On November 28th 2016, the BC Government surprised the outdoor community with a brand new BC Parks’ Future Strategy document. Given that the document serves as a guideline for many years of park initiatives and priorities, it was disappointing that there was no public consultation while the strategy was being formed. Knowing that anything goes in an election year, I reviewed the document with an open mind.

My opinion is that there are many positive promises in the strategy but they are too vague at this time. More importantly, they are undermined by a guiding philosophy of relying on private and corporate funding sources that represents a serious threat to the BC Parks system.

Funding a world class park system is surprisingly simple. With a great park system, residents choose to stay in the province for their vacations and tourists fly in from around the world. These visitors are initially drawn in by the parks but they spend significant amounts of money on restaurants, tour guides, gifts, shows, adjacent attractions, hotels, etc. That fuels a tourism industry which creates jobs and generates significant tax revenue. A portion of that tax revenue is used to maintain and grow the parks and the cycle repeats. This is a well trodden path and there are many jurisdictions around the world that serve as excellent examples of how this formula works consistently and reliably.

The BC Government is now trying to break that cycle and come up with an entirely different way of doing things. They want the tax revenue and jobs to keep pouring in from the tourism sector but they don’t want to use more of the tourism revenue to fund the parks. Instead, they have come up with a variety of methods for funding the parks that seem far-fetched and unlikely.

In the strategy document, they state that: “…to make sure BC Parks funding is sustainable and reliable in the future, we are introducing new and innovative revenue sources.” Anytime the government talks about finding “new and innovative revenue sources” for a cherished public asset, it’s worth a deeper look.

The methods that they are proposing range from selling custom BC Parks license plates, to encouraging people to leave their inheritance to the parks, to seeking out corporate sponsorship, to forging a loyalty card deal with equipment retailers which would involve some form of a profit sharing arrangement back to BC Parks.

It’s hard to decide where to start with this list. We could spend a great deal of time talking about the lack of feasibility of many of these ideas and my belief that they will leave the BC Parks system in a continued state of being underfunded. We could also talk about whether we want the government to be working so hard to divert donation money to the park system since a portion of that money will inevitably be redirected from other causes such as healthcare. However, I’d like to focus this brief article on the conflict of interest that these methods create.

The park system isn’t just a tool to generate tourism revenue. The park system plays a critical role in protecting the environment and in providing non-commercial non-motorized recreation and wilderness opportunities for BC residents. Today, the rangers and park planners who make the park management decisions are paid by tax dollars and are able to make those decisions independently.

What happens when a significant portion of the parks budget is controlled directly by corporations and wealthy private donors? The answer is simple. If a ranger’s salary or if an important park program depends on a corporate sponsorship and if it’s obvious that their sponsorship is contingent on a certain change being made to a park (for example allowing a motorized activity where it is currently banned,) then we will have effectively lost control of the parks. At the same time, the parks will likely become less desirable to residents and tourists as corporations are able to exercise a larger influence over the park experience.