(Vancouver Courier, Aug. 3, 2011)
The Beaver Lake scandal. BeaverLakeGate. The Beaver Lake affair.
Most people have never heard of Beaver Lake, a small shallow wetland in Stanley Park. It was created by heavy machinery in 1929. Due to a natural process called succession, it’s slowly shrinking, and if left alone, may evolve into another ecosystem less attractive to frogs and salamanders. It may take decades to dry up—if it happens at all. But if it happened tomorrow, despite discomfort for a few frogs and salamanders, the ecology would adapt. There is no pending environmental disaster in Stanley Park.
However, last January, thanks mainly to COPE park board commissioner Loretta Woodcock, the park board approved a plan to “save” Beaver Lake. The plan included two phases: 1) An environmental assessment (price tag: $100,000); 2) An intensive public consultation process to determine what—if anything—should be done.
Woodcock repeated this promise in the media, and one week before the vote last January, she spoke to the Courier. “I want community groups to create a vision for Beaver Lake,” said Woodcock. “We just need to figure out how to get there and what the public wants.”
That was last January. To date, there have been no public meetings about Beaver Lake. And the environmental assessment, which would determine Beaver Lake’s fate, never happened. Yet last month, Vision park board chair Aaron Jasper made an announcement. The board, he said, plans to spend $500,000 on the “restoration” of Beaver Lake.
But what about the public consultation? What about the environmental assessment?
According to board spokesperson Joyce Courtney, the assessment will take place sometime this year. A “team of various folks with environmental expertise” will devise “the best solution for that rapid-infilling problem.” Then “contracts will be tendered to actually start the work.”
Whoa, wait a second! Back in January, Woodcock and company said the assessment would examine a range of options. It sounds like this “team” will craft a plan to dredge the lake. That’s not an assessment, that’s a blueprint!
“The board,” says Courtney, “did not consider doing nothing a viable option.”
Confused? Don’t be. It’s quite simple. The park board lied. Woodcock and friends promised an open process of impartial assessment and public consultation. We got neither. They’ve earmarked $600,000 ($100,000 for the bogus “assessment,” $500,000 for the first phase of restoration) to “save” a tiny, two-metre deep, manmade lake. Moreover, the $600,000 is a mere down payment. The final Beaver Lake price tag will surely soar skyward like Stanley Park’s majestic blue herons. (Incidental footnote: In December 2010, the park board threatened to close public washrooms due to budget woes. And this summer, Vancouver greenspaces, once kempt and inviting, grow wild because the park board reduced its lawn-mowing budget.)
In related news, yesterday crews began demolishing the Jericho Wharf, a wood and concrete structure at Jericho Beach, which was used by the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War.
In November 2010, the park board fabricated an environmental crisis—a green Gulf of Tonkin, so to speak—to torpedo the wharf. The old wooden pilings, they said, were leaking creosote and contaminating the water. The evidence? A letter from Murray Manson, a biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), who wrote the park board last summer recommending the destruction of the wharf. But wait. The DFO conducted no testing or evaluation of the water around the wharf. In fact, according to Manson’s letter, the main problem with the wharf was not water contamination but shade cast on “visual feeders” such as perch, herring and flounder.
Nevertheless, last November the park board voted to demolish the wharf. Price tag: $2 million. And pending approval of the city’s capital plan, an additional $500,000 will be spent on “beach restoration and historical interpretation.”
No comment from the skittish flounder of Jericho Beach. Let’s hope they’re happy.
These two park board projects—Beaver Lake, Jericho Wharf—honour city hall’s Greenest City 2020 Action Plan, which places the environment above all other city concerns. Where hysteria trumps reason. Fiction eats fact. And the formerly scandalous is virtuous and green.
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