CAMPSITE BOOKING
Election pushes things back
Dogged by computer glitches in preceding years, making reservations for nightly campsites in provincial parks faces a new challenge: Next year’s provincial election.
Due to the April 4 election, the dates for the nightly camping reservation launch will move to later in April, the provincial parks ministry says. “It will follow the same format as 2015, utilizing a queuing system and staggering the launch over a 10-day period.”
More information about the precise date of the nightly camping reservation launch will be available in January.
The ministry figures this temporary change will work out, its director of visitor experiences, Mary-Anne Wihak, said Tuesday.
She noted the opening of campsite registration many years ago was at midnight Dec. 31, which meant some people “would plan their New Year’s Eve party around campsite reservations to make sure they got them in a timely manner.”
The ministry switched to a computerized reservations system, but “technical support wasn’t easy on New Year’s Eve either.”
So reservation time moved to March, but some campers thought this was too early as they hadn’t booked summer holidays yet.
All that being so, she figures an April start to nightly reservations will work, though the ministry will survey campers, many of them regular users, as events unfold.
The province’s 1996 Election Act puts strict controls on what government agencies can do in communication and marketing during the campaign and in the three-month run-up to the dropping of the writ, the campaign’s official start.
When this law was introduced, the logic was that the government should not do or say anything that would highlight its programs or raise its profile in the minds of voters before an election.
There are exceptions for emergency announcements and Crown corporations that compete with private firms.
Unaffected by this regulation is seasonal camping. This lets people secure a campsite from mid-May until the end of August, or even into September at some locations. These campsites are offered at a price discount from the regular nightly camping rate and let campers settle into a site for the whole summer.
There are 20 provincial parks and recreation sites that offer the seasonal camping program, the ministry says, adding these campsites are always in high demand.
Due to the popularity of this program, sites are allocated via a lottery system.
Application forms for seasonal campsites will be available online at www.saskparks.net beginning Jan. 4. The deadline for applications is Jan. 28 and the draw to award the campsites will be held Feb. 1.