Pandemic getaways a concern for residents
Urban visitors ‘know people live here, but they don’t care ... they know there’s no enforcement’
Isolation getaway: It’s a great idea, or at least sounds like one.
Head off on your boat or RV, head to the bush with your tent and your 12-packs: Where better to be safe than in the great outdoors?
Except the shores off where you’re anchored and the forest you’re camping in, those are people’s homes, too. Think of it this way: Just because someone’s not using that patch of grass at the moment, doesn’t mean it’s not still someone’s backyard.
“They know people live here, but they don’t care,” Squamish-Lillooet Regional District chairman Tony Rainbow said. “They know there’s no enforcement, or very little.”
The district has one bylaw enforcement officer, based in Pemberton, and she works just two days a week.
The traffic is steady, he said. One car travelling in Paradise
Valley was clocked going 140 kilometres an hour in a 30-km/h zone.
One area resident, Geoff Park, sent Rainbow a photo showing a handful of parked cars: “Driving home (on Sunday),” he emailed Rainbow. “Group of about 12 bikers having a close gathering. And a totally separate group of about four or five people having a picnic, complete with folding picnic table.”
The were all adults and clearly not from the area.
“It’s a nuisance,” Rainbow said, “but of more concern is it flies in the face of everything (provincial medical health officer) Bonnie Henry is saying.”
It’s not like the province, or at least its wilderness, has shut down. Some places are open; hunters and fishers are still being granted licences.
But a lot of tourist destinations have hung out signs saying: please don’t come.
“People with the financial means to escape urban lockdown are exercising their privilege to do so,” said Dan Bertrand, regional director of the Central Coast Regional District, an area encompassing 22,000 square kilometres.
“We’re concerned about folks coming in and bringing COVID-19 with them. We need the provincial government to step up and support First Nations because those people may bring COVID-19 into the island communities.
“It’s a case study, a classic example, of why we need government regulations.”
A non-essential travel ban isn’t a radical idea, he said. Our freedom-loving neighbours in Alaska have implemented a statewide one, for instance.
So has the Northwest Territories.
The Inside Passage, basically a marine highway between Washington State and Alaska, is bustling with boats, the ones from Washington and Oregon presumably having entered Canadian waters before the border closed, joining yachts from the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island.
“They stop in for supplies and provisions,” Bertrand said. “It brings a lot of concern to the residents here.”