Irony, not oil, heating up Whistler climate spat

The tone-deafness and hypocrisy of Whistler politicians is almost as breathtaking as the mountain scenery and the ski resort’s 1,530-metre vertical drop.

Little more than a year ago, former mayor Nancy Wilhelm-Morden stirred up trouble with her comments about day-trippers from Vancouver adding nothing but garbage to the mountain culture. Tourism Whistler CEO Barrett Fisher chimed in that the town’s focus should be on attracting the “right guests.”

But that’s nothing. Mayor Jack Crompton has now sparked a boycott of the resort and inflamed an already testy and aggrieved relationship between Alberta and British Columbia.

He wrote a letter to Calgarybased oil company Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., asking it to pay its “fair share” of the municipality’s climate-change costs, including Whistler’s $1.4-million wildfire protection budget.

Singling out that particular company was odd. Yes, it is an oilsands producer. But its Canadian owner, Murray Edwards, is also an investor with Bill Gates in Squamish-based Carbon Engineering.

Carbon Engineering is developing technology to capture CO2 from the air and synthesize it into transportation fuel.

What makes the mayor’s letter and his subsequent grovelling video so terribly ironic is Crompton is in the transportation business. After founding and selling Resort Cabs, he launched Transportation Whistler and RideBooker, which help tourists travel the 140 kilometres to and from Vancouver International Airport.

Transportation is Canada’s second-highest source of greenhouse gas emissions after the oil and gas industry. It’s also Whistler’s lifeline. To put the environmental cost of transportation to Whistler into context, here are some calculations from an online offset website.

Last year, three million people visited Whistler — an increase from the previous year because more tourists came from the U.S., Mexico, Australia and Britain.

Offsetting a single economy passenger’s share of the CO2 emissions on a return flight to Mexico City or New York City of 1.3 tonnes is estimated at $26. To be carbon neutral, economy class passengers from London and Sydney, Australia, would have to cough up $50 and $82.80 respectively. The cost quadruples for first-class travellers.

For a back-of-the-envelope calculation, if you figure a million visitors arrived by plane, multiple that by $26 and — well, you get the idea.

That said, I have some empathy for Whistler’s leaders. They’re small-town politicians in the glare of the international spotlight who seem to be responding to the wishes of the people who vote for them.

But they’re not like their counterparts in similarly sized Powell River. It barely made the local news when its council joined the campaign promoted by West Coast Environmental Law and fired off letters to oil companies demanding that they pay their share.

The same is true for West Vancouver’s council, which approved sending letters on Dec. 10. Even Victoria didn’t get much attention, although Total S.A. replied that it “cannot be held liable for the consequences of climate change.”

For Whistler’s politicians, they are caught in an increasingly uncomfortable bind. Is it more important to work for the people who elect them or protect the company and industry that sustains them?

For politicians and the electorate, Whistler is their community, their home where they want to raise their children and grow old. Their worries are similar to other B.C. municipalities. Housing affordability dominates the conversation while multimilliondollar mansions sit empty except for a few days or weeks each year.

With employees often having to compete with tourists for rental accommodation, business owners worry about finding enough employees.

But then there’s the conundrum if you build more: How do you do that without destroying more of the surrounding pristine environment, which attracted everyone there in the first place?

Yet, here’s the big difference. Unlike most of the rest of British Columbia, this is a purpose-built resort municipality. It’s like Disneyland, existing for the pleasure of visitors.

With the munificence of provincial and federal taxpayers who have helped build the infrastructure to both access and enjoy the resort, it’s been an enormous success.

It’s grown into an economic engine for the province. But its continued success depends on outsiders — both the Americans who own Vail Resorts and the “right guests” who come for more than a pristine environment with gold and platinum credit cards in hand.

Whistler’s politicians ought to know that, especially Crompton. Not only do his companies depend on it, his grandparents in the 1960s were original shareholders in the Garibaldi Lift Company.

It was formed to build a ski resort and bid for the 1968 Olympics and was the genesis of Whistler, which has carried on the “if-you-build-it-they-willcome” belief through the 2010 Winter Olympics and beyond.

Still, there’s a conceit in Whistler that somehow it is different from other company towns such as Fort McMurray, Tumbler Ridge or ghost towns like Uranium City.

But the only real difference is that Whistler is selling pleasure, not petroleum, into an increasingly glutted market.