Only a short time ago, criticisms in Whistler over the 2010 Games were rarely heard and quickly silenced. Now, though, with taxes going up and up as if they were on the world’s longest ski lift, angry questions are getting louder – and any answers are proving elusive.
There was a time when the worries Linda McGaw had about her town’s role in hosting the upcoming Winter Olympics were viewed with ridicule and contempt. She was one of a dozen residents who put their names to a letter to the editor a few years ago urging people to take a step back from the unabashed enthusiasm they were expressing for everything Olympics.
“The people who put their names to that letter were lambasted by the boosters in town,” Ms. McGaw recalled this week over coffee. “They told us the Olympics could do nothing but good. All we were saying was, ‘Nobody is asking hard questions here.’ I lost a friendship over it. Some of us were verbally abused. Part of me would like to write a letter today that says, ‘Well, what do you think now?’ ”
Just seven months before the Games open, the mood in Canada’s famed resort town is anything but celebratory. In fact, there is growing anti-Olympic sentiment created by double-digit tax hikes and new user fees that residents feel are being levied to help pay for what many see as a three-week-long party.
Even the man who has been the focus of much of the anti-Olympic rhetoric, Whistler Mayor Ken Melamed, concedes that the town’s normally laid-back residents have become a crabby, cantankerous lot. Partway through a discussion of the town’s grievances, the mayor stopped and said, “You’re starting to get the sense of why the community is feeling some frustration, and there’s a lot of tension, I acknowledge that,” he said. “We deal with it on an almost hourly basis.”
The mayor is the town’s biggest Olympic cheerleader, an irony not lost on long-time residents. Before ascending to the mayor’s chair, Mr. Melamed was a councillor, the only one to vote against Whistler becoming part of a Games bid.
Each week, the editorial pages of the town’s two weekly newspapers, The Whistler Question and The Pique, are filled with letters denouncing the mayor and council over decisions that residents, rightly or wrongly, have linked to the Games. The source of their grievances ranges from a proposed 20-per-cent property-tax hike over the next three years, to a decision to charge for parking in previously free lots.
Environmentalists were angry when a sensitive wetlands habitat became the chosen site for a new bus facility that will be used to accommodate a fleet of hydrogen buses Premier Gordon Campbell promised to showcase at the Games. Even the mayor admits an Olympic deadline forced a decision on the location that wasn’t the best. Then, more trees had to come down near the town centre to build Celebration Plaza, where Olympic medals will be handed out.
More fury and indignation.
Few are happy either that the local high school will be closed for the 17-day duration of the Games – except those who have rented out their homes for big bucks and will be in Mexico or some other warm clime when the Olympics are on. (The schools won’t be closed for the Paralympic portion of the Games.)
One of the mayor’s fiercest critics is lawyer and former councillor Nancy Wilhelm-Morden. Her weekly column in the Whistler Question has become a platform for a relentless attack on local leaders over what she sees as decisions that could haunt the municipality for years.
“I’m mostly concerned about the amount of money that’s being spent,” she said in an interview in her Whistler office. “I’m concerned about what happens after the Olympics, when all the construction workers are finished the projects they’re working on, and there are a million fewer skiers next season because of the economy, and we’ve spent a lot of our reserves from a municipal perspective.”
Ms. Wilhelm-Morden said it is becoming increasingly expensive for the middle-to-low-income earners who make up the bulk of the resort’s year-round population of nearly 10,000. “A lot of those people are starting to feel like they’re being driven out of here,” she said. “If that happens, it would be really tragic for Whistler, a real loss, because the people who live and work here are what make the place so special for visitors.”
Lennox McNeely, philanthropist and retired investment analyst, is an eloquent letter-to-the-editor writer. Paying for parking won’t affect his bank account, but he’s worried about young families who don’t have much disposable income, and are, in many ways, the lifeblood of the town.
“What bothers me the most is the total lack of concern for the financial squeeze residents are going through,” Mr. McNeely said over dinner one night this week. “And also the lack of participation by the municipality and the municipal workers in any cutbacks. Meantime, the average income of most other people in town is off 10 to 15 per cent. And then they have the gall to spend thousands on Olympic jackets, I mean…”
Oh, yes, those jackets. We’ll get to those in a minute.
Residents were upset that unionized municipal workers were awarded a raise of 12 per cent over three years that was agreed to by their municipal counterparts throughout Greater Vancouver. The mayor said he couldn’t unilaterally cut back their wages, despite calls from Whistler citizens to do just that. Mr. Melamed took more grief when he voted in favour of a rate-of-inflation increase for himself and his fellow councillors.
“If we don’t get that, we’re taking a pay cut,” he said. Which is precisely what many residents thought he and the council should have done.
But it’s often the little things that become symbols of protest. And an announcement that the municipality was spending more than $37,000 to buy Olympic tickets for the use of city staff and others went over about as well as a drunk toastmaster at a wedding. But that was nothing compared to the wails over the decision to spend $38,000 to buy Olympic jackets for the 350 municipal workers.
“That was the last straw for a lot of people,” said G.D. Maxwell, town iconoclast and a weekly columnist for The Pique. “They’ve been spending money on all sorts of things that are all about appearances. But what will allow people to have a good time here is not the lipstick on the pig, it’s how long the pig’s been smoked and how good it tastes. I think we’re using a lot of lipstick that we don’t need to use.
“People here were as hopping mad about those jackets as Americans were seeing auto executives riding to Washington in corporate jets begging for money.”
Perhaps underlying the growing angst is the feeling that Whistler hasn’t been calling many of the shots when it comes to its Olympic involvement. That it’s become a town run by outsiders, namely the Vancouver Organizing Committee and the International Olympic Committee. A charge the mayor doesn’t dispute.
“There’s no question that is the reality,” he said. “And I say to people who criticize that, ‘I’m not sure it could have been any other way. Those are the terms of engagement when you put on an event like this.’ ”
Writer Michel Beaudry has been coming to Whistler to ski for more than 30 years. He said the recent real-estate boom and now the Olympics have changed the gestalt of the town. “Now people are saying, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” said Mr. Beaudry, still recovering from the shocking death of his wife, Wendy Ladner-Beaudry, murdered earlier this year while jogging in a park near the University of British Columbia. “The IOC doesn’t have Whistler’s best interests at heart. Whistler is just realizing now that it is just a satellite to Vancouver in all of this. …
“The politicians in Whistler love to talk about sustainability, but it’s a big joke because the Olympics have created these white elephants, like the ski jump and sliding centre that will never pay for themselves. Whistlerites are saying, ‘I came here to simplify my life, now I’m paying more tax than I did in the big city.’ ”
Perhaps adding to the sense of foreboding is the rapid deterioration of the local economy. hotel bookings are off significantly. The ski industry has been hard hit by the recession. Whistler faces an end to the rapid development that has boosted the economy for more than two decades.
To address funding shortfalls, civic leaders are wrestling with an ugly dilemma: continue to raise taxes, or allow the town to expand beyond the limits set out in its long-term sustainability plan. That, many fear, would imperil Whistler’s one-of-a-kind, European-like resort experience.
Those sounding the alarm about the Olympics have one thing in common: an intense feeling of ownership and love of their town. But they are increasingly worried that the very things that attracted them to Whistler in the first place are slowly disappearing. They are feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change and under siege by the associated costs of the Olympics.
Even the mayor senses that.
“People are feeling the burden of: What’s next?” the mayor said. “How many other things are coming down the pipe that we’ll have to make a compromise on to support the Games? But my view is, in the end, most people will agree it will have been worth it.”
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