Michael M’Gonigle a founding member of Greenpeace, described it well when he said, “In the Western world, sovereignty, by its very definition, emanates from the top. Politically, our national constitutions simply assume that power is to be centralized, and then they seek to “balance” centralized powers by keeping them apart.”
Premier Gordon Campbell suggests that the Okanagan will become “British Columbia’s third great urban center.” Those words were stated with very little disagreement due to the fact that in a valley-wide population of 300,000 there was no advocate that could claim the authority to disagree with the premier.
If in fact there is any disagreement.
We need to ask municipal candidates how they would encourage the formation of a valley-wide Official Regional Plan (ORP), and ask valley residents the most basic question first – just how many people do we want living in this valley?
While our communities have created clear objectives within OCP’s, residents have not made a clear and definitive choice collectively as to whether they want the Okanagan Valley as a whole to have a population of 400,000 people or 2.5 or 5 million people.
The underpinnings of belief that support ongoing development are very predictable within the pro-development community here. The valley is still sparsely populated when compared to most other urban centres. When local governments speak of entering into joint transit, water or sewage agreements they are accepting a process that begins to merge each community footprint into a single larger one.
For residents, there has never been an effort to compare growth with other places so that a common understanding can be embraced that would allow everyone in the valley to imagine the magnitudes of a metro area of 1.2 – 5 million people. For most of us, population growth is abstract, and tied to our image of the houses on the hillside or not; and to a wishful thinking that construction will happen later in our lifetimes if at all.
A good tangible comparison is helpful. In 1912 Vancouver had a population of 100,000 people. In less than 100 years, Metro Vancouver has a population of 2.5 million and it is quickly approaching 3 million.
The City of Vancouver is one of the most densified cities in the world with a population of 600,000 people. It sits on 114 square kilometres. Metro Vancouver includes the entire surrounding area that includes Burnaby, Surrey, Langley and North Vancouver which spans 2848 square kilometers.
By comparison, the City of Kelowna has a population of 123,000 people and at 228 square kilometres spans twice the area of the City of Vancouver. While the entire Metro Vancouver area could fit within the land area contained in the Central Okanagan Regional District.
The North Okanagan Regional District at 7500 square kilometres, which is two and a half times the size of Metro Vancouver could easily contain a metro-city of 4 million people that even considers relatively low density.
So one can imagine an extreme case where all three regional districts in the Okanagan design metro-growth strategies where each of our larger cities encouraged population growth to reach 2.5 million would result in the valley pushing towards an overall population of 7.5 million by the turn of the next century.
Abstract, but yet possible.
Mega-decisions that addresses the water issue, sewage and waste management remain at the core of unbridled growth, however further issues follow closely. The valley population would have to abandon most of the ideas it may have about regional food production, removing the presence of the ALR and replacing it with a final inventory of agricultural land that would be a smaller area strategically kept so as not to interfere with population growth.
A transportation strategy that created rapid transit would be the activator for new urban development areas. For the most part, air quality would remain a make-the-rules-up-as we-go, and hope for the best – similar to other large cities.
The questions are many, but they are questions that will remain unanswered due to the fact that valley-wide we are not fully engaged in a planning process that gives decision makers clear objectives.
Instead, we are allowing a few people to make choices for us.
Not having a grasp of the magnitudes associated with the present speed of growth is our greatest risk today. This is accompanied by the way we choose to govern ourselves, or more accurately the way we allow others to govern us.
The National Homeless Initiative, the federal secretariat most directly responsible for homelessness in Canada, estimated in 2005 that 150,000 Canadians were homeless, based on “street and shelter counts ... at a minimum, approximately 0.5 per cent of the population in any given Canadian community will be homeless.” This could mean that within a valley-wide population of 250,000 the Okanagan may have 1200 homeless residents which would equal the population of Keremeos and not only represents a social tragedy but also represents a net loss to our overall valley economy that equals that of an entire community.
But left ignored, a population of 2.5 million would spawn over 12,000 homeless people, which suggest that at some locations in the valley skid row environments would become very apparent.
The Kelowna International Airport is the 11th busiest airport in Canada in terms of passenger volume. In 2006, volumes once again reached record levels, at 1,226,442 passengers. This represents a 13.7% increase over 2005. Passenger activity has more than doubled since 1995 and traffic is expected to continue to grow. March, 2007 was the busiest month on record, although December is typically the busiest month of the year for the airport.
As our population grows, passenger levels will increase to over 4 million people annually. Our demands will require a second international airport and the question becomes where? By the time we reach this need, aircraft emissions will be a key contributor to poor air quality. This may cause planners to consider placing a new airport out of a valley-bottom area and perhaps on an upper plateau above the valley and ultimately leading to more urban and industrial sprawl.
It’s difficult to find detailed traffic counts for the entire Highway 97 corridor. But we do know that at the Okanagan Lake Bridge the daily traffic count is about 50,000 vehicles. But recently, new data has appeared that tells us a bit about highway traffic in the North Okanagan.
Two new highway upgrades have been announced in this region. The new upgrade project between Vernon and Armstrong compiled data that tells us 20,000 vehicles a day travel the route in the summer, 3000 per day more than in the off-season. The new upgrade between Vernon and Wood Lake indicates summer traffic flow at 25,000 vehicles per day; 5000 more than in the off-season.
What the analysis also tells us is that with these highways being upgraded, there will be approximately a 2 percent increase in traffic. This means that between Wood Lake and Vernon we can expect more than 8 million vehicle trips every year, a number that will be guaranteed to grow.
Nearly everyone wants these bottleneck areas to disappear, and that’s why the Ministry of Transportation invests in such projects, but for the most part, local planning won’t play a role in such decisions, if it does, public engagement remains sparse.
Whether it’s the Central Okanagan sinking bridge pontoons into Okanagan Lake or moving to create more marinas; the North Okanagan diverting water channels or amalgamating rural areas; or the South Okanagan creating more lake front subdivisions, wineries and golf courses, at some point, we’re all in this together. We live in a valley that shares certain limited resources that remain at risk.
Our challenge will be, to engage the knowledge found in the countryside and in neighbourhoods and to create a model of stewardship and empowerment so that together, we may solve some of the big problems that Okanagan communities are facing right now and into the future.
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Don Elzer writes and comments about the future, current affairs, lifestyle and the natural world. He is a director of the Watershed Intelligence Network publishers of The Monster Guide, which can be found at www.themonsterguide.com
He can also be reached by email at: treks@uniserve.com
