by Ned Jacobs

A 35-minute bus ride from downtown Vancouver and a brisk 10-minute walk up Eagleridge Drive brought me to the Baden Powell Trail and the metropolitan area’s last remaining arbutus forest. I was wandering unmarked paths among the mossy bluffs, taking close-ups of the fascinating trunks and limbs, when I spotted a pregnant doe nibbling arbutus leaves.
I stopped in my tracks, took a deep breath and beamed peaceful intentions her way. She looked directly at me, but to my surprise and delight held her ground. For half an hour, she browsed and rested while I followed at a respectful distance. Eventually, the graceful creature vanished into a dell, thick with salal and swordferns. Returning home on the city bus with keepsakes in my camera, I felt that I had spent an afternoon in paradise.
Not long afterward, I learned that BC Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon was planning to blast a four-lane, five-kilometre diversion of the Sea to Sky Highway through the heart of this irreplaceable wilderness. The purpose was to increase road safety and shorten the drive to Whistler by a minute or two, especially during the 2010 Olympics.
Inexplicably, Falcon was unwilling to consider various other options, including a tunnel, a one-lane addition to the existing highway, or simply improving safety on the existing road, where it bypasses the ferry terminal and town of Horseshoe Bay. Alternatives were supposedly too dangerous or too costly, yet no hard data was produced to back up those assertions.
Strange thing: Falcon’s claims don’t add up. His winding, overland route entails excessive grades at elevations frequently shrouded in fog and subject to black ice. The interchanges are confusing and require abrupt changes in speed. In fact, this diversion barely meets the province’s
minimum safety standards. Put together, it spells a death trap for travellers and for many animal species, such as the rare red-legged frog, and, of course, the Eagleridge deer.
The minister’s claim that a tunnel would be more than twice as dangerous as a road is based on building a two-lane, two-way tunnel, which no-one is advocating. His cost estimates for a tunnel or third lane are unreliable, because contractors were not asked to quote on these options.
Falcon warned that a tunnel might “… drain the Larsen Creek wetlands.” Perhaps he didn’t know that an existing railroad tunnel even closer to this marvellous treed bog has done nothing of the sort. To improve the optics on his overland route, he presents absurdly low estimates for compensating British Pacific Properties, for which the “community consultant” (spin doctor) happens to be the spouse of West Vancouver Liberal MLA Joan McIntyre. Nor does he want to discuss the hideous scar his highway would leave on one of Greater Vancouver’s most attractive landscapes, other than to suggest that the huge retaining walls could be painted green. Maybe that is what Premier Campbell means when he boasts of a green Olympics.
Many kilometres of the Sea to Sky will remain only two lanes wide. Why then is the province determined to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, waste priceless habitat and alienate thousands of citizens in order to add four lanes to one short stretch of a two-lane road, when a much less costly and less destructive alternative is the construction of a third lane at Horseshoe Bay. But Falcon shows no more willingness to compromise on Eagleridge Bluffs than on his contentious Gateway Program. He wastes our money on sham public consultations and threatens legal action against citizens who contradict his unsupported assertions, with bullying tactics more in keeping with dictatorship than democracy.
My years of involvement in civic affairs have taught me that when the things that governments tell us don’t add up, motives and beneficiaries are being concealed. Question: what is it that only an overland route can provide? Answer: road access for million-dollar lots overlooking Horseshoe Bay. What did Kevin Falcon do before entering politics? Real estate. Who contributed most to his election campaign? Real estate developers. Who was the BC Liberal’s biggest donor? The New Car Dealers Association.
Add this to the fact that the two least justifiable components of the provincial Gateway Program, the twinning of the Port Mann bridge and expansion of Highway 1, are primarily at the behest of the construction and development lobby. Now add patronage appointees to the BC Agricultural Land Commission. A distinct pattern emerges: this government’s transportation policies are tailored to perpetuate car dependency and suburban sprawl.
The utterly unacceptable demise of our region’s most rare, beautiful and accessible ecosystems is provoking citizens to walk in the footsteps of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jane Jacobs, Betty Krawczyk and countless others, who have committed civil disobedience in defence of their communities.
I was among the 23 protesters arrested on May 25 for possession of common sense (actually, “contempt of court”). We will continue to defend these irreplacable public assets by every peaceable means possible, and to expose the broken Olympic promise and Mr. Falcon’s contempt for truth.
Come what may, I offer the Eagleridge doe as a symbol of the values we are striving to protect: beauty, diversity, fertility and integrity. They are vulnerable values, and they are essential.

Ned Jacobs is the son of author and activist Jane Jacobs, whose last civic act was a message of support for the Coalition to Save Eagleridge Bluffs.
www.eagleridgebluffs.ca