Our provincial parks are in trouble

BC Parks stewards some of North America’s most spectacular and diverse landscapes and seascapes. Our parks are at the core of our identity as British Columbians and are vital for supporting our health and economy. Our parks system is the largest provincial system in Canada, and yet it is one of the worst funded per-hectare in the country.

Adequate funding for BC Parks is essential to ensuring the integrity of our parks, including hiring enough park rangers and conservation officers to look after them, and providing visitors with a positive experience. Over the past two decades, the provincial parks system has increased in size significantly, as has the number of visitors, but the operating budget for BC Parks has remained stagnant.

BC Parks’ annual budget so far has failed to keep up with the cost of maintaining and protecting these treasured places. Currently $31M, this hasn’t changed much since 2000, despite a 4.2-million hectare expansion of our parks system in that time. Inflation and a rapidly increasing population spread this amount even thinner.

In November 2016, the provincial government released a new plan called the BC Parks Future Strategy, which broadly outlines a framework for improving the management and operation of our protected areas system. There are some promising components to the strategy, but overall it is largely lacking in details. Without many of the details about funding increases and additional rangers, among other things, it is unclear how this plan will change the current trajectory our parks system is currently following.

One thing we know for sure: without adequate funding, our parks will continue to suffer and run the risk of becoming nothing more than “paper parks” – protected in theory, but not in practice.

Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society