So much depends on the Harbour.
We swim and fish in it, we train on it and many still use it to visit neighbours — it’s our identity.
During the summer months, Pender Harbour attracts thousands of visiting boats and is famous as a refuge from storms year-round.
It provides curious factoids for dinner parties — did you know if you stretched out the shoreline of Pender Harbour it would cover 32 miles?
We even tout it as a marketing tool — Venice of the North. But if you’ve ever smelled the waters around Venice you might recognize how appropriate that nickname could become.
The truth is, the Harbour’s turning into a bit of a cesspool.
It’s been a long time since you could eat a clam plucked from its shores — fecal contamination from your septic field took care of that.
Despite that, the Sechelt Indian Band has blocked the issuing of new foreshore leases that cross those traditional clam beds. And while it seems to be a political tool, I’m inclined to side with them. Having a dock on your property was fine when the next one was 6oo yards down the beach but now that some sections of the waterfront have been carved into increasingly tiny slivers, you can’t take a pee without hitting a neighbour’s dock. And it’s ugly.
But where else can the boats go? As waterfront real estate values continue to rise, developers are eyeballing the the remaining marinas, hoping to rezone and increase their density. There’s little interest in building future moorage facilities because there’s less profit in it.
As moorage becomes scarcer and rates rise we’ll see more boats anchored permanently in the Harbour.
And we all know that holding tanks are kind of like recycling — everybody says they do it but you still see a lot of discarded cans at the landfill.
So, if some clown (who seems to have a penchant for near drownings) anchors his blue liveaboard off the Madeira Park wharf, who checks that he isn’t pumping bilge oil or poo out a thru-hull or that he has enough power onboard to maintain an anchor light at night?
The answer is (mostly) Ottawa.
You can’t build a set of stairs off your porch without applying for a building permit but it’s perfectly fine to anchor a permanent mooring buoy off someone’s front deck. It’s only the start and the overlapping levels of government seem impotent to contend with the potential for future problems.
Our Harbour Authority has been doing some great work lately but its responsibility extends only to the end of the government wharves.
It seems practical to create a true Harbour Authority with a mandate (and funding) to provide local input in addressing issues already faced by other harbours on the coast.
I’d be the last person to suggest we need more scrutiny by civil servants but all the signs say the boat that will break Pender Harbour’s back is coming and it seems the people who live here have very little power to stop it.
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