Squamish: Squish to Swish?
At the pool table in the Chieftain Hotel pub, a fortyish circus roustabout with bleached hair, tanned arms and prison tattoos knocks down the last three solids of an eight-ball rack.
The carnival is camped out on the waterfront this weekend, on Nexen Canada Inc.’s old chemical plant lands, and five other West Coast Amusements employees are clustered at a nearby table. But aside from them, the place is pretty much empty at 10 p.m. on a Friday night. The two bartenders are cleaning glasses and wiping down tables.
Despite the cheap drinks and loud music, there’s that uncomfortable am-I-in-the-wrong-place feeling in the air. If things don’t pick up soon, the night will fizzle.
“It’s slow here in general these days,” says one of the DJs. A drywaller by day, he’s in his mid-20s, with longish hair curling from under a climber’s toque. “This used to be the logger bar and then it got all cracked out, so it got kind of a bad rap.” He downs a shot called a Prairie Fire: tequila and Tabasco. While the Chieftain has a recurring role in the ABC TV series Men in Trees – a sort of Sex and the City-Northern Exposure hybrid – as the beloved social hub of fictional Elmo, Alaska, reality has treated it less kindly. The collapse of the resource economy and the rise of Highway 99 have caused its clientele to dwindle over the past 15 years, leaving it the haunt of unsavoury desperados. Raj Gounder, the new manager, recently shooed away the drug dealers, renovated the hotel suites and installed a martini bar along with a few chandeliers, resulting in some sporadic successes. “Big nights still happen here,” the DJ says. “Last Tuesday the place was packed.” But so far tonight, we’re still waiting for the party to get started.
It’s a familiar feeling in downtown Squamish. Step out the side door of the Chieftain and the main street of Cleveland Avenue is void of cars. The sidewalks are vacant. Aside from the comparatively upscale Howe Sound BrewPub down the street, the only other venue open for business is the Ocean Port Hotel, serving up a modestly scruffy, Chieftain-style mix of cheap draft and classic rock. Tucked onto a flat peninsula at the south edge of Squamish, most Sea-to-Sky tourists don’t even know the town centre exists, which is too bad. In daylight the humble grid of two-storey hotels, shops and restaurants has a million-postcard view of the Stawamus Chief’s sheer granite face and a charming, if vestigial, small-town vibe.
Nicknamed Swampish, Squampton or “The Squish,” the sprawling district has long been snickered at as a fast-food, gas-and-sip highway strip of pulp-mill hicks. For Whistler-bound tourists and Lower Mainland residents, Squamish has traditionally been the place to pick up your discount 7-11 lift ticket on the way up to the mountain and a burger on the way down. Highway-centric planning – what SFU planning professor Gordon Price calls the “Kelowna model” of development – has starved the downtown core, and with it businesses such as the Chieftain.
Such abandonment is an old story in North America, and highways from the Yukon to Florida are littered with the skeletons of 1950s-era town centres. But Squamish has something they didn’t have. Step off the Chieftain’s sidewalk on a night like this one, the cool evening whipped with breezes off Howe Sound, and head west toward the water; in five minutes you’ll be standing on the old Nexen brownfield. Except for a few pole buildings and the creepy tableau of a powered-down circus, the land is vacant. This 24-hectare expanse of muddy gravel, sprouted with alder and cottonwood saplings, is one of the most precious pieces of undeveloped waterfront in North America. It’s also a kind of toxic hallowed ground, a cemetery of Squamish’s past as well as the foundation of its future.
“Where else on the West Coast,” asks Ted Prior, as we chunk over potholes and washboarded gravel in his well-used, child-smudged van, “would you find 60 acres of undeveloped waterfront in a deep-water port an hour from a major city, surrounded by world-class skiing, climbing, mountain-biking, hiking and windsurfing?” The description is standard for boosters of downtown Squamish, and Prior, a shortish, balding local developer with a barrel chest, doesn’t simply talk; he exclaims. But he lives downtown with his family, and his enthusiasm is that of a sincere booster, not a huckster. He’s a member of the Squamish Oceanfront Development Corporation (SODC) board, an arm’s-length company created by the district, patterned after a similar board in Chilliwack.
Like thousands of other Squamish residents, Prior is equal parts excited and frustrated by the still-fallow downtown waterfront. “We’ve got to get everyone on the same side. We’re missing the boat on the Olympics, and the longer we wait on moving forward, the more it’s costing us. Negative people have been steering the ship in this town, people who only want to look at what could go wrong, not at the opportunity that’s right in front of them.”
From a sociological perspective, he says, the ups and downs of Squamish’s past 15 years are fascinating. “I was almost thinking I should go back to university and do a thesis on it.” He laughs, but with an edge.
We pass the muddy log sorts on the adjacent Westmana lands, giant pickers stacking stripped fir logs into neat piles. Prior pulls the truck into a wide, brush-grown lot near the site of the old chemical plant and he sweeps his arm in an arc to include the surrounding forest, mountains, ocean and, especially, the unused land we’re parked on. “You see?” he asks.
I do see. But it takes some research before I understand what I’m looking at. Before the Squamish waterfront was a barren campground for travelling carnies, it was the British Columbia Rail Co.’s (BC Rail) land, rented out to the Nexen chlor-alkali plant. Hydrochloric acid and caustic soda – essential bleaching ingredients in the pulp-and-paper industry – were shipped out by the ton from the plant, which nicely complemented the Woodfibre plant across the water. Locals had been collecting paycheques from the Woodfibre pulp mill since 1912, and, as late as the 1980s, few locals believed the plants would ever shut down. But in 1991, Calgary-based oil-and-gas producer Nexen closed the doors on the Squamish plant for good, the first in a series of economic blows the town would absorb over the next 15 years.
In 2003 International Forest Products Ltd. (Interfor) closed the sawmill next door to the Nexen plant, eliminating 117 jobs. After the province sold BC Rail the following year, Canadian National Railway Co. laid off 80 maintenance workers from the rail yards. The haymaker that sent the resource industry to the mat was the closure of the Woodfibre mill in 2006 after 94 years of operation, which put 325 people out of work. All told, the town lost around 600 jobs and $3 million in annual tax revenue over four years.
Not that Squamish didn’t see it coming. Since the 1980s, threats of factory closures had hung over the town like the pervasive funk of the pulp mill. Council members and residents had been arguing for a diversified economy for years, foreseeing tourism, light industry and high tech as essential to the town’s future.
Dave McRae, owner of Triack Resources Ltd., a Squamish recycling and selective-timber-harvesting firm, was one of them. A square-shouldered man in a black Kenworth work jacket, the 47-year-old former logger and sawmill owner was one of the first to see the downtown waterfront in the terms many councillors and SODC officers have since used: a northern Granville Island, False Creek or Steveston.
Over lunch in the Howe Sound BrewPub – unlike the Chieftain, the kind of place that serves pepper jack-stuffed “potato kayaks” and organic green salads – McRae talks about his experiences with the waterfront lands over the past decade. “BC Rail tried to get industry down there for years, but nobody came knocking. Back in 1997, I could see the value of the land was greater than anyone recognized at the time, and that in 10 years the Interfor mill would be gone too – that there wouldn’t be any industry on the waterfront at all.”
McRae bought a parcel of land downtown, hoping to turn it into a Granville Island-style market, but his development permits were delayed by successive city councils, delays that he sees as bad-faith stalling. For eight years, McRae says, he couldn’t get a road or a building on the site, and in 2005 he was forced to sell the property to pay off debts.
McRae is not a wealthy developer, nor an idealistic transplant from Vancouver. His great-grandfather moved to Squamish in 1907, and his father was born downtown in a house on Cleveland Avenue, two blocks up the main street from the Chieftain. His family has been working in Squamish forestry for four generations, and, along with volunteering on arts and school committees, he’s sat on three different working groups since 2000 trying to facilitate waterfront development and economic diversification. All communities need a three-pronged approach, he says. “You need environmental, industrial and residential. If you’re thinking you’ll live off condos and hotels, it won’t happen.”
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