B.C. parks play a huge role in our province’s identity – Super Natural British Columbia is the official slogan used to advertise B.C. around the world.  Tourism contributed more than $7.7 billion to our GDP in 2014, employing over 127,000 people. But B.C. parks have been suffering from neglect for more than a decade.

Tell the B.C. government to properly fund B.C. parks

The B.C. government budgets $31 million to manage 14 million hectares of parks and wilderness – about $2.20 per hectare – which has remained static since 2001. By contrast, Parks Canada spends 10 times this amount per hectare to manage B.C.’s federal parks system.

Since 2008, the number of seasonal B.C. Parks staff has shrunk by 40 per cent. The number of full time staff has been reduced by 11.4 per cent. In that time, the number of senior park rangers has been cut from 10 to 7, a 30 per cent reduction.

Numbers are important but they only tell part of the story. The real impacts of more than a decade of neglect by the B.C. government can be seen on the ground – in decaying infrastructure, in reduced monitoring and enforcement, and in our inability to protect the environmental integrity of our parks system.

Now, a growing number of environmental organizations are joining the call to increase funding for B.C. Parks services. Recently, the Federation of Mountain Clubs of British Columbia has launched an online campaign to lobby the B.C. government to increase parks funding.

The BCGEU welcomes the involvement of our friends in the environmental community and urges our members to actively support the campaign by visiting their web site, signing their online petition and emailing the Premier and Environment Minister to ask them to increase parks funding.

Our parks are a major economic and environmental asset to all British Columbians that deserve to be properly managed. We hope you will take a few minutes to tell the B.C. government to properly fund our provincial parks system: