Georgia Straight News Features
Critics say growth of aquarium won’t stop
By Matthew Burrows

Publish Date: November 30, 2006

After its latest expansion, an SFU graduate student worries that the Vancouver Aquarium’s 1.8-hectare footprint in Stanley Park will continue to grow.

Allison Dunnet is completing her master’s degree in public policy and has studied the aquarium issue at length. At the November 27 special meeting of the Vancouver park board, Stanley Park’s major tenant added a further 0.6 hectares to its lease holdings after commissioners voted 5–1 to allow the proposed expansion. For Dunnet, the results are bittersweet.

“We all have memories of the Vancouver Aquarium as a kid,” she told the Georgia Straight. “But the main concern I have is, this [expansion] keeps happening with the Vancouver Aquarium. How much space in Stanley Park can the aquarium take up?”

John Nightingale, president of the 50-year-old facility, told the Straight that this is “not the final revitalization”. But does he foresee another increase in footprint?

“There’s not another one called for at the moment in our current master plan, no,” he said. “So the answer, so far as I know, is no.…Sometime before the middle of the next decade, we have to rebuild the tropics—the oldest part of the aquarium. That’s a decade away. That’s not an expansion. That will occur within the existing building envelope.”

When the Straight informed Dunnet of Nightingale’s response, she said she was concerned by the words at the moment.

Annelise Sorg, director of the Coalition for No Whales in Captivity, told the Straight she agrees with Dunnet.

“The construction site at the Vancouver Aquarium will never end unless the people of Vancouver wake up and stop voting for these two parties [NPA and COPE park commissioners],” Sorg said. “It’s sad to watch the park board turning into aquarium pawns, as they were last night. No, the construction will never stop at the aquarium. The place just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Nightingale confirmed this is the ninth construction project in the 50-year history of the aquarium.

“Then I think there have been five or six additions to the original 1956 footprint—six including the one last night,” Nightingale said. “Including the one last night, there will have been nine separate construction projects. Some of those took place within the existing aquarium. For instance, when we rebuilt the Pacific Canada Pavilion, that didn’t go outside the footprint line at all.”

Dunnet reiterated her respect for some aspects of the aquarium operation. But, she says, when the park space is at risk from development, Stanley Park is the loser.

“The Vancouver aquarium is a very effective organization, no doubt,” she said. “They had a very slick public-consultation process. But it avoided pertinent topics or addressed them using very friendly terms and avoided other issues, such as having an option to say, “Okay, we agree with this 30-percent expansion, but after that, that’s it.’

“Nobody is looking out for the park the way the aquarium is taking care of itself.”

Former NPA park commissioner Jim Harvey, commissioner between 1983 and 1984 before being turfed from the NPA caucus, is a long-time critic of the aquarium. He claims that his strong views on the issue got him bounced from the NPA caucus in 1984. On November 27, the same day as the park board special meeting, he turned 76.

In a May 30 interview with the Straight, he said the aquarium “has a lustful way of always wanting more parkland.”

“The trouble is, the present board is made up of people who look at parks as development sites,” Harvey said at the time. “They don’t have a traditional park viewpoint. Stanley Park is what it is today because of the people opposing expansion.”

At the May 29 park board meeting, commissioners voted 4–2 in favour of NPA commissioner Marty Zlotnik’s motion to rescind 1995 and 2005 bylaws requiring, respectively, a referendum on any aquarium footprint expansion and a plebiscite on keeping whales in captivity. Both Dunnet and Sorg said this hurt the ability for public input at the ballot box.

“When the park board can rescind a decade of resolutions in one swoop, without consideration, it’s a slap in the face for Vancouver,” Sorg said.

Former NPA park board chair David Chesman was responsible for getting the 1995 bylaw passed by the NPA–controlled board. He told the Straight he thought it was “unfortunate” that it got rescinded.

“Back during the time when I was dealing with the aquarium we had just come off the zoo referendum in the 1993 [municipal] election,” Chesman told the Straight. “That seemed a good way of handling such a major decision over the use of public land. At the time it seemed a good idea to put the aquarium through the same process through which the [Stanley Park] Zoological Society had been put.”

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