$162M highway project through Goldstream park faces objections from First Nations

Every Tuesday for a year now, 76-year-old Carl Olsen has stood on the Trans-Canada Highway at Goldstream Provincial Park protesting the province’s plan to widen the roadway.

The $162-million plan to design and build safety and environmental improvements to 2.6 kilometres of the Malahat corridor within Goldstream Provincial Park was reaffirmed in last month’s provincial budget. It was originally announced in 2018 and about $15 million in engineering work and plans have been completed.

In a post on the W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council’s website, the First Nations group said its right to “hunt and fish as formerly” is enshrined in the Douglas Treaties signed between 1850 and 1854. It said that right to defend against development that puts hunting and fishing at risk was upheld by a 1987 B.C. Supreme Court ruling.

In the ruling, the judge said that James Douglas, the Hudson Bay Company’s representative who oversaw the treaties, “implemented a policy to protect the Indians in their right to pursue their traditional economy of hunting and fishing” and concluded “that they had the right to resist … the proposed marina at Saanichton Bay as it would diminish in the extent the fishery contractually reserved to predecessors of the original signatories to the Douglas Treaty.

Olsen said the project will involve cutting down “hundreds of trees,” which he believes will be detrimental for birds and the salmon spawn as the canopies provide shade to keep the waters cool. Major construction so close to the river is also likely to have an impact on spawning beds, he said. About 600,000 people visit Goldstream Park every year, especially during the summer and fall salmon-spawning months.

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