In a move that surprised no one, the NPA-controlled Parks Board gave a green light to a massive expansion of the Vancouver Aquarium. The decision shines a light on a nexus of power in Vancouver where tourism and the exploitation of nature meet. It’s a contrived process providing the facade of a public consultation while short-circuiting democratic oversight.
Fundamentally one's position on the aquarium debate revolves around the question: who are the main beneficiaries of the Vancouver Aquarium expansion? The citizens of Vancouver? The tourism industry?
COPE Parks Board Commissioner Spencer Herbert, who sided with the single independent commissioner and the NPA commissioners Vancouver and its citizens will benefit from the expansion. As a child Herbert regularly attended the Aquarium and he credits it with an early development of his environmental consciousness. He said by the age of about ten years, he was writing letters criticizing drift-net fishing, largely based on what he had learned by visiting the Aquarium. Herbert won a significant concession by writing in a requirement that 1,000 free passes be given to each of 23 Vancouver community centres so that low-income Vancouverites can attend the Aquarium.

While Herbert is aware of the Aquarium's critics, he points to its contributions—research, education and animal rescue—and feels that, overall, the Aquarium makes a positive contribution.

Commissioner Loretta Woodcock, Herbert's sole COPE colleague on the board, and the only commissioner who voted against the expansion, told The Republic that she felt that it was a "land use question" and the expansion was "not an appropriate use of public land."

One fierce opponent of the Aquarium expansion is Annelise Sorg, President and co-founder of “No Whales In Captivity.” In conversation with The Republic, Sorg called the Aquarium a "circus" and an arm of the "entertainment industry." Sorg questions the Aquarium's commitment to the well-being of cetaceans. The process and decision left Sorg deeply cynical about the municipal political scene. She said "corporate Vancouver has taken over the NPA and COPE as well.”

The process: public consultation or public relations?

In May of 2006 the Board tore up a previous NPA-instituted by-law requiring a public referendum on any further expansion of the Aquarium. This will be the eighth and largest expansion of the Aquarium, and there was little discussion about how the expansion will affect the whole park. The most obvious manipulation by the Board came with its "public consultation process" when it hired Kirk and Company to engage in infomercials and stage-managed opinion management and molding techniques. The glossy final report makes a mockery of the idea of public consultation. Kirk and Company report that 75% of the respondents overall either strongly or somewhat agree that "whales and dolphins are brought into the aquarium with no intention of releasing them back into the wild." Did Kirk and Company provide the facts or history with their questions? For example, 12 out of 60 orcas died during capture operations between 1965 and 1973. It makes one wonder what the intentions of the Vancouver Aquarium are in this regard. I wonder if Kirk and Company asked Vancouverites if they'd favour their taxes going to subsidize a tourist-related service that was too expensive for many of them to attend.

Public subsidies, private profits

With an international reputation, about 750,000 paying customers in 2005, and an income of around $24 million, the Aquarium is an essential part of Vancouver's tourism-industrial complex. As Vancouver has evolved into a resort city, its primary industry is tourism. The only rival to the tourism complex is the real estate development industry, and in many ways they are related (many of the largest real estate investments are simultaneously investments in tourist related projects, e.g., the new "Shangri-La" investment downtown, among many others). There are massive public subsidies to the tourism industry in the form of government grants to the Canada line, designed to transfer tourists from the airport to downtown; the Convention Centre, designed to attract large business groups to Vancouver; and, of course, the underwriting of the 2010 Games.

The expansion of the Aquarium, a premier tourist attraction on the downtown peninsula, is another such public subsidy. But it is only one of a number of such subsidies. Comically, the Vancouver Aquarium has been paying the city a measly $40,000 per year on its lease of a massive piece of land in the most famous city park in Canada. As Sorg has correctly pointed out, this is what you'd expect to pay for a warehouse in a bad part of Surrey.

In 2000, local journalist Ian Mulgrew wrote a groundbreaking article entitled "Charity goes fishing for profit" which looked at the evolution of the Vancouver Aquarium from a modest “educational association” to an ambitious, entrepreneurial hub of a number of activities. Mulgrew found that, with the arrival of John Nightengale, it was "quietly transformed from the old Vancouver Public Aquarium Association into a veritable private company" and he "steered the charity down . . . an entrepreneurial course." Mulgrew quoted an Aquarium-produced document from the time which spoke of a search "for opportunities to generate new sustainable revenues which may be set up as independent or subsidiary businesses."

And Mulgrew added that, at that time, the Vancouver Aquarium "administration plans to operate a constellation of for-profit businesses it hopes will stretch from the sands of Nevada to the tables of Asia." At that time, Mulgrew claimed "it own[ed] three live, for-profit corporations registered in" BC.

One such spin off, Mulgrew wrote, was the role the Aquarium played in an underwater predator display at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. Details of these private companies are a closely held secret, and Mulgrew could only find one of them mentioned in the Aquarium's annual financial statement. Mulgrew could not even find out how much Nightengale is paid because "he does not work directly for the Aquarium—he is contracted through Vancouver Aquarium Management Ltd." Mulgrew raised important questions about the privatization of our public commons, questions which our current Parks Board will not be considering.