Girl Guide camp to open this season

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This article was published 29/04/2011 (5474 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A year after the Caddy Lake Girl Guide Camp in Whiteshell Provincial Park was closed, new organizers have the blessing of the Guides to sign up campers again.

The Girl Guides of Canada granted Caddy Lake a five-year grace period after local guiding leaders stepped in to save the camp.

“We put together a five-year plan… and we are going ahead,” Danielle Paquette, new chairwoman of the Caddy Lake Camp Committee, said Wednesday.

Last spring, she spoke on behalf of a group that opposed a decision by the Manitoba Council of the Girl Guides of Canada to close the camp.

The council had cited falling attendance records going back a decade. From a peak of 100 campers per week over an eight-week summer season, the numbers had dropped to a total of about 100 girls over a shortened four-week run.

Now, the camp’s website lists a full, five-week slate of summer camping to lure registrants.

The future of the Caddy Lake camp is still fragile, even with the backing of the national council of the Girl Guides of Canada and the tacit nod of approval of the provincial council that tried to shut it down, Paquette warned.

“We have a self-imposed mandate to ensure that we have 150 campers this summer. We are supposed to have that many registered by May 1st,” she said.

The Caddy Lake camp is owned and operated by Winnipeg-area Girl Guides — not the provincial or national bodies, she said. Even though the hierarchy was contacted to determine protocol regarding last year’s closing, they are not directly responsible for the camp.

Neither the provincial nor national councils were available to comment.

So far, parents have been reluctant to hand over fees — an average $357 a week — without a guarantee the camp, located eight kilometres west of West Hawk Lake, will be a go.

At the same time, the campsite is 61 years old and in need of repairs.

There’s a $9,100 grant from The Winnipeg Foundation to pay for kitchen repairs to meet health and safety standards. There’s also a lot of sweat equity needed to clear fallen trees, fix tent platforms and give the place a coat of paint in time for opening day on July 8.

Paquette, a Girl Guide and Pathfinders leader, said her own daughter hadn’t missed a season at the camp in nine years — until last year when she was still 15.

Paquette vowed to go over the heads of the provincial council to the national governing council to reopen the camp. But in the end, national and provincial permission came following her guarantees to make the repairs and sign up 150 campers. For more information, click on www.caddylakecamp.com.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca