Costs and fees in the great outdoors

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/05/2024 (865 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s so close you can almost smell the burgers sizzling on the barbecue. May long weekend is just around the corner and the forecast is (at the time of this writing) looking fine. For many, it’s time to open up the cottage, or if you’re like me, pull the trailer out of storage and hit the highway.

Seasoned campers will already have their reservations. Since 2022, when the province moved to a staggered booking schedule, the system appears to be working better than ever. Most people I talked to were able to make their reservations within minutes, as opposed to years past when you’d be stuck online until nearly lunchtime.

This summer I was easily able to get my camping spots at Grand Beach, Falcon Lake and Bird’s Hill on their respective booking dates. There’s also one Ontario lake near Vermilion Bay that I visit every summer for its pristine waters and exceptional forests.

Invariably, whenever I meet up with fellow Manitobans at an Ontario campground, they’ll motion towards upgraded amenities and lament a lacking in Manitoba parks. What they may not realize is that Ontario, along with B.C. and a few other jurisdictions in the country, recover 90 per cent of the cost of operating their parks through fees. These provinces have a dedicated fund, sometimes called a special purpose account, where all revenues generated from the parks stays within parks. What that means for daily users and campers is perhaps a better experience, but it comes at a higher price.

An electric site at Blue Lake, Ontario costs $43.75 a night plus a $9.73 reservation fee, with all the money collected going into a parks reinvestment fund. By way of comparison, an electric site at West Hawk or Grand Beach is only $19.95 a night plus a $10 reservation fee. An even better deal is a full-service site with sewer, water and electricity at Bird’s Hill for only $25.20 per night.

However, unlike Ontario and most other provinces, all revenue generated through camping fees and park passes in Manitoba goes into general revenue. The government of the day then gets to decide how much to re-invest in parks. Some years are more lucrative than others, politics comes into play, and certainty is less available for long-term planning.

For example, last year, under our PC government a historic $220-million, multi-year parks investment strategy was launched. Perhaps some would argue it was an attempt to win a forthcoming election, and readers would not be wrong if they looked over historical infrastructure and parks budgets and saw this was often the case for governments of the day. Nonetheless, last year’s investment included restructuring the seawall at West Hawk Lake, replacing the Nutimik museum, putting in more electric sites at Spruce Woods, and of course, resurfacing and restructuring parts of the Trans-Canada Highway between Falcon Lake to the Ontario border.

Other years parks have received considerably less, including this year with a $46-million investment by the NDP. Even so, the current year’s investment is still considerably higher than any revenues the parks will collect.

Moving to the Ontario model would require increasing camping and park fees to pay for the services. As untenable as that may be, it would also be unfair to increase fees for campers and day users until the fee structure for cottagers have been modernized. Yet the last time a government tried doing that in earnest, it failed considerably. Many people in my former circles believe the NDP lost the 2016 election, in part, because of their unsupported escalation of cottage fees in provincial parks.

As hugely unpopular as the decision was, there was justification. Consider this: in 2013, the total cost to government for providing property services to the 6,200 cottages in provincial parks was $4.5 million, yet revenues from cottage fees were only $1.7 million. It is one of the only models in Canada where the government subsidizes cottage ownership to this degree.

However, the fee escalation attempted by the Greg Selinger NDP government did not include property assessments to justify the proposed increases that, in some cases, more than doubled the existing cottage fee. It had created such acrimony that when our government came in 2016, we applied a four-year moratorium on any cottage fee increases that ended in 2020 with a two per cent addition to be applied annually.

Undoubtedly, this current NDP government will try to keep Manitoba parks the most affordable in the country. Time will tell if they enter the fray once more with cottage owners. This time, they would be wise to proceed with caution.

Rochelle Squires is a recovering politician after 7 1/2 years in the Manitoba legislature. She is a political and social commentator whose column appears Tuesdays. rochelle@rochellesquires.ca