I inquired about booking a room at the Community Centre the other day, assuming it would be pretty much sitting empty until 3pm when the after school programs kicked up, but there was no chance. The team was helpful and courteous, but they can only do so much wizardry. “We are full pretty much every afternoon of the week for the duration of the school year. There is not much wiggle room for meetings. We are in serious juggle mode with space and accommodating needs.”

I took my partner to emergency and someone was being treated initially in the waiting room because it was too crowded behind the door, and the staff were helpful and courteous and doing their best to meet everyone’s needs and keep the flow moving, but personal conversations with staff members have amplified how underresourced and busy they are, and how much a new facility is needed.

I have seen Facebook lamentations from people who couldn’t get a spot in gymnastics 2 minutes after the registration opened. I have never even bothered trying to get an after school care spot. Day care is one of the biggest challenges families have to navigate. I don’t know if it’s possible to get a vet, dental or counselling appointment, if you aren’t already a patient.

We have doubled the population size, in terms of number of residences, and doubled the amount of traffic on the road, but nothing has kept up. None of our infrastructure is sized to meet the new demands. Is it?

A new French school has been announced, with a french-speaking daycare and space for 220 new students, but Signal Hill has spent the last year recruiting for a French-speaking teacher for their immersion program, to meet a maternity leave, and, along with many schools across the province, simply couldn’t find one. So the French immersion grade 6-7 class is going to have half their week taught in English.

The only way Lil’wat could get the province to take their concerns about traffic volume through their community and on their lands seriously was to close access to Joffre.

While the Village of Pemberton might be the body charged with approving development applications, the only infrastructure they have control over is the waste water treatment plant and the water system and some park space. They don’t even really have the ability to say no to a developer – free market dominates. If someone buys the land, and has a plan, all the Village can do is offer some guidelines about how it should be shaped to align with their overall vision for the community, and its zoning.

Money is to be made. So no-one seems to be pausing. Even though they’re building to meet a demand for housing, which is so insatiable we need to acknowledge that we will never cross that finish line and successfully meet all the demand, we must also pay attention to the fact that new construction shifts the burden of demand, down the line to the clinic, the community centre, the school, the services, the non-profits.

I don’t know what the solution is. Squeaky wheels seem to get the grease – the Francophone families had to launch legal action back in 2010 under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and then launch an appeal after the 2016 finding didn’t go in their favour, in order to cajole the province into funding their new school. But I don’t think there’s a Charter obligation to help us manage growth in a really generative and future-caring way. Still, we need to get creative and start talking about where our community’s pain points are, so we can start fundraising, or advocating, or lobbying, to take care of the people who are taking care of us.