Vancouver down to 2 public outdoor pools
CBC
By any measure, Vancouver was already lacking outdoor public pools before it was announced the aging and frequently-under-repair Kitsilano Pool would not open at all this year.
No Kits means Vancouver has only two swimmable outdoor pools: Second Beach in Stanley Park and New Brighton in the northeast corner of the city.
By comparison, Montreal has 63 outdoor pools, Toronto, 58. During a recent heat dome, both cities announced extended hours at some of those facilities to give people a place to cool off.
Regina, with a third of Vancouver's population, has five outdoor pools.
Vancouver used to have more outdoor pools dotted across the city. Unfancy, rectangular tanks in neighbourhoods like Sunset, Hastings-Sunrise and Marpole that were decommissioned at the end of their lifespans and not replaced.
Mount Pleasant also had an outdoor pool that, by all accounts, was a busy summer hub for 42 years, right up to 2009 when it was demolished.
A replacement pool was promised based on public consultations that overwhelmingly identified it as the top priority in the Mount Pleasant Park redesign, and the park board of the day pledged to build it when funds became available.
Fast-forward 15 years, and the land set aside to fulfil that promise remains an empty expanse of patchy grass.
Meanwhile, as longtime pool advocate Marjory Duda points out, the population of the city and neighbourhood have exploded.
"If we had built this back when it was in the draft capital plan several years ago, we could have built five more of them for what it costs today," said Duda, a Mount Pleasant Community Association board member.
"And now that we're down to only two outdoor swimming pools in Vancouver, I think somebody needs to step up and deliver on this before the other two outdoor pools fail."
The Mount Pleasant pool saga speaks to the dissonance between Vancouver's two elected bodies: park board and city council.
Park board politicians are responsible for planning and delivering parks and recreation services. But it's the politicians on city council that have the hammer, so to speak, with the final say on funding infrastructure.
Park boards have repeatedly tried to push the Mount Pleasant pool forward over the years, most recently in 2022, when commissioners voted unanimously to reallocate $11.5 million in funding to finally build the thing.
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