A cadre of eco-tour entrepreneurs say grizzly watching could be B.C.’s next big tourist bonanza. The province wants to promote bear hunting instead. The argument on both sides hinges on a simple question: What’s a bear worth?

David Leach, Financial Post Business  Published: Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Jasmine Loh parks a half-sized school bus at the end of a dirt road and stares through a scrim of cedars toward the far shore of the creek. “Okay, let’s go,” she says quietly, and holsters a canister of pepper spray. Another can of aerosol-fired cayenne stays in the bus as backup.

Five people clamber into a flat-bottomed aluminum boat, which Jasmine, in gumboots, then hauls to the opposite bank. The shallow water teems with spawning pink salmon. She returns and ferries the rest of our group across. Armed to our Gore-Tex hoods with high-end camera gear, digital video equipment and lenses the size of bazookas, we ascend a wooden ladder through the evergreen canopy and into a two-storey tree fort. Everyone jockeys for the best vantage. And then we wait.

Our group includes a 30-something couple from Australia, a pair of garrulous American retirees and a family of Brits with plummy accents and matching blond sons. All have paid several thousand dollars to travel to Glendale Cove, 250 kilometres northwest of Vancouver as the eagle flies, and stay in a floating resort anchored in the shadows of British Columbia’s steep-faced Coast Mountains. They’re not here for the scenery, however spectacular.

A rustling in the undergrowth cuts short our chit-chat. Something large and hungry is slouching through the bush toward our viewfinders: a grizzly bear, three or four years old. As the young bear emerges and ambles across a clearing towards us, our shutters go off like paparazzi at a Britney Spears booze-up. Even the most bored British lad glances up from his Game Boy. “Daddy,” he asks nervously, “can it climb up here?”

Few industries in Canada are as unusual in their transactions as commercial bear viewing. Think about it: In what other business do you run the risk (however remote) that your product might actually devour your customers? While that prospect might discourage most hoteliers, not so at Knight Inlet Lodge, the resort from which we embarked. Over the past decade, this former fishing destination has established an international reputation by delivering to eco-tourists intimate views of North America’s legendary brown bears in their (nearly) natural habitat. Moreover, its success - in 2007 it expects to host 2,500 visitors over a six-month season and gross $3 million in revenue - has spurred a burgeoning bear market up and down the coast. The latest count shows at least 20 full-time operators. And anyone who remembers the early years of the B.C. whale-watching industry, now worth well over $100 million annually, or who sees the way African countries are raking in millions from safari tours, won’t be hard-pressed to envision a day when grizzly bear watching is in the same position.

Anyone, that is, except provincial bureaucrats and politicians, who so far seem unconvinced that bear-watching is a legitimate - never mind potentially lucrative - enterprise. This year, the B.C. Wildlife Act came up for its first major revision since the 1980s. Bear-watching operators, united under the recently formed Commercial Bear Viewing Association, anticipated these legislative discussions would be an opportunity to expand their turf and protect coastal salmon-run tributaries (which support the bears) from loggers, miners, fish farmers, commercial fishers, poachers and especially trophy hunters. Instead, the discussion paper released this spring, for legislation to be tabled next year, contains as much about the obscure sport of falconry as it does about wildlife viewing. Far meatier, on the other hand, are proposals to use public funds to recruit 20,000 new hunters - using such methods as appealing to women, buying electronic hunting simulators and hiring a marketing professional to promote the sport as a “cool” thing to do. Officials in charge of the review declined to provide further comment at this stage in the consultation. But their recommendations have got bear-watching entrepreneurs madder than a griz with a snout full of honey bees. “I’m totally disgusted,” says Dean Wyatt, who owns and operates Knight Inlet Lodge with his wife, Kathy. “They want to generate more hunters, even though [bear hunting has] become socially unacceptable because of the urbanization of our population. Any fool who understands demographics understands this - except the Ministry of the Environment.”

Previous land-use and resource battles in B.C. have had a way of turning into violent confrontations and legal disputes. But not this one. Whether it’s because wildlife-watching outfitters are business owners as well as conservationists, or because it’s simply hard to chain yourself to a grizzly, this conflict is taking shape as a war of numbers, with pro-hunting lobbies like the B.C. Wildlife Federation wielding one set of spreadsheets and marketing strategies, and bear-watching operators and their allies in the environmental movement another. Each side is trying to make its case by seeking - and delivering - an answer to the same question: What is a bear really worth?

There is at least one place in Canada where this question has already been answered - in the bear watchers’ favour. Every October and November, around Churchill, Man., summer-starved polar bears muster along the sub-arctic coastline and wait for the sea ice to form on Hudson Bay, where they will feed on seals throughout the winter. In 1979, Tundra Buggy Tours Ltd. began chauffeuring visitors to view the annual gathering in pimped-out Monster-Truck-style buses. Today, more than a dozen outfitters offer hundreds of polar-bear tours, at $5,000 a pop for an average week-long trip, most of which sell out months in advance. According to Travel Manitoba, the Churchill region rakes in annual tourism revenue of $10.6 million, with 90% of that from international travellers. To residents, then, a bear is worth a bundle.

Dean Wyatt was one of the first people to foresee the economic potential of what he calls “industrial bear viewing” transplanted to the West Coast. In 1979, he was managing a travel agency in Red Deer, Alta., when he visited Knight Inlet Lodge, then a sport-fishing getaway. He didn’t spot any grizzlies but fell in love with the place and kept coming back. By 1995, two things had changed. The lodge was for sale. And grizzlies were everywhere. “I realized then there were more revenue streams than just fishing,” he says.

While the area’s natural beauty was a constant, it was a decidedly human intervention that had turned waterways above the lodge into a grizzly bear magnet. Specifically, in 1988, the federal government added to Glendale River a “salmonid enhancement project” - a fancy phrase for an artificial spawning channel or “fish ladder” designed to help over-sexed salmon shimmy up waterways fouled by industrial activity. Federal fisheries officers who built and monitored the ladder weren’t keen to dodge bullets, so the province instituted a hunting restriction. That ban, covering 11 square kilometres of estuary, remains. The increase in fish attracted the grizzlies. Sanctuary from hunters kept them coming back.

In 1996, Wyatt and his wife bought the lodge for $650,000, moved from Alberta and began laying the groundwork for the new business. At the time, the only other grizzly-viewing operations in Canada were small boat tours in the highly regulated Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary north of Prince Rupert. When Wyatt unveiled his plans to skeptical officials, one conservation officer predicted - with 100% inaccuracy - that all the grizzlies would have to be shot after they mauled Wyatt’s clients.

After much haggling, Wyatt hammered out a compromise about where, when and with how many tourists he could visit the bears of Glendale Cove. In 1997, the first 80 bear watchers stayed at the lodge. Two years later, after erecting a viewing stand beside the fish ladder, where a dozen or more grizzlies can often be spotted, the new owners hosted 1,200 visitors. “We went from zero to hero overnight,” says Wyatt, whose broad-hipped gait, hirsute profile and commanding voice remind many of the grizzlies he loves. With little advertising, the watershed became a bear-watching hot spot. One Dutch TV documentary ranked it among the top five wildlife-viewing destinations in the world.

How did they do it? The Wyatts cultivated relationships with tour wholesalers in Europe. As a result, British travellers now fill 60% of the lodge’s capacity, with a high quotient of Australians and Dutch, too. Because Knight Inlet Lodge relies so little on American visitors, the business has remained immune to tourism scourges such as SARS, 9/11 and the resurgent Canadian dollar.

The bear market has proven bullish for other owners, too. “I get a ton of requests but just don’t have the space anymore,” confirms Vicki Storey, customer service manager for the Great Canadian Adventure Co., an Edmonton-based firm that sells eco-tours on behalf of 200 outfitters across Canada. Tom Rivest, co-owner of Great Bear Lodge, out of Port Hardy, B.C., and president of the Commercial Bear Viewing Association, concurs: “I think there’s twice the demand for the capacity right now.”

In most businesses, expanding to meet such demand would merely require additional capital. What bear-watching operators need most, however, is access to habitat with conditions that parallel those at Knight Inlet Lodge - specifically, salmon runs with feeding bears and protection from hunters. And that requires provincial government intervention, something that only appears achievable if the industry can prove that it makes better economic sense to set aside land for bear watching rather than for hunting.

There are precedents. One of the conservation movement’s biggest victories has been a cunning act of rebranding. For years, the chunk of coastal mainland from the tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaska Panhandle was known as the Mid Coast Timber Supply Area. Translation: Here Be Loggers. But in the early ’90s, environmentalists launched a campaign to replace that utilitarian label with a more poetic trademark: The Great Bear Rainforest.

The new name has become a global icon - not quite Coke or Nike, but still recognizable to British and German eco-tourists looking for a wild time. The international cachet helped to persuade the Liberal-led government, in 2006, to set aside 18,000 square kilometres of terrain from logging (it’s left open to hunting) and earmark the remaining 46,900 square kilometres under a yet-to-be-determined “sustainable forestry management plan.” Earlier this year, the federal government matched B.C.’s pledge of $30 million, doubling $60 million in private donations, to fund conservation management and sustainable ventures (which could include bear watching) in Canada’s remaining temperate rainforest.

Back in 2001, environmentalists also convinced the foundering NDP regime of the time to institute a three-year moratorium on grizzly hunting. During the election later that year, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute argued that the next government should take the politics and the PR out of bear protection by allowing people to buy, sell and trade the right to hunt or view grizzlies, like any commodity. The victorious Liberals revoked the moratorium but have yet to create a truly free market for B.C.’s bears.

In 2003, the Raincoast Conservation Society weighed in with financial arguments of its own. The West Coast environmental group commissioned the Centre for Integral Economics, a Victoria-based think tank focused on market-based solutions for sustainable living, to study the business case for bear viewing versus trophy hunting. Zane Parker, co-founder of the centre, and Rob Gorter, the report’s number-cruncher, calculated that grizzly watching brings in $6.1 million per year compared to $3.3 million annually for grizzly hunting. “We tried to be conservative when it came to bear viewing,” says Parker, who knew the figures would be relied on by bear watchers but dissected by hunting outfitters. The report only considered the “use values” of bears (i.e., direct revenues from hunting or viewing) and left it to future economists to tabulate more nebulous “non-use values” (i.e., symbolic worth).

The authors then calculated at what rate the bear-watching industry would need to grow to offset the revenue lost if grizzly hunting were banned for the next 20 years: 9.1% over five years, 5.4% over the next decade, and 4% over the full 20-year span. Given the rapid expansion of eco-tourism, bear-watching outfitters say that none of these figures seems overly optimistic.

The hunting lobby doesn’t buy the report’s conclusions. “You can twist stats any way you want,” says Les Husband, wildlife committee chairperson of the B.C. Wildlife Federation. Under the province’s limited-access hunt, about 320 grizzlies are killed each year. While his organization hasn’t compiled economic data specifically for grizzly bears, Husband says that a guided 10-day hunt can cost as much as $25,000, that most of B.C.’s 280 outfitters offer a bear option (usually black bears) and that hunting adds $124 million annually to the province’s GDP. He believes that grizzly hunting and watching can co-exist on the coast. “There’s enough room for both groups,” says Husband.

If the Centre for Integral Economics stats are accurate, and grizzly bear hunting is worth about $3.3 million annually, then those 320 bears killed annually bring in about $10,300 each. By comparison, Wyatt makes $3 million a year on a population of about 30 bears that inhabit Glendale Cove. Dollar value per bear: $100,000. Those aren’t bulletproof numbers, but they do suggest hunters have some catching up to do.

On top of that, they’re also still reeling from a different kind of hit - a December 2005 flanking manoeuvre by the Raincoast Society that could have been ripped from the Fraser Institute’s free-market playbook. For $1.3 million, the group bought the long-term hunting tenure for 20,000 square kilometres of the Great Bear Rainforest. The guide-outfitter who sold it then went into the bear-watching business and was branded a traitor by hunting advocates.

Whoever owns the tenure in question, B.C. Wildlife’s Husband expects the provincial government to enforce the Wildlife Act’s provision that a hunting tenure either be used or revoked - which puts the Raincoast Society in an awkward position.

Nobody imagines the green group will ever run a hunting operation, not a successful one at least. “We’re in the process of drafting a business plan,” is all executive director Chris Genovali will say. “We’ll do what we need to do to maintain our tenure.”

Dean Wyatt has resorted to similar tactics. The past two seasons, he has paid the guide-outfitter who owns the hunting tenure for Knight Inlet between $21,000 and $28,000 not to shoot grizzlies in the still-unprotected areas near Glendale Cove. His largely European bear-viewing clientele don’t like to imagine “their” grizzlies becoming throw rugs in some CEO’s mansion, so they help to fund the annual payoff by buying anti-hunting bracelets at the lodge.

Wyatt insists that many bear-watching operators would prefer a return of the moratorium, but that most would be satisfied, for now, if grizzly viewing were allowed on the coast and hunting licences were reserved for bears in the interior. If nothing else, Wyatt believes hunting should be banned in the 1,000 square kilometres of Knight Inlet, so that his multi-million-dollar eco-tourism operation won’t be reduced to petty bribery. “My people shoot those bears 20,000 times a year, minimum,” says Wyatt. “These guys just shoot once and then it’s gone.”

For both hunters and eco-tourists, encountering a bear in the wild is a vivid and memorable experience. I’ve been lucky enough to see polar bears along Hudson Bay; brown bears up and down the B.C. coast; and dozens of black bears right across the country. It’s tough to go back to bird watching after standing 20 feet from a grizzly. It’s nearly as mesmerizing to watch other people watching bears. You can sense their excitement as a bear shambles into view - an abrupt reminder that there is still true wilderness beyond our suburbs.

With B.C.’s Wildlife Act now being redrafted, the bureaucrats and politicians in charge of the review must decide what a grizzly is truly worth to the province. By early next year, Wyatt and the rest of B.C.’s bear watchers should have their answer.

Chris Genovali of the Raincoast Conservation Society insists that more than profits are at stake in the West Coast’s great bear debate. However, the controversial new owner of a long-term hunting tenure can’t resist one last appeal to dollars and sense. “Economically, it’s in the province’s best interest to keep these large carnivore species healthy and viable,” he says. “There are not many places around the world where you can watch these magnificent animals in their natural habitat. And that’s worth a lot of money to the B.C. economy and the tourism industry.” Few people who have stared into the eyes of a grizzly - at least through a camera viewfinder - would disagree.