The spit was originally intended to keep the Squamish river in its west channel, to dry up the estuary to build a coal port there. Without the spit the Squamish river channel would have continued to wander around as time goes on, as all rivers tend to do (
see aerial images 1930-2019). Pre-spit, at different times the river took different paths, and one of those paths was through the middle of the estuary – that's why you can't walk straight from the spit straight to the port, that water in between is the remainder of that other main channel that was closed off when spit was built.
Image of proposed coal port plan from 1972:
Something I forgot to mention about funding. This project is funded mostly by government grants. There are hundreds of millions of dollars of funding available for projects like this across BC and Canada. But for this Squamish estuary restoration project a certain amount and timeline of funding has already been approved, and my impression is that they either don't want to or can't spend any of it on windsports access, but are ok spending it on destroying our infrastructure without providing a replacement.
The funding they have is also time-sensitive, if they don't spend it this year, it won't roll over to next year. So you can see why they're rushing this through with just a few token consultation sessions that don't seem to amount to anything.
As for the port, it's a foreign private corporation on a long term lease. Why would they waste their money to help us when there isn't even a public outrage over this? The environmentalists did a great job positioning this as a salmon-vs-windsports issue, and that's how people see this, even some windsports users.
---
You're right about waterfront access in Squamish being pathetic. So much water, so little use. Could be much better but we need to stand up for it. How many calls / letters did the district receive about our issue? Barely any, I'd bet. Instead we were suckered into a "consultations" process that seems to ignore our needs wholesale. Anyone personally involved in that process is welcome to provide evidence of the contrary, of course, on the off chance that something dramatically changed in the last month.
That talk by DFO was triggered by
this petition by the way. I've said it before, and I still believe that
our only chance of maintaining any feasible access to the spit is to raise our collective AND individual voices a notch or two, NOW. We are now perhaps just a few short weeks away from the final decision to demolish the spit being made. It is not a decision to which SWS is a party to. The time to say something about that is now.