Good work, CSRD!
You know how it is, in the winter it’s cold and we aren’t outside very long before our ears tell us they’re freezing. Then in the spring, it warms up, and we don’t hear from our ears much anymore. But then it becomes mosquito season, and all of a sudden, we know we have ears again because those pesky biters really like to get at them.
Incidentally, do you know which is the deadliest animal in terms of lost human lives? Is it the lion with those big teeth, or the huge elephant that is so big and can run pretty well, too? Or is it a cobra or python snake that would put fear into any of us? Or, more locally, is it the cougar or grizzly bear?
But no, it is, instead, the little varmint that doesn’t weigh even an ounce, and which we have here in Golden, too; the mosquito. They kill us humans not in the physical violence sense, but by spreading diseases such as malaria, and kill they do, by the thousands. Google says that 597,000 people died from malaria in 2023.
This isn’t a Canadian thing, but we have some concerns here too with them spreading some disease. You’ve heard of West Nile.
So yes, it’s mosquito season again, even here in Golden.
And this year of 2025, they seem particularly bad.
But if you think they’re bad now, you should have been here in the early ’80s. Maybe you were here, and if you were, you remember the Town of Golden works crew pulling that fogging machine up and down the streets, shooting out that mist which was supposed to kill the adult mosquitoes. I’m sure it killed some, but I think I’m safe in saying that most people didn’t think it was enough.
I was the Area A Director in those early ’80s, and I eventually heard from enough people suggesting that the summer of ’83 had been so horrible that something needed to be done.
So I looked into possible mosquito control programs that fall and did enough research on it that I felt it represented a possible improvement to warrant taking the issue to the public in the form of a referendum, which, if passed, would allow us to implement a control program. My thought was that if we ran a referendum in the early part of ’84, we could have the program in place by June or July and perhaps be able to enjoy the summer.
So the referendum was conducted in January, and when the votes were counted, it had been turned down.
You have heard that timing is everything, and while that sounds like just a worn-out phrase, I learned that if you are going to conduct a mosquito control referendum, you don’t want to do it in the winter when there isn’t a mosquito in the valley. You’d better do it in July when we are all getting bitten while on our way to the polling station.
So it got turned down on that first crack, but still believing in the idea and, I suppose, being somewhat stubborn, I took it to referendum again eighteen months later, right in biting season.
Guess what?
Yes, it was passed that time, and we have had mosquito control for about forty years since.
Now, does that mean that the mosquitoes are all gone?
No, far from it. But nothing else is either.
I think it’s fair to say the bugs are better than they were without a control program, and now I hear that the regional district has decided to spend a significant amount of money to improve the program this year. I hope they do, and I hope it’s effective.
It’s interesting how, in the area of human progress, mankind has made huge strides in improving the human condition, our quality of life. But in some ways, we haven’t made much.
Battling mosquitoes is one of those.
Every recent generation can recite a list of things that didn’t exist, or are at least now much improved upon compared to earlier years. I’m not really, really old, but I can remember when everyone on Canada’s prairies farmed with horses, and part of a farmer’s job was rigging up things to protect the horses from mosquitoes. In the ’40’s you could buy screen things that fit over a horse’s mouth and nose to keep the mosquitoes away. They made a huge difference.
The trial and error and research that is needed to protect people and animals from these pests, however, has not been great enough to keep us comfortable in summer.
So for that reason, I salute the CSRD for at least making an effort to improve the program here in the Golden area. Perhaps other improvements might be made in future years as well.
