A resident of Pointe-du-Chêne, New Brunswick is raising the alarm over the amount of people flooding into the community to visit Parlee Beach Provincial Park and the village’s famous wharf.
Fred Durette said the community was inundated with visitors over the weekend, choking the streets with vehicles and jamming the wharf with people.
Durette is worried that the sacrifices of New Brunswickers that have led to the low COVID-19 case counts could be easily undone after just a few weekends of sun and the visitors it draws.
“It’s our community being safe,” Durette said. “We’ve worked so hard as a community to follow all the rules and make sure that this pandemic does not come into our community and we’re so proud of the province of New Brunswick.”
“We’d just like people to have a little patience and stay away from the wharf on nice weekends. I mean stay away from that place.”
In neighbouring Nova Scotia people are being asked to refrain from driving to parks and to stick to ones in their own communities. Durette says similar rules would make sense in New Brunswick.
“I’m not going to pile my family into a car and drive 30 or 40 miles to go sit on the beach when I can take my family out here and get some fresh air,” he said.
“Yes it’s inconvenient you can’t come to the beach, but you will be once everything is lifted and if we work diligently at it now maybe it will be this summer.”
But it’s unclear what the rules around travelling to green spaces outside of one’s home community are. Parks and beaches are permitted to open under the first stage of New Brunswick’s reopening plan as long as people are able to practice physical distancing.
At New Brunswick’s daily COVID-19 update on Monday, Premier Blaine Higgs said the province is encouraging people to get outside and enjoy provincial parks, as long as they can do it safely.
With no new active cases Higgs says the province is turning its attention to its borders, hoping tighter controls will make people within the province a little more comfortable.
“We’re going to really focus on the ability for people in our province to move around New Brunswick and see New Brunswick and do it in a respectful way that meets the health requirements and we can do that a whole lot more safely if we continue to tighten and secure our borders,” Higgs said.
“The stronger we are at protecting our borders, the more people are going to feel comfortable with new people coming into their community and these new people are fellow New Brunswickers.”
But New Brunswick’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Jennifer Russell says the province is still asking people to stick close to home.
“If you’re driving around the province obviously, as the premier said, we are hoping that people are not going to far away from their neighborhoods and are going out to do essential things” she said.
“But certainly as measures are relaxed and people are more comfortable going out on outings, again, doing it as safely as possible with all of the advice that we’ve given.”
The chair of the advisory committee for the Pointe-du-Chêne local service district says the community should be able to handle the extra people with proper controls.
Chuck Steeves says barriers to force people to move one way are being installed on the wharf, and similar measures are being examined for the park too. Signage reminding people to practice physical distancing will go up soon.
“I’m confident that the provincial park manager, … with his folks that he’s working with in Fredericton, are going to figure out how they can handle the volumes of people they’re going to see in provincial parks this year,” Steeves said.
Steeves says the number of people being allowed on the wharf or into the park can be regulated, but in the end it’s up to the individuals themselves to ensure they continue following physical distancing requirements.
“You know, three or four hundred people spread across Parlee Beach is no big deal,” he said.
“That number should not be a problem if people are respecting the 2 metre distancing. But of course it doesn’t matter what the numbers are if people aren’t respecting the distancing.”
Issues around outside visitors surfaced early on in the pandemic for some communities. The resort town of Saint Andrews closed municipal parks early on and has yet to reopen them.
“Really we have continued our vigilance and I think we were one of the first places that picked up on the fact that we had people travelling from elsewhere in New Brunswick just to come here for a day which we certainly understand,” said Saint Andrews mayor Dough Naish.
“Under normal circumstances we would welcome that and we are in the tourism business, so that’s all fine, right now it’s just too dangerous.”
Naish says there were some issues over this last weekend, but mostly enforcement has meant talking with people about why they can’t access public parts of the town.
“Most people have been really cooperative and it’s really calmed down. I’m not saying we don’t have a problem and every time you get a nice day there’s an upsurge in people who want to go places and I don’t blame them,” Naish said.
“We love having visitors, that’s our life blood here, but right now everybody agrees that this is nothing to be trifled with.”
But Parlee Beach is a provincial park and Pointe-du-Chêne is a local service district without a town council, meaning those worried about visitors have little they can do to respond. Instead Durette is left asking those from away to keep away from the community until they can visit safely.