B.C.’s Minister of Municipal Affairs says a municipality in the East Kootenay with no people should never have been incorporated in the first place.

Selina Robinson says Jumbo Glacier will be disbanded, but she says the Local Government Act requires residents to petition for disincoporation.

Speaking to NL News, she says her Ministry will have to figure something new out since it has no residents.

“This was a Liberal government decision to create a municipality of no one, and to give them money in order to operate. In order to make decisions for no one.”

Jumbo Glacier was incorporated in 2013 – with no people and no buildings – with plans to create a mega ski resort, however the community will now be turned into a protected Indigenous area.

The province tells NL News it provided $470,740 in grant funding, from 2013 to 2015, for Jumbo Glacier to have a mayor and senior staff until now.

No funding has been provided to the municipality since 2015, according to the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, which says the money that was provided came from a cost-sharing grant program between the feds, the B.C. government and local governments.

“Dissolving a municipality is more complex than you would think, because it hasn’t been done [in B.C.] since the 1920s. Staff are working through how to best proceed, and it’s just one more piece of Liberal decision-making we’re having to clean up,” Robinson says.

“You should never make a municipality when there’s zero people living there. It’s just a bad idea. That’s my advice.”

The mayor of Jumbo, Greg Deck, says there’s nothing more for council to do than “tidy up some administrative details.”

“Really boring stuff like terminating insurance coverage and closing bank accounts. All funds will be returned to the province, and we will cease to have any role to play,” Deck says.

(Photo: jumboglacierresort.com)