Controversial Jumbo municipality to be created in B.C.

The B.C. government will officially create the Mountain Resort Municipality of Jumbo Glacier with a new mayor and council, but no residents, despite ongoing opposition, on Tuesday.

The appointed mayor and council of the municipality will take their oaths of office in the nearby community of Radium.

The ceremonies are the culmination of a 20-year effort to make a year-round ski resort in the Jumbo Valley, which lies outside Invermere in the province’s southeast.

The appointed council will make decisions intended to turn the 6,000 hectares of rugged and spectacular backcountry into a thriving tourist destination.

Meanwhile, Jumbo's opponents are trying to persuade the courts to declare the whole enterprise illegal.

The West Kootenay EcoSociety spokesman David Reid said the organization has recently filed the legal paper work.

"If you ask any Canadian what a municipality is, they'll say, ‘It's a place where people live,’" said Reid.

"There is no one living in the Jumbo Valley. So to call it a municipality, to call these people a mayor and council where no one elected them, is simply not true. It's a farce and a perversion of democracy."    

Jumbo's proponents and the B.C. government say the mayor and council are needed to do the kind of legwork any new municipality needs.

But as the new council is sworn in Tuesday, protesters say they will be marching outside.