VANCE: Why I started a petition to free Kits Pool

For most of my life Kits Pool was my centre.

I learned to swim there, then it was my respite during my teens — I found community there. As a young adult I would swim a mile every day, times would vary with my multiple jobs and culinary school. I always found a way to keep this healthy routine alive.

When I became a mother, my boys and I would spends many morning hours in the shaded shallows of this pool, playing and getting sun on our faces. My mile a day wasn’t quite as every day but I kept up on that, as best as I could — thanks to the other moms hanging out poolside. We would pop out to the concession stand to get burgers and fries, maybe ice cream bars and revel at our great fortune. 

Fast forward to 2020, and while we were told that ‘outdoor gathering is the safest’ — this pool was slashed and heavily restricted. I followed all of the rules and managed to swim three times. In the six years since, I’ve managed to swim three times a year.  

The first time I tried to pop in for a swim at Kits Pool this summer, I walked up to the gate and it was closed — not for maintenance, not for weather, but for a 30-minute "crossover cleaning" between booked sessions. A Covid-19 holdover.

I stood there, towel in hand, watching a 137.5-metre saltwater pool sit empty under a blue sky. I am not alone. I started to hear from others in the community about how they’d "given up on trying to get in … it always says sold out online." Kids and teens were most certainly not planning their pool adventures three days prior and booking online. A generation of kids, who need to get off phones and touch grass most, are missing out on access to Kits Pool. 

Kids, teens, young families, shift workers and seniors are my "why" when asked about the Free Kits Pool petition. 

The freekitspool.com ask is simple: fully restore capacity and access the pool offered before 2019, when the Park Board began chipping away at both capacity and spontaneous access. What began as a pandemic-era public health measure has quietly become permanent — and it's turned one of Vancouver's most ICONIC public spaces into one of its most EXCLUSIVE private clubs.

Think about what Kits Pool has always meant to this city. It opened in 1931, and for most of the decades since, it ran on a simple principle: show up, pay your entry fee, swim. No app, no login, no competing with strangers over a calendar grid at 7 a.m. It has always been a rare public amenity that worked the same for a retiree, a tourist, a shift worker, and a kid who just wanted to swim after school. That's what "public" is supposed to mean.

The booking system breaks that promise. It rewards whoever has the fastest phone and the most flexible schedule, and it punishes everyone else. Parents managing daycare pickups can't plan three days out. Shift workers whose schedules get posted a week at a time can't either.

Tourists who read about the longest outdoor pool in North America show up and are turned away because the slots filled up online before they'd even landed in the city. We've taken a first-come, first-served public good and turned it into something that behaves like a fitness studio class booking — except the "studio" belongs to all of us.

To be fair, I understand why the booking system existed, initially. It started in 2020 as a genuine public health necessity, and I don't fault the Park Board for that. But five years later, Kits Pool is one of the last places in Vancouver still operating like it's 2020. Other civic facilities dropped their pandemic-era capacity limits years ago. Kits Pool didn't — likely because nobody has been forced to reconsider it until now.

I'm not shouting into the void here, either. Mayor Ken Sim wrote to Park Board commissioners just this week, saying Kits Pool should be open and accessible to everyone, all the time, with no complicated booking system and no barriers. He's right — and it's telling that this frustration has reached the mayor's desk independent of our petition. This is the shared experience of thousands of people trying to use a public pool the way the public has always used it.

I know the counterarguments. Capacity limits, some say, protect swimmer safety and prevent overcrowding at a pool that's showing its age and still leaks tens of thousands of litres of water an hour. Those are legitimate concerns, and I'm not asking the Park Board to ignore them. But there's a wide gulf between "manage capacity responsibly" and "reserve most of the pool for people who can win an online booking race." The city can set a sensible attendance cap and still let people walk up and swim, the way it did for nearly ninety years before 2019.

Kits Pool is genuinely one of Vancouver's most cherished places — and cherished things belong to everyone, not just the people who happen to be free at 7am three days ahead of time to fight for a reservation. Restoring real drop-in access won't fix every problem this aging pool has. But it will fix the one problem entirely within the Park Board's power to fix immediately, at no capital cost: giving Vancouverites their pool back.

If you agree, I'd ask you to sign the petition and tell the Park Board what this pool has meant to you. It's a small ask for something this city has never had to ask for before.

FREEKITSPOOL.com

Jody Vance is a well-known international broadcaster, podcaster, and columnist.  She offers insightful commentary on local issues in British Columbia.