Capital Daily for Wednesday, August 5

Point Ellice House, one of Victoria's oldest homes, will shut its doors to the public on Aug. 21. On Sept. 2, the province assumes operational control of the Rock Bay site and its roughly 12,000 O'Reilly family artifacts, with no reopening date attached.

Métis Nation BC took over the museum in January 2024, the fifth operator since the province started contracting out its heritage sites in 2002. This week the Nation declined to comment on the closure, pointing the Times Colonist to the provincial government.

Kelly Black, who ran the museum from 2019 to 2023, said he isn't surprised. He called the closure the inevitable outcome of chronic underfunding: a 2007 study pegged proper operating costs at $230,000 a year, while he says the province offered $110,000. The Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport says it has spent more than $55 million preserving heritage assets since 2020, but Black argues almost none of that pays the people who keep the doors open.

The house has two acres of heritage gardens and the longest natural shoreline left on the Gorge Waterway. For now it's open Wednesday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., until the fence goes up for good.

Greater Victoria woke up Tuesday to sunlight the colour of a peach, and no, you weren't imagining it. A layer of wildfire smoke moved over the southern and eastern Island through the day, filtering the light into a warm orange glow strongest at sunrise and sunset.

The smoke isn't from any one blaze on the Island. Only one wildfire is burning on Vancouver Island right now, and it's classified as being held. The haze is mostly a much larger plume produced by numerous fires across eastern and central Washington, carried west over Puget Sound by shifting winds. Fires like Old Trails, Kaiser Canyon, Sinlahekin and Border 2 have grown quickly and are throwing off large amounts of smoke.

Here's the reassuring part. Environment Canada logged an air quality health index of 2 in Victoria on Tuesday morning and forecast a maximum of 3 through Wednesday, both in the low-risk range. Much of the smoke is sitting high in the atmosphere, tinting the daylight without settling to street level.

firesmoke.ca expects the haze to thicken again around Victoria and Sidney on Wednesday afternoon before clearing that evening, and to linger over the region until early Thursday.