By Jack Krayenhoff

THE OLD, venerable Oak Bay Beach Hotel had to go.

To bring it up to present-day standards would have been impossibly expensive. Just the seismic upgrading alone would cost more than the whole building would be worth in the end, the engineers told the owners, Kevin and Shawna Walker.

That was sad news to the Walkers. In fact, it was worse: it was a personal defeat. The hotel had been very much a family business. When Kevin started his hotel career, not only did his father own it – even his grandfather still worked there.

When his father wished to retire, Kevin bought the hotel from him; but it was an extreme financial stretch, with maximal borrowing – and he and his wife had to work exceedingly hard to make the grade.

Then 9/11 came, and the bottom fell out of the travel business. Once more, they had to struggle to survive. And now, after all that, would the hotel have to disappear anyway?

“It was very discouraging,” Walker says. “I felt beaten. The problem was bigger than me.”

However, he continues, “my habit was to take that kind of thing to the Lord. I hope this doesn’t sound trite. I said: ‘What am I going to do about this?’ And then I got the sense that it wasn’t a defeat – but a challenge we had to rise to.”

Faith, he muses, “really does work in the day-to-day life of a businessman. I’m not sure how it works – just that scripture makes clear there is a cause and effect here: engage your faith, and God immediately engages with you.

“He is there to counsel and direct – often without any great sense of his presence. But you run into signposts along the way, where you say: ‘Wow! There is no way I could have gotten there on my own. That is a lot better than I could have come up with.’”

Can he give an example of this from the long and arduous process of getting approval from Oak Bay Council for building his new hotel? Indeed he can.

“Afterwards it may seem like a brilliant idea,” he says, “but at the time it was just us saying: ‘What are we going to do here?’ Let’s consult with people, see what they’ve got to say. I’ve found that is how the Lord often shows up – by listening to others.”

To telescope the story somewhat . . .

Walker put an ad in the paper, saying: “We need an advisory committee – anybody interested? You won’t get paid; you will get some good meals, and we’ll spend a lot of time together.”

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There was an excellent response, and he wound up with committee of 35. It had architects in it, as well as aboriginal activists, green activists, some very senior citizens and some very bright business people.

“They all had opinions,” Walker recalls, “and when I saw them I said, ‘What have I done? They’re going to give it to me!’”

The first question Walker put before his committee was, “Does the old hotel have to go?” In the end, they said “yes.”

Next question: “What do we put on the site? It is zoned for condos. Condos is the easy way to go; a hotel is the tough way, but for some odd reason that is what we prefer.”

After some time, the majority decided a new hotel was the best thing for the community.

“Then we asked their help to come up with a design, to enable us to fit this much density – which the business plan said we needed – onto the site. We had a three-day design session, with building blocks – it sounds almost outrageous – but somewhere in the process, we began to trust each other.”

A basis for community endorsement had thus been laid; but Council approval was still a long way off, because Oak Bay is a fiercely residential and conservative place.

“But funny things began to happen,” Walker says. “An 82 year old gentleman came up to me, and said: ‘I’m opposed to what you’re doing. I thought I’d tell you straight, for that’s the sort of man I am.’

“That evening at the Council meeting, nothing was going right for us. He sat there, but said nothing. The following day, he came and said: ‘I was appalled at the way you were treated last night. We were wrong. My wife and I need to support you.’

“He formed an organization, The Friends Of Oak Bay Beach Hotel. And by the time he was done, he had 1,100 supporters – who went door-to-door with petitions to sign, and attended all the public meetings. He organized meetings with Council members, often without my knowledge.”

With all these hurdles behind him, Walker is looking forward to a fresh challenge: building a new hotel, almost three times as big as the old one.

Asked to describe what has been the most rewarding part of his struggles, Walker says: “The stuff where the Lord has shown up in this whole experience: in the human things  along the way. It has been pure gold. Win, lose or draw, whether we will be standing there or not, cutting the ribbon for the new hotel – it will be a success story.

“We still don’t know what the outcome will be. There are still things that have to fall into line. But I have discovered we serve a God of sound character. He is a good God, and whatever he has in store for us – I’ll be okay with that.”

August 2007