(2024-09-12) Open letter to Premier Eby regarding logging on Quadra Island

In TimberWest’s “Sustainability Progress Report 2023”, they identify protecting water quality as a top priority. So is this not one of those cases? I also question why the road will be extended so far and see the possibility of TimberWest continuing it across our trail to log the forest beyond it at a future date.

Our community met with TimberWest’s James Aiken and Colin Koszman and although they said TimberWest had not drafted plans for this area “yet”, we do not trust that response. They did a good job of PR for TimberWest but the bottom line they gave us is that it is their business “right” to cut and they left us feeling hopeless.

Isn’t this Crown Land owned by the people of BC? Do we not have a say when it is literally at our door step. Most businesses that operate in a community try to be cognizant of being good neighbours and TimberWest can too by not cutting this special area. This would show us that TimberWest can run a business, show some grace and not tremendously upset the locals. How? By listening to us and being a good business neighbour. We have to put up with degraded roads; washboards, pot holes and edge erosion that make it a single lane in some area and the expensive impact on our vehicle’s suspension from the logging trucks and the illegal movement of heavy machinery not on trailers chewing up our roads. We carry chainsaws in our vehicles to deal with the amount of trees blown down across the main road after the small margin of trees left after logging are hit by the first strong winds. We drive defensively on our narrow road against the steady stream of logging trucks, heavy machinery and dump trucks with road building materials, often pulling over to let them by.

The Granite Bay community does not ask for much but we are asking TimberWest to not log block 12-651 between our lake and bog and let the “second growth” forest around the old growth remain intact to also turn into old forest and protect the cedar from being impacted from full sun exposure. The harvest area had numerous trails that our community uses daily and the flagging tape for the cut block comes within 8 meters to our beloved recreational trails.

We have put wild life camera systems in this area and have seen wolf, cougar, fisher, deer, raccoon, marten and have seen Northern pygmy owls, peregrine falcons and many migratory birds that use these lakes and bogs to rest. In the summer, when we are uncomfortably hot we walk through this forest as it is much cooler and—left intact—is part of climate mitigation.

This concept is included in the progress report as the “BigCoast Climate Initiative”, but here they are again trying to take out forest in an important watershed corridor. The clearcut’s exposure will fry the moss, deer ferns and cedars that do not like full sun and without a stand around them they will not stand for long. Further up Saxon Main there is a prime example of a solo, yellowed and dying old-growth cedar and a few gnarled old-growth Douglas firs surrounded by a cut block. Those trees are struggling to survive the harsh conditions of exposure without their surrounding forest stand.

This area to be cut may be a small, quick cash grab of forest for TimberWest or the We Wai Kai Nation but it means the world to the locals of Granite Bay. As a person deeply connected to the land, thinking seven generations ahead, I feel I am its guardian and cannot condone logging an untouched “old forest” whose value standing far outweighs the short-sightedness of a future monoculture crop. We will continue to engage our Quadra community and conservationist organizations to stop this callous cut. I reached out to James Carlyle, ministry of Forests and his only response was to say “Yes, it’s Crown land” and sent me to this website which has no contact information for comments.