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Briony Penn

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  1. A large clearcut near Prince George. Photo by Sean O’Rourke, Conservation North WHILE THE SLOW ROLLING OUT of indigenous rights, responsibilities and title continues over Crown-managed forests, our existing laws—or lack of them—are rapidly pushing these ecosystems past the point of no return. The last 20 years has proved that industrial forestry will find a way to incrementally push all rules and regulations to favour one thing: maximizing the cut. Nowhere is this more evident than in the history of how regulations meant to protect wildlife—and other non-timber values—have been stripped to the point where they became meaningless. The Forest Practices Code Act was replaced in 2002 by the Forest and Range Practices Act. The latter enshrined one forest value—timber. Overnight, government relinquished oversight and management of Crown-managed forests to industry. Although nine non-timber values were listed in the 2004 Forest Planning and Practices Regulation, their protection was conditional on “not unduly reducing the supply of timber from British Columbia’s forests.” There was no disguising the objective to ensure timber trumped all other values—soils, biodiversity, cultural heritage, fish/riparian and watershed, forage, recreation, resource features, visual quality, water, and wildlife. That last afterthought—wildlife—has been so badly abused that BC scientists now say 1800 species of plants and animals are endangered or threatened. The old Forest Practices Code designations of Wildlife Habitat Areas (WHAs), Old Growth Management Areas (OGMAs) and Riparian Zones (RZs) have lingered in name only, conditional on “not unduly reducing the supply of timber.” This legislation—written by the forest industry—allowed a thin sheen of “protection” that has been a disaster for wildlife. The ministry capped WHAs at one percent of what is called the “Mature Timber Harvest Land Base” (trees over 60 years old in BC’s coastal forests) where all the old growth and valuable trees are. Government scientists knew that this isn’t sufficient for protecting the habitat for a list of species for the whole of BC. Protecting habitat for a single species at risk, like marbled murrelets on the coast or mountain caribou in the interior, could use up the entire one percent of the MTHLB alone. There was an additional mathematical problem, too. When mature forest is logged, the pool of mature forest shrinks. One percent of that shrinking pool, in areal extent, gets smaller and smaller as more and more mature forest is logged. How small is “one percent” now? We don’t really know because no one is actually keeping track. WHAs only applied to certain “identified” wildlife and determining which species were on that list became the job of politicians, not the scientists. Lots of plants and animals never made it on to the list and that list hasn’t been updated for 15 years. Under the new regulations, with its high-level orders, only 10 percent of a WHA was actually protected. The rest could be logged as long as a certain percentage of mature forest was retained at any one time, and the road blasting stayed away from the nesting site. What still looks on a map like a protected wildlife area is now, on the ground, mostly a clearcut with a few clumps of trees. Originally, OGMAs were also fixed, spatial, geographic areas. Up to 13 percent of a specific area, determined by land use planning, was supposed to be reserved to capture the old growth characteristics of different types of forests. As the industry began to reassert itself, however, high level plan orders came into effect that ate away at the areal extent of OGMAs. For example, the Vancouver Island Land Use Plan included this paragraph: “To avoid severe social and economic consequences, as determined by the district manager and the designated environment official, the full target of 13 per cent for old growth retention in CWHvm1 may be reduced by up to one third provided that ecologically suitable second growth forest is identified to recruit the shortfall.” This created new categories of ‘non-spatial’ and ‘non-legal’ OGMAs. Companies just shifted their OGMA boundaries around in their Forest Stewardship Plans (FSP) until they’d logged all the old growth because they knew they could draw some circles around second growth that might be old growth one day. District managers issued them permits because they only had one mandate—to not unduly reduce the timber supply. Their tasks did not include monitoring what was left of old growth on the ground—that fell to citizens and independent scientists. Other ministerial orders eroded the designation of the legal OGMAs by allowing intrusions up to ten percent of the OGMA for road building, removal of danger trees, rock quarries and salvage harvesting to prevent the spread of insect infestations. Co-location is another method of shrinking the area where habitat needs to be retained that has been employed to make more forest available for cutting. An OGMA could be moved to an existing WHA, UWR or RZ. In fact companies can co-locate all the designations in one place if the vague rules for each line up in the companies’ favour. One of the identified wildlife habitats on the West Coast is nesting sites for marbled murrelets (MAMU), an endangered seabird that is dependent on old-growth forests, especially in riparian areas. Co-location has occurred throughout the South Island district, including TFL 46 where Fairy Creek resides. OGMAs were co-located with MAMU WHAs, UWRs and RZs to maintain the MTHLB. (Yes, that’s a mouthful of indigestible acronyms. Government has been hoping the public will lose its appetite for monitoring forest policy by dumping endless opaque acronyms and bafflegab on the subject.) As for bear dens, wildlife tree retention, salamander habitat, bat roosts and every other plant and animal, well they are just sheer out of luck unless someone is spending their entire life fighting these companies—usually with no legal tools at their disposal. The monitoring of all these non-timber-supply values were to be rolled into what was called the Cumulative Effects Framework (CEF). For the coast, ten non-timber values were identified including old growth, MAMUs and forest biodiversity etc. But, not surprisingly, the assessments are only “underway” and not one report has been produced. It’s as though wildlife habitat might still exist, but if it does, it’s been swept under a rug. Monitoring for the public interest has been pushed under another rug, administered by a “Multiple Resource Value Assessment” (MRVA) team to “provide resource professionals and decision makers with information about the environmental component of this ‘balance’ so that they can assess the consistency of actual outcomes with their expectations.” For south Vancouver Island, there is one 16-page document dating back to 2013. It illustrates high impacts to riparian areas, stand level biodiversity, water and visual quality. ‘Balance’ is parenthesized by the authors, which speaks to their hesitancy in using that term to describe—not half—but what amounts to maybe six percent of the area of prime timber in the MTHLB—once you account for the area of all the co-located RZs, UWR and WHAs and non-legal OGMAs. Finally, there is the annual Assistant Deputy Minister Stewardship Report (ADMSR) based on the results of the Forest and Range Evaluation Program (FREP) and the MRVA. This is the “cornerstone” of monitoring that gets delivered to the Minister’s desk. In this document, the coast—from Bella Bella and Haida Gwaii to Vancouver Island—is covered in ten pages. The only directives are in a box called “Opportunities for Improvement.” For the category of stand-level biodiversity, the opportunities are “retain some large diameter trees on the site; look for opportunities to leave large snags as anchors; and retain a full representation of pre-harvest tree species.” None of these documents are rooted in any kind of reality—the things we actually see when we walk around the forests of Vancouver Island. We are all watching the last of these ancient forests falling, wildlife plummeting and the only word getting to the minister’s desk is to “look for an opportunity to leave a few snags as anchors.” High profile species at risk, requiring recovery plans that were swept under some other rug, are starting to trigger federal reviews for failure to act under the federal Species At Risk Act (SARA). Then the 2018 enquiry into the shambles of professional reliance found that government had no authority to hand monitoring over de facto to members of the public who became unofficial, unpaid and unsuccessful watchdogs. The one independent arm, the Forest Practices Board, which recently investigated logging in the Nahmint Valley, found BC Timber Sales was “not in compliance” with virtually any of their guidelines for biodiversity. The investigation found the Compliance and Enforcement Branch were “not investigating these concerns and not taking appropriate action.” It doesn’t get much worse for wildlife or the future when our own provincial logging company can’t even follow or enforce its own vague and non-legally-binding guidelines. Over the past 20 years we have witnessed the utter failure to legislate and enforce rules and regulations that would protect wildlife. Enough. The sweeping 1950s-era experiment of replacing nature in BC with a giant, man-made, largely unregulated wood-fibre plantation, managed by and for the benefit of forestry companies should—on the basis of the ecological collapse it has precipitated—be ended. The People of BC need to rise up and take back the forest from the industrial clearcutters. But enough about what I think. What do you think? Briony Penn is a naturalist, artist and award-winning author of several books.
  2. Management of public forests by the forest industry isn’t in the public interest. BC’s forests have become a vast patchwork of roads, clearcuts and mainly young trees. Of the latter, critics say, there has been no reliable inventory. As well, the Province has relied less on its own scientists and more on forest industry professionals to conduct management of public forests, blurring the distinction between public and private interest. FORMER GOVERNMENT FOREST SCIENTIST Andy MacKinnon’s battle cry, as he knocks on doors as a Green Party candidate in the upcomming provincial election, is: “Wake up British Columbians!” He’s one of an increasing number of scientists who are getting into politics to raise the alarm about what happens when proper government oversight is put at risk through budget cuts and political interference. MacKinnon believes the threat to BC’s greatest public asset—tens of millions of hectares of forests—should be one of the election’s foremost issues. “We have rapidly disposed of it for too few jobs and too little money,” MacKinnon says, “and this is all happening within our provincial model of ‘professional reliance,’ as the BC government sheds scientists of all sorts—professional foresters, biologists, engineers—and hands responsibility to professionals employed by the forest companies. Some have called this ‘the fox guarding the henhouse’ model.” This apparent loss of ability to properly manage BC’s forests isn’t just Green Party rhetoric. “We were hearing this from scientist after scientist,” says Katie Gibbs, one of the co-authors of an April 2017 report, Oversight at Risk: The State of Government Science in British Columbia. The report, commissioned by Evidence for Democracy, an Ottawa-based watchdog for promoting the transparent use of evidence in government decision-making, interviewed scientists across BC ministries. The aim was to assess their independence and capacity to produce and communicate reliable data. Highlighted in this review was the scientists’ response to the BC Liberals’ Orwellian term “professional reliance,” which is described in the report as “outsourcing both research oversight and decision-making activities that were formerly done by government.” Evidence for Democracy chose the BC situation for its first provincial review, says Gibbs, “because there had been lots of rumours that BC’s public sector was particularly dysfunctional in Canada and badly in need of an independent review.” When she and her co-author started interviewing, she says, “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from these scientists: That monitoring was outsourced to the professionals who were contracted by the very companies that they were monitoring? Was this for real?” It appears to be. The 64-question survey was circulated to 1159 government scientists this past November, with most of the responses coming from the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO). The report provides the historical context for the survey, which includes the dramatic reduction of provincial staff-scientists starting in 2001. BC now has the smallest public sector per capita of all Canadian provinces, despite its wealth of natural resources. Of those government scientists still working for the Province who were allowed to participate in the survey (and not all were), around half “believe that political interference is compromising their ministry’s ability to develop laws, policies and programs based on scientific evidence.” One FLNRO scientist wrote, “The reduction in staff and financial resources has caused us to not be able to conduct the scientific work that would best support changes in policy. Instead, policy is most often developed as a result of political pressure from select interest groups, in particular forest industry stakeholders.” The survey didn’t include scientists who are members of the BC Government Employees Union which, according to Gibbs, denied a request to distribute the survey to their members because “it was not in line with their priorities at the time.” IN A BRISTLING REPORT delivered to the Coastal Silviculture Committee this spring, authors Anthony Britneff and Martin Watts, non-partisan forest professionals, dug deep into the structural details of how “professional reliance” without independent third-party oversight has set off a domino effect of poor policy decisions affecting everything from stumpage rates, tree planting and water quality to the health of moose and grizzly populations. Britneff describes the resulting and ongoing grab of timber as “the rape of the land.” A 40-year career forester with the provincial government, Britneff says that during his last ten years in government, “[I experienced] radical budget cuts and changes in policy that I saw as being detrimental to the forests and to the life within them.” From left: Katie Gibbs, Anthony Britneff, Diane Nicholls, Andy MacKinnon The biggest problem, according to Britneff, is the corrupt data and unreliable models for determining the inventory of the forests—known as the “Timber Supply Review”—that’s used by the Chief Forester to determine how much forest can be cut each year, the “Annual Allowable Cut” (AAC). “If this information is wrong, which it is,” Britneff says, “then we put whole communities at risk. Job losses, mill closures, community hardships, very little stumpage [royalties] flowing back to the community, have all resulted because there is no reliable inventory or analysis to determine [appropriate] rates of cut.” One of the clearest indicators that there is a problem is the discrepancy between the allocation of timber in the AAC and what is actually cut. As Britneff puts it, “Industry can’t even find the wood allocated to them for the cut because the Timber Supply Review is an economic fiction, supported and informed by unvalidated computer models. Companies are pushing further and further into previously protected areas like the wildlife habitat areas and right up to the edge of provincial parks. They are making no provisions for climate change, and have used beetle kill to escalate the cut. To add insult to injury they are giving it away at 25 cents for a telephone pole.” In response to Britneff’s allegations, Chief Forester Diane Nicholls told Focus: “The people of BC can have complete confidence in Allowable Annual Cut (AAC) determinations as they are based on robust complex analysis of many factors that pertain to timber supply and other forest values. The process that supports my AAC determinations is open to public and First Nations for review and comment. All documents generated, including a detailed description of how I arrived at my decision, are available online.” Nicholls also noted, “The uncertainties in the analysis and data are managed through sensitivity analyses that allow me to assess the impact of these uncertainties on my decision. We continuously improve and update our data and analysis based on field audits and assessments and new or additional information.” But Britneff takes issue with Nicholls’ defence. He notes that “uncertainty” is a technical term used in the international accounting world when measurements “are based on estimates, judgments, and models rather than on exact depictions.” The absence of independent auditors to verify the data means there is no sound basis upon which to trust Nicholls’ numbers. Britneff and Watts also believe that the sensitivity analyses to which Nicholls refers are incorrectly applied. Remarkably, there is no legal requirement for Nicholls to conduct an actual inventory of provincial forests. That used to be a statutory responsibility of the chief forester, but changes to the Forest Act in 2002 transferred the inventory function to what was then called the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management. When that ministry was disbanded, inventory staff returned to the Ministry of Forests and Range but the legal requirement to conduct inventories didn’t. It simply disappeared. Both Oversight at Risk and Britneff point to problems beyond the uncertain timber supply, including insufficient capacity and budget within the Ministry to do an inventory. There is also no legal requirement for foresters working outside of government to maintain their data and records. There is also evidence that a political agenda at least partially determines the Annual Allowable Cut. This is perhaps best illustrated by an historic directive issued in 2006 by then Minister of Forests Rich Coleman to “maintain and enhance” the timber supply. This directive is still in force and, in effect, means that the AAC would never go down. This approach has left towns like Merritt with no timber and a long wait until the trees grow back. As Britneff notes: “It isn’t AAC that’s ‘maintained and enhanced,’ it is forests!” Foresters on the ground are the only ones who can determine whether what grows—or doesn’t grow—lines up with what the models predict. As Britneff argues, “When one has a centralized high priesthood of timber supply analysts, inventory gatekeepers and ivory-tower computer modellers, most of whom are out of touch with what the forestry staff on the ground are observing, then, by convenient omission, timber supply estimates and AAC determinations become economic fiction and AACs are maintained fraudulently high to align with Coleman’s directive—to keep raising the cut.” While Gibbs and her co-authors don’t use the word “fraud” to describe what they found, they do note, “The results from our survey show that around half (49 percent) of government scientists surveyed across ministries believe that political interference is compromising their ministry’s ability to develop laws, policies and programs based on scientific evidence.” As Gibbs states, “This ‘professional reliance’ system is a huge public interest issue but it hasn’t received the attention it should because it is a difficult thing to communicate precisely. It sounds all fine, and people think that qualified professionals are looking after their interests.” But the growing record of scrutiny of professional reliance—by bodies including the Centre for Public Policy Alternatives, the Environmental Law Centre, and the Auditor General in his scathing 2016 report—suggests otherwise. Professionals aren’t able to look after the public’s interests when they have no legal requirement to do so; they are employed by the companies they are expected to monitor; and their professional organizations are not at arm’s length from the forest companies that employ them. Last year, only one disciplinary case was brought to the Association of BC Forest Professionals—and it was thrown out. The year before, five cases were brought forward; three were thrown out and two are still in play. The findings of Oversight at Risk suggest that the professional reliance experiment has not only failed but should be scrutinized for fraud. Industry and government remain complicit and unaccountable to the public. Fifty-seven percent of BC government scientists are concerned that government’s reliance on external professionals compromises the ability of their Ministry to use the best evidence or information in decision-making. One forester wrote: “Decisions and objectives are fettered to the industry interests due to government/industry working groups. The industry-sympathetic administration does not always permit us to assess evidence, and even when we have evidence it does not easily accommodate providing direction to industry or changes in policy that may negatively impact (even in a small way) existing mainstream industry and their interests.” Another scientist working in FLNRO reported, “government rarely or perhaps never suppresses scientific findings. They do, however, by way of lack of funding, suppress research and data collection which are necessary for proper science based management.” Cases like the Mount Polley disaster, the green-lighting of the Site C project through exemptions of the Wildlife Act, and Elk River selenium risks are cited in the report as the most egregious examples of the failure of professional reliance, so the problem extends well beyond forest management. On the issue of being free to communicate their concerns to media, only 3 percent of scientists stated they could do so without approval from their bosses; 32 percent said that they were not able to communicate at all with media; 42 percent had to seek approval; the rest didn’t know. During my own 16 years of writing on the subject, no permissions have ever been granted to speak to a government scientist without public relations approval, even for data as seemingly apolitical as the population of black bears. COURT CHALLENGES—at both federal and provincial levels—are tackling the issue of scientific muzzling. A recent court case initiated by Martin Watts against the Province of BC is over “blacklisting” professional foresters for raising concerns with the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations over the quality of inventory data, and being excluded from contract opportunities and given only limited access to information. On May 11, a judge in the Supreme Court of BC will decide if the civil claim will proceed. As Britneff states: “Couple this apparent negligence with the fact that the chief forester is operating without a statutory mandate to maintain an inventory of the lands of the province, and one has a pernicious boondoggle of proportions sufficient in seriousness to cut rural jobs, close mills and harm forest-dependent communities, which is exactly what has been happening over the last 15 years.” Another insider scientist, who spoke to Focus on condition of anonymity due to fear of being fired or blacklisted, makes even stronger allegations: “Industry and government are inextricably bound, providing the conditions and potential for monkey business at every level. This failure has gone unseen for 16 years by bullying the civil servants who found problems with this model. Untouchable teams moved, fired and ignored people who did not support this model. Some districts simply suspended all staff meetings for years to hide this fact. One need only look as far as the way that volumes used for cutting permits are calculated. The Province uses outdated tables, ‘Loss Factors,’ which date back to the sixties. The more precise ‘Call Grade Net Factor’ volumes are also collected, but not used to assess stumpage volumes because business prefers lower taxes. This speaks to the influence that business has over government policy.” WITH LITTLE ABILITY TO GET EVIDENCE, no jurisdictional oversight to even enforce against fraudulent activity, and little confidence that the current government wants to change the status quo, some scientists like Andy MacKinnon are turning to the political sphere. Yet, strangely, the management of public lands (94 percent of this province) is not a big election issue. Raw log exports have grabbed more attention, but their revenue impacts are small compared to the scale of the economic problems created by the diminishment of proper government oversight. NDP leader John Horgan, who comes from a forestry background on the island, released his party’s forestry platform in April. Aimed more at top-of-mind issues like curbing log exports and job creation, it doesn’t mention reforming the professional reliance system, raising stumpage, or bringing back the scientific research branch—not surprising because it is hard policy to explain. MacKinnon admits the communications challenge of this issue. “What I have found works, though, is that if you tell someone that our vast provincial forests and wildlife are being looked after by just a handful of foresters who work for the companies that cut them down, they get that there is a problem.” Katie Gibbs, a scientist herself, feels a better job needs to be done in connecting the dots for people. “Public science affects all of us—from clean drinking water to making sure bridges and roads are safe—it’s in all of our best interest to ensure that government science is independent, robust and openly communicated.” Briony Penn’s most recent book, The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan, won the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the inaugural Mack Laing Literary Prize.
  3. Tourism operators on the coast have been forced to watchdog forestry operations since government introduced self-monitoring. JOHNSTONE STRAIT, around Robson Bight, is one of the most scenic and busy sections of the Inside Passage for Vancouver Island tourism in general, and for whale watching in particular. Across the water from the Bight, in Boat Bay on West Cracroft Island, is Spirit of the West Adventures’ base camp. There owner Breanne Quesnel is juggling her busiest time of year for kayak guiding, looking after her two under-two-year-olds, and fielding my questions on an issue she has been watchdogging for the last five years. Quesnel has been monitoring harvesting operations by TimberWest, the company that holds the Tree Farm Licence in the area. It all started in June of 2011 when she found cutblock boundary marker ribbons near her licenced camp. Since then she has been researching, meeting with government and TimberWest, and offering recommendations on how best to conserve local viewscapes. Breanne Quesnel Managing viewscapes is a legal requirement of BC’s forest practices that has been around for a long time. WAC Bennett popularized the concept because he knew that visitors to Beautiful BC actually came to see trees—not stumps. Since those days, it has become a more exacting science than just keeping a strip of trees between the highway and the clearcut—and an increasingly contentious issue. Quesnel and others involved in tourism in the area know that clients choose other destinations when they start seeing too many big, ugly clear-cuts. Focus spoke with Quesnel back in 2013 when she went public about concerns not being addressed by TimberWest or the district manager of the North Island Central Coast Forest District—concerns also voiced by the Sea Kayak Guide Alliance of BC, the Wilderness Tourism Association, the North Island Marine Mammal Association and others. Three long years later, triggered by TimberWest’s submission of a cutting permit application, Quesnel filed a complaint with the Forest Practices Board (FPB). She argued the concessions to visual quality were inadequate, the process flawed, and government wasn’t acting in a timely manner. The FPB is an independent board that investigates complaints with forest practices and makes recommendations to the regulator, the Ministry of Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, and companies holding licences to log Crown land. Quesnel’s chief frustration lay in the lack of opportunity for the public to review and comment, specifically on cutblock layouts. The mechanism by which a company can legally get away with no input from the public is by requesting an “extension” or renewal of an existing Forest Stewardship Plan (in this case a plan developed more than a decade ago). There is no legal requirement for public input on an extension. A Forest Stewardship Plan is a regional plan that describes how the area will be managed for a variety of values. It is the only legally-binding planning document under the Forest and Range Practices Act (FRPA). Quesnel describes it as “so vague, it allows forestry companies the ability to push through cuts just about anywhere once it is approved or extended.” The public has no recourse except a cumbersome legal appeal process in which they need to prove that stopping the logging plans would not unduly impact the supply of timber on the coast or the economics of the logging company, and that the public benefits outweigh any constraints or impacts on the licencee. As Quesnel asks, “How does a member of the public prove these tests?” The answer is they aren’t supposed to. The onus is on the professionals to weigh up the varying priorities of serving the interests of the company, the government and the public. THIS IS CALLED “professional reliance” and it finds its way into much of our legislation these days. The Province recently rescinded it for the real estate industry, but it’s alive and kicking in the Forest Range and Practices Act. In theory, it allows government to cut costs and “get out of the way” of business. In his previous employment with UVic Environmental Law Centre, lawyer Mark Haddock, now a lawyer for the Forest Practices Board, wrote in a 2015 paper: “Just over a decade ago, the British Columbia government embarked on a significant regulatory experiment. It adopted an ambitious goal of cutting or deregulating one-third of the regulations, coupled with an equivalent reduction in the size of the public service. Natural resource management and environmental protection laws and agencies were a prime focus for this initiative as government believed resource companies were significantly over-regulated.” To assure the public that standards wouldn’t diminish, the responsibility of managing our forests for aspects such as wildlife, tourism and water—as well as timber—was to be put in the hands of the professionals instead of government. Professional reliance is preferred by business for its flexibility and lack of regulatory controls, but it has been characterized by many as the fox guarding the chicken coop. Government’s role was converted to reviewing the “results.” Results are what you see once the harvesting is done; they provide evidence of whether the professionals did their job—or not. Under this deregulated system, the responses of the FPB to Quesnel’s concerns were predictable: 1) that there was little more that the district manager could do other than encourage her to continue to discuss concerns with TimberWest and, 2) that TimberWest did voluntarily reduce some of the visual impact of the cutblocks to accommodate non-forestry business interests. Is Quesnel assured that the experiment is working? As she points out, “Well you can’t stand the trees back up!” The Ministry’s own study on the effectiveness of managing visual quality objectives (VQOs) found they were only achieved, across the province, an average of 61 percent of the time. The most stringent category of visual quality (which represents 13 percent of scenic areas) was effective less than half the time. After five long years of gathering a large body of evidence in a field she’s worked hard to learn, Quesnel now wonders: “Why do members of the public have to do all of this? And where are all the foresters on this issue? I can’t even dig a pit toilet here without getting an archaeological impact assessment and they are blasting a road behind us?” Mike Larock of the Association of BC Forest Professionals supports the professional reliance system, pointing to 90 percent compliance in terms of government monitoring. He sees the Association’s key priority as educational, working closely with government advisory and appeal boards, watchdogs and members of the public. He notes that every allegation raised by any of these groups is investigated. Around 10 complaints are reviewed annually. He says there have been some suspensions of licences (unconfirmed at time of press). In the online case digests, it is evident that in the majority of cases offending firms didn’t end up with fines. And the number of citations in 2014, listed in the Association’s annual report, was zero. A minimalist approach to penalties also appears to be the policy of the Ministry. With a results-based system, if a district manager is alerted that legislated standards might not have been met, he or she informs the Compliance and Enforcement (C & E) branch who monitor “the results.” West Coast Environmental Law did an analysis of the Ministry’s C & E branch, called Few Inspections—Low Consequences. Since 1999/2000 the number of inspections has dropped from 34,046 to 7,976. Despite so few inspections, inspectors are finding the same number of non-compliance actions. However, the amount of fines collected has plummeted from $561,511 to $72,585. TIM RYAN, CHAIR OF THE FOREST PRACTICES BOARD, has concerns similar to those of Quesnel’s. “I have heard many of these issues myself and have seen the efforts [members of the public] make to gather the information, and I agree, they shouldn’t be in that position.” The FPB has reviewed numerous complaints about impacted viewscapes. In a 2014 complaint brought forward by the Council of Haida Nations, for instance, the FPB found that the results on the ground for visual quality were not in compliance and, more importantly, that the Ministry’s C & E branch itself “did not provide an adequate rationale or a reasoned decision for stopping the investigation, nor was the pace of the investigation satisfactory. Government’s enforcement of Forest Range and Practices Act was not appropriate.” To that end, the FPB has made various recommendations over the years to the Ministry to improve the process. Chief amongst them was stopping the practice of approving “extensions” of Forest Stewardship Plans that preclude any public review, and increasing the discretionary powers of district managers so that if they see the runaway train coming they can do something about it. As the FPB wrote in a December 2015 report, “In recent years, the Forest Practices Board has seen situations arise where forestry development was putting local environmental and community values at risk, yet district managers could do little to affect the development and protect the public interest.” The FPB has also prepared reports on contentious issues like visual quality, endangered ecosystems and professional reliance. It cites the Haida Gwaii visual quality complaint report, and the Mount Polley mine disaster report as examples that “point to the need for a review of all parties’ roles and responsibilities in supporting professional reliance, including effectiveness and monitoring.” Key to effectiveness is a genuine penalty for the non-compliers. In one of the first cases of its kind for visual quality, the Ministry’s C & E branch successfully brought a non-compliance case against Interfor. It concerns the visual quality objectives of Stuart Island, one of the Discovery Islands, another high- profile tourism area south of Johnstone Strait that Focus reported on in 2013, alerted by another tireless tourism operator, Ralph Keller of Coast Mountain Expeditions. Keller’s experience was similar to Quesnel’s with no real opportunity for input and huge investments of his limited time. After investigation of the complaint by the FPB, the case was heard and it was found that “Interfor had erred on the side of risk instead of on the side of caution” and that the company “had failed to take all reasonable care to avoid a contravention.” A penalty of $20,000 was levied. When Interfor appealed to the Forest Appeals Commission, the FPB provided its evidence and Keller and others were invited as witnesses. Interfor’s appeal was turned down this summer. (Legal costs assuredly exceed the $20,000 penalty.) One of the findings in the Interfor case was that a forester involved failed to do a “proper peer review because of his earlier involvement with Interfor in the design of the cutblock” and was found not to be independent. INDEPENDENCE LIES AT THE HEART of concern over professional reliance. How can foresters whose work is controlled by so few companies be independent of them? Haddock put it this way in his report: “In some cases the same individual can be the evaluator, planner, approving professional and the supplier of goods and services. In many cases that professional may be an employee or contractor of the proponent, with duties of loyalty that may conflict with optimal environmental outcomes.” And then there’s the matter of discipline and penalties. The Association of BC Forest Professionals’ Mike Larock could not comment on any disciplinary action for the foresters named. He said they would be looking at the case and that they take objectivity very seriously under their professional legislation, the Foresters Act. The FPB’s Tim Ryan feels the economics make it challenging to ensure consistent standards and practices across a big landscape where there are lots of complicated technical problems. The Association of BC Forest Professionals operates on a budget of $2.3 million to cover the education, monitoring and disciplining of 5000 members over the entire province. Larock admits, “We are stretched pretty thin.” Ryan’s own agency has not had any increase in funding for 10 years and operates on $3.8 million. Is this enough to provide independent education, monitoring, investigation and enforcement for a profession overseeing an industry generating $15.7 billion dollars in sales? Keller feels the Interfor/Stuart Island case may make a positive difference. Interfor had already had a case brought against them earlier for another infraction in Pryce Channel and so a second strike against them could be more damaging. In 2015, the Forest Practices Board made a recommendation that the cases of non-compliance should be made more public on an easily accessible website to act as a deterrent. Keller couldn’t agree more. “The professional reliance around how well the companies do is hollow since monitoring and enforcement is underfunded, understaffed and underpublicized. Most members of public are so cynical they don’t even bother writing complaints any more,” he said. The Association of BC Forest Professionals’ Mike Larock says the decision on Interfor’s performance on Stuart Island was welcome and “will shape the management of visual quality objectives.” Interfor logging on Stuart Island When Focus asked Interfor about its next steps in light of the case, its Director of Economic Partnerships & Sustainability Karen Brandt responded: “Before the Tribunal’s decision, Interfor and tourism groups had already begun to work together to improve communications and collaboration. Interfor is now a member of the Discovery Island Tourism-Forestry Group, shared its 10-year harvesting plans with tourism operators, hosted open houses and developed new operating procedures and training for staff to guide visual management. The recent Tribunal decision provides further learnings to improve independent peer reviews.” Quesnel does feel things might be improving, citing the forester from Interfor for finally bringing maps to the table for their Tourism-Forestry Group. Still, she cautions, “While all of this is going on, logging is actively taking place. None of the companies have agreed to halt plans until agreements can be reached with the tourism sector.” And what of the Ministry of Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations? Is it listening to the Forest Practices Board? In a letter addressed to its chair, Deputy Minister Tim Sheldan wrote, “Now that FRPA has been in effect for over a decade it is appropriate to acknowledge and address areas of learning and longstanding concerns. And begin integrating them into our administration and implementation of the Act and framework.” The Forest Practices Board chair Ryan believes the government is beginning to take a more “aggressive” stand on the over 270 Forest Stewardship Plans up for renewal. “We will see some improvements,” he predicts. Sheldan stated that “province-wide expectations are also being set for the submission of new plans that will be subject to full review and comment by the public and stakeholders. Achieving a new standard will take time and collaboration.” Quesnel, Keller and many others frustrated with the system will be watching with sharp eyes as to whether genuine change is afoot or simply more delaying tactics. Meanwhile the two tourist operators are confident that the business case for logging is losing out to tourism values in their regions. Quesnel calculates “our one business generated more income in less than four years than [forestry generated] from the entire cut—which can only be done every 60 years or so.” Briony Penn is the author of the new book, The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan. She recommends Daniel Pierce’s Heartwood videos on forestry issues on the Island.
  4. Owned by government pension plans, TimberWest appears set to ignore a Forest Practices Board finding about its logging on the island. IT HAS TAKEN SIX YEARS, but just about everything with the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) Agreement has been innovative. That includes new models for financing forest conservation; new ways of managing forests where the well-being of ecosystems and First Nations are the twin goals; new ways of resolving conflict where once-battling industry and environmental groups sit down committed to solutions; and finally, new ways to draft regulations through real BC-government-to-First-Nation-governments decision-making. With public reviews now all in, the final ratification of the GBR Land Use Order will unfold in the next couple of months. It will result in the provincial government amending laws to enable a plan painstakingly crafted by multiple stakeholders to “establish a Natural Forest of 3,108,876 hectares and to maintain old forest representation of each ecosystem at 70 percent.” The proposals include eight new areas fully protected from logging, covering about 290,000 hectares (an area larger than Clayoquot Sound). In addition, the new laws would increase the forest area set aside from logging outside of protected areas by approximately 600,000 hectares. Half a million hectares is planned as “Managed Forest” with an annual cut of 2.5 million cubic metres until 2025. Central to the plan is the intent “to protect and conserve First Nations forest and cultural values…and provide enhanced access to opportunities for carbon benefits and commercial forestry” under a new type of management called Ecosystem-Based Management. (EBM recognizes the importance of preserving habitats that wildlife need to maintain viable populations.) The only problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is western Canada’s largest private forestry company, TimberWest, and its behaviour in the Sonora/Thurlow region at the very southern tip of this huge area. These are the islands where the conservation and timber values are the highest, and the plan and relationships the weakest. As Dallas Smith, representative of the Nanwakolas Council (consisting of seven local First Nations), says of the Sonora/Thurlow region, “It is one of those litmus tests for engaging with the current process. Ninety percent of us have all agreed to play by the ground rules for some years and now TimberWest is finally being held accountable as well.” Perhaps ironically, the bad boy on the block is owned by British Columbia Investment Management Corporation and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board which manage government pension funds—raising questions around the government itself being in a conflict of interest. Almost all of the calls for tighter legislative controls during the review process have been prompted by TimberWest’s dismal show in the southern region of the GBR. Smith is hopeful the process will bring the company into line, but others, like Jens Wieting of Sierra Club BC, one of the three environmental groups involved in the process under their banner of Rainforest Solutions Project, are more skeptical. They will be watching closely to see if government will close the loopholes to make everyone truly accountable. TimberWest has amassed a significant record of finding loopholes over the years. In the Great Bear Rainforest, TimberWest has steadfastly refused to join other industry participants, like Interfor and Western Forest Products, who are playing by the rules. They have been “cutting as if there is no tomorrow” according to Sierra Club and allies who found TimberWest had overcut by a million cubic metres. While not technically illegal, their overcutting contradicts the spirit of the efforts being made by everyone else. It has meant that potential conservation areas were logged before stricter legally-binding agreements could be put into place. Ross Campbell, an independent ecotourism operator from Sonora Island, points to government as a big part of the problem: “Sonora is emblematic of the lack of oversight from government.” With legislative proscriptions stripped from BC’s old Forest Act to form the new Forest and Range Practices Act, reliance on self-policing by forestry professionals is all there is protecting the public interest. So in 2014 Sonora citizens stepped up. Campbell’s family and the Sonora Island community hired their own forester to prepare an independent report as part of their complaint to the Forest Practices Board (see Focus, Sept 2014). They catalogued recent stumps of old-growth trees and prepared maps of where TimberWest had clearcut old-growth forests. Those forests had contained communities of red and blue listed species—plants and animals that are extirpated, endangered, threatened, or of special concern. Their complaint led the Forest Practices Board to conduct an audit of TimberWest’s Tree Farm Licence in the area. It recently finished its investigation and found TimberWest “did not meet the spirit and intent of Ecosystem-Based Management for old forest representation and management of red and blue listed plant communities.” TimberWest’s forester defined old growth forest as one where 50 percent of all the trees were over 250 years old. Labelled a “bizarre” definition by Valerie Langer of Forest Ethics, the Board stated more diplomatically: “This initial interpretation of the definition of old forest and red and blue listed communities as well as lack of caution in its old forest recruitment strategy, did not demonstrate the careful management associated with EBM to meet the goal of maintaining ecological integrity.” They also noted that the government district staff knew this yet didn’t raise any concerns, and that TimberWest was making some effort to change with a decision to hold off on a very small number of cut blocks starting in 2013. In its response to Focus’ questions, TimberWest’s Domenico Iannidinardo directed me to the website which states: “TimberWest continues to operate above legal requirements…As the Forest Practices Board acknowledges, assessing spirit and intent is a subjective exercise. Ecosystem-Based Management is a complex undertaking of balancing human well-being and ecological integrity. At TimberWest, we strive to continuously improve.” But many feel the company will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to improve and that it will take more than good will to finally bring them into the agreement. According to Wieting of the Sierra Club, the industry (excluding TimberWest) and ENGO groups, focused on such improvements as how to protect red and blue listed ecosystems, provide more clarity for riparian protection, and set aside a forest buffer around black bear and grizzly bear dens. Wieting also notes the critical importance of getting the reserve designs in the south done right, where about 90,000 hectares of rainforest will be set aside in new “restoration reserves”—a special challenge in this part of the GBR with little old growth remaining and every old-growth Douglas-fir tree worth 15 times an old-growth hemlock in the north. Campbell, working in the heart of this endangered ecosystem, is more critical of the plan and process in the south: “The draft shows government hasn’t really taken any lead on anything, and is passing TimberWest’s proposals straight through, verbatim. No one has ever stopped to see if there is any scientific analysis of their landscape design.” When TimberWest was asked if they would continue logging in the contentious cutblocks, it responded that their “harvest planning is being informed by the current iteration” which technically allows that. This is despite the Forest Practices Board’s recommendation that “surrendering declared cutblocks with outstanding conservation values and low levels of investment by the licensee could demonstrate a commitment to the spirit and intent of EBM.” Rory Annett, executive director of Coastal Projects, Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations, says it’s too early to speculate about government closing the loopholes: “All comments received will be screened and we will make final recommendations about what is next. It is very difficult to say what we will change. What I can tell you is that there has been a long discussion between environmental groups, First Nations and the companies and that is what led to the draft Land Use Order.” When asked what kind of technical experts would be working on the reviews, Annett commented that, “we cobbled together a team of government scientists and members of the consulting community, but it is not the Coast Information Team.” The CIT was an international scientific team that developed guidelines on Ecosystem-Based Management for land use planning processes on the coast. Disbanded well over a decade ago, there are few scientists left in government. To complicate matters, TimberWest has contracted Homalco Forestry Limited Partnership, owned by the Homalco First Nation, to log the contentious southern cut blocks. Smith, from the larger First Nation alliance, however, is confident that the agreement forged by 90 percent of the stakeholders will carry the day. “Council are confident in the process. We are very happy that TimberWest will finally be accountable.” To close the loopholes, the Forest Practices Board made a key recommendation “that government clarify the definitions and guidance for old forest and at-risk plant communities.” Now it is in the government’s court to follow their advice and make everyone fully accountable—even the company that invests their pensions. Briony Penn PhD has been reporting on the environment since 1975. She recently wrote The Real Thing: The Natural History of Ian McTaggart Cowan. The book is scheduled for release in September.
  5. Evidence of destruction of old-growth forest on Sonora Island appears set to shake up BC’s South Central Coast forest policy. OVER MY YEARS OF REPORTING on TimberWest, there has been virtually nothing that could bring the company’s inexorable liquidation of their forestlands to heel. Being named in a case before the Inter-America Commission for Human Rights, for example, hasn’t slowed the company down; nor has being the focus of a wide-spread media campaign by Greenpeace in 2011. Nor has being challenged by shareholders. Nothing seemed able to slow TimberWest’s relentless pace. That is until two pairs of siblings, all born and raised in the shadow of the last of the old growth on the Discovery Islands, took to the woods of TFL 47 to investigate if TimberWest’s logging had transgressed rules protecting endangered old-growth ecosystems. The Sonora Island foursome—Farlyn Campbell, her partner Jody Eriksson, Farlyn’s twin Tavish, and Jody’s brother Cam—have helped convince TimberWest to put a moratorium on the logging of old growth in one of the most threatened regions of the Great Bear Rainforest (parts of the Thurlow, Gray and Fulmore Landscape Units) while the company rethinks its approach. It all started in February of 2013 when TimberWest flagged a cutblock in seven hectares on Sonora Island. This cutblock contained 160 old-growth trees, some with six-foot diameters and heights of 200 feet. The Sonorans obtained the cutblock plans from TimberWest and laid them down over Google Earth, discovering that numerous other planned cutblocks on Sonora’s Crown lands coincided with the last of the old growth on the island. Under existing rules, the company should have avoided any of the last remaining (four percent) old-growth Douglas-fir. When they initially took their complaints to TimberWest, the Sonorans were given a variety of excuses. The most egregious justification for the locals was TimberWest’s claim that these were “second-growth” forests and they had a right to log them. It appears that TimberWest’s definition of old growth was “forest with more than 50 percent of the stand volume over 250 years old.” As Valerie Langer of Forest Ethics stated in her blog “How did they pull that off? By using a bizarre, technically-unheard-of definition they made up.” So the Sonorans commissioned their own professional forester to come up with an opinion on that definition. Registered Professional Forester Doug Hopwood was “unable to find any documented scientific basis” for TimberWest’s definition of old growth. The Sonorans took the definitions to the Forest Practices Board (FPB), asking them to intervene, but the Board can only respond to a complaint once a violation has occurred. The FPB told them, “Go talk to TimberWest and come back to us if they chop them down.” Throughout the rest of 2013, the company and the Sonorans did just that. Sonorans talked and TimberWest cut. TimberWest’s Chief Forester and VP for Sustainability Domenico Iannidinardo assured the Sonorans that TimberWest would be “precautionary” while the Forest Practices Board, the government, and First Nations developed their final ecosystem-based management agreement and definitions. TimberWest’s definition of “precautionary,” however, seemed to be as shaky as their definition of old growth, and trees of great stature continued to fall. So in January of this year the Sonorans decided to collect evidence of violations of the “South Central Coast Order” for a formal complaint to the FPB. They mapped out where the company’s cutblocks were in the Thurlow Landscape Unit on Sonora and where endangered (red and blue listed) ecosystems overlapped. Then they packed some tents, a couple of bicycles and $500 worth of spray paint into their boat and set off to assess the situation on the ground. They had little difficulty finding huge stumps from recent logging; these they identified and marked with bright red paint. Anyone can now see the painted stumps as they fly over Sonora Island at the southern edge of the Great Bear Rainforest. Each tree has been catalogued by the team, with its age and geographic location. Catalogues of seven cutblocks, which the foursome calls “Stump Reports,” document the cutting of close to 500 old-growth trees with an average age of 300 to 400 years old, with some as old as 800 years. The team then made a formal complaint to the Forest Practices Board, which is now exploring whether TimberWest fulfilled the objectives of the South Central Coast Order. This legal order, passed to (temporarily) satisfy the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement in 2009, has obligations to maintain biodiversity, protect 30 percent of the old growth of each forest type and protect red- and blue-listed plant communities. The FPB has stated that it will be investigating whether the company “physically adhered to the spirit and intent of the Agreement,” which required them to use “ecosystem-based management.” Ecosystem-based management recognizes the importance of preserving habitats wildlife need to maintain viable populations. For example, the red-listed (in BC “red listed” means extirpated, endangered, or threatened) marbeled murrelet can nest only in old-growth trees. Their population continues to decline in BC. With the Sonora Island old-growth trees having a monetary value of up to $10,000 each, depending on their size and condition, the temptation for TimberWest to overlook its obligation to practise ecosystem-based management was perhaps too great. Formerly in BC government foresters told companies where they could log on Crown land, and government foresters monitored the cutblocks. But the Liberal government argued company foresters could monitor themselves through their professional organization by a process known as “professional reliance.” It’s now evident this system is not working. Lately, when professional foresters fail to protect endangered ecosystem or species, the responsibility has fallen on citizens to file complaints, but that requires discovery of the offense and the collection of evidence—a challenging proposition, especially when cutblocks are as remote as that documented on Sonora Island. That’s one weakness of “professional reliance.” A second is that such self-policing requires a robust disciplinary process. In 2009, the Association of BC Forest Professionals committed to “improve the transparency of the discipline process” and started to publish case digests. We now know that from 2010 to 2013 there were only seven complaints of failure to protect endangered ecosystems/species or riparian areas. Only one of those was investigated and no citations were issued. Although transparency is improving, there’s still no real deterrent for bad practices. All that remains to keep companies honest is the Forest Practices Board, which has been gutted by the provincial government. The Board now does only one random annual audit of a TFL each year. At that rate, the odds are good a TFL won’t get audited more than twice in a century. So it’s encouraging that, as announced this past month, the Board is conducting an audit of all of TFL 47. That audit, as well as a report on the Campbell-Eriksson complaint, is expected at the end of the year. Meanwhile, with the threat of a judgement looming, everyone appears to be leaping into action. The Province, in conjunction with First Nations and licence holders, is finally redoing the 2009 Orders for the Great Bear Rainforest with the stated intent of “achieving low ecological risk” and a higher percentage of protected old growth. TimberWest has voluntarily made significant changes to their 2014 logging plans and, in fact, is going one step further than is required by the rules, creating restoration planning areas because of the extent of the damage in this region. But would any of these moves towards accountability have occurred without the hundreds of hours devoted to documenting TimberWest’s misdeeds by four young Sonora Islanders? Briony Penn PhD has been reporting on the environment since her first article in The Islander in 1975 on Garry oak meadows. She lives on Salt Spring Island.
  6. International courts and BC teachers try to make up for government and corporate abuse of human and environmental rights. THE EXTRAORDINARILY RICH FORESTS of Vancouver Island have been fought over since James Douglas had 14 Vancouver Island chiefs sign a blank piece of paper. The frustration in losing virtually every battle by four generations of First Nations and concerned citizens has bred some sophisticated new approaches to the old task of protecting Indigenous rights and nature. These reach out internationally and to corporate shareholders. As a result, 2014 is off to a difficult start for Island Timberlands, the corporation most in the news these days for questionable logging practices. First, a resolution on an ethical investment issue was passed unanimously on January 31 by the BC Teachers Federation. The resolution urged BC Investment Management Corporation (bcIMC), which invests the teachers’ pensions and is a majority shareholder in Island Timberlands, to send the company back to the planning table over its liquidation of old growth forests on Vancouver Island, specifically around Port Alberni (near Cathedral Grove and McLaughlin Ridge). This resolution built on a 2012 recommendation that “the BCTF seeks legislative or regulatory changes that would clarify the definition of fiduciary duty to include consideration of long-term financial sustainability through environmental, social, and governance responsible investing principles.” Since pensions are fuelling the logging rates, this hits at the heart of the problem. In support of their resolution, members of the BCTF used the argument presented in the 2008 Supreme Court of Canada judgment that the directors must resolve to balance stakeholder interests “in accordance with their fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the corporation, viewed as a good corporate citizen.” This leaves it wide open for the courts and citizens to define “a good corporate citizen.” Another case brought by Robert Morales, chief negotiator for six southeast Vancouver Island First Nations of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group (HTG), might do just that at the international level. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (Focus, November 2011) will assess the culpability of Canada and three corporations (including Island Timberlands) who are the “successors in interest” in breaching human rights. Morales explains that after the original application to the international tribunal was filed in 2011, the government of Canada objected on the grounds that the native groups had not exhausted all domestic remedies. Morales states, “We argued that no Canadian court has ever recognized Indigenous people’s rights to private property. The Inter-American Commission agreed with us, and were satisfied that there were no domestic remedies. Canadians don’t realize the gravity of this statement. Here is an international body of human rights experts stating that in Canada a situation exists where a group of people’s human rights cannot be effectively dealt with under the existing legal and political structures here.” The case is now awaiting the final hearing—and we can anticipate that this court’s judgment might point to a lack of good corporate citizenship. Island Timberlands’ third worry is a cluster of community groups up and down the island, who, under the slogan “No community stands alone,” have been seeking an improvement in forest practices of the company. On February 4, Jane Morden, spokesperson for Watershed Forest Alliance out of Port Alberni, released in a letter to bcIMC and IT “the evidence for our concern regarding Island Timberlands’ logging practices on private lands in the Alberni Valley area.” In the documents submitted to bcIMC and IT, the Alliance detailed the history of the IT lands in question. In 2004 the provincial government removed 74,000 hectares of Island Timberlands private land from Tree Farm License 44 with a letter of intent that grandfathered the protection of 2400 hectares of critical wildlife habitat (old growth) for wintering ungulates (deer and elk) and the nesting Northern Goshawk—a red-listed species at risk. After long negotiations between 2005 and 2008, and upon acquiring these lands, IT agreed to the boundaries of the 2400 hectares of ungulate winter range (UWR) and wildlife habitat area (WHA) for goshawk as the minimum area required for protection. Shortly after, however, IT began clearcutting these lands. In a document obtained by FOI, government scientists Darryn McConkey and Erica McClaren stated “negotiations ceased because we could not agree on the management regime within these boundaries. Island Timberlands wanted to extract timber resources from within UWRs and WHA 1-002 and Ministry of Forests could not scientifically rationalize how the quality of these areas could be maintained.” Ministry scientists go on to say that IT’s proposed management “did not incorporate any input from the Ministry of Environment” and “is not supported by the best available science.” Island Timberland’s spokesperson Morgan Kennah, in answer to this claim of unscientific forest practices, stated IT stands by its forest certification process, Sustainable Forestry Initiatives (SFI). SFI has received strong criticism for being an industry-financed certification system. ForestEthics, for example, has stated, “The SFI certification program actually assures its timber company customers that it does not prohibit logging in old growth forests, wild areas that do not currently have roads, or other places in which ecological values are especially rich.” When asked about these critiques and industry ties to SFI, IT’s Kennah responded, “Many people would say that it [SFI] is independent. The board is made up of economic and environmental interests. We feel strongly, as [do] others, that it is not controlled by industry.” On the SFI board various non-profits are represented, including Bird Studies Canada whose website states that SFI is a Gold Donor with donations of over $50,000 for projects like their Bird Atlas, which ironically would include the goshawk nesting site that the Alliance seeks to protect. Bird Studies Canada President George Finney, defended his role: “From Bird Studies Canada point of view, we are just giving them bird information and how they can be less detrimental to various bird populations.” He said, “Complaints could be registered and they will be investigated.” The Kwakiutl First Nation also added their voice to the chorus of disenchanted Vancouver Islanders with an ongoing peaceful protest when Island Timberlands started to log cultural sites, traplines and cedar trees in their territory. The Douglas Treaty (signed 163 years ago to the day of their February 9 press release) stipulated “that lands and waters were to be set-aside for the exclusive use by Kwakiutl to maintain livelihood ‘as formerly’ and for ‘generations to follow.’” Chief Coreen Child of Kwakiutl First Nation stated: “The people of Kwakiutl have been left with no choice but to protest and stop Canada and BC from allowing Companies to cut and remove cedar trees from our land.” IT’s response to this was: “We have done due diligence by sending in an archaeologist to do an Archaeological Impact Assessment with members of the band attending.” Focus asked to view the report or the terms of reference, but was refused. Chief Child argues that these studies don’t address cultural land-use issues granted in the Douglas Treaty. Morales and the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group are also pointing to these cultural land-use issues as the nub of the case: “The Inter-American Commission is not judging whether the action of transferring the land to private corporate hands was legal or not, but whether the ability of the people to practice their culture has been significantly affected by this action today.” He argued that the privatization resulted in a situation in which First Nations cannot practice their culture due to the losses that they have sustained. “How can you teach your children how to build a canoe when there are no longer any cedar trees? That is the loss that the Inter-American Commission is considering.” Finally, Cortes Islanders, who have successfully fended off Island Timberland’s clearcutting plans for the old growth on their island to date (Focus, January 2013), celebrated—after 20-plus years of negotiation—realization of a community forest agreement (CFA). The agreement covers Crown lands adjacent to IT’s land and includes equal partnership with the KIahoose First Nation. The partnership is in the process of developing a Community Forest Operating Plan that reflects community values and will guide forest management within the CFA. Cortes Islanders had asked IT to bring their own forestlands under a similar value-added ecosystem management and certification system, Forest Stewardship Council, but IT has consistently rejected that idea, citing increased costs. Today, with shareholders demanding this type of ethical management, IT’s excuse of fiduciary responsibility is sounding less and less convincing. Documenting all these examples of citizens fighting back is Dan Pierce who, with producer Cari Green (of the award-winning documentary The Corporation), is developing a feature documentary (through crowd sourcing) on these initiatives. That gives hope to the idea that community involvement could finally supplant the old corporate model—from how we invest our pensions and how we run our timber companies to how we fund our films. See www.heartwoodfilm.com. Briony Penn has been writing about controversial issues surrounding bcIMC and Island Timberlands since 2006.
  7. Government’s reluctance to limit logging in wilderness areas makes no sense when you do the math. SOMEWHERE AROUND July of 2005, the tourism sector in British Columbia, for the first time in history, outstripped the forestry sector in GDP—in fact it outstripped all sectors including oil and gas—and hasn’t relinquished that position. During the 10 years between 2001 and 2011, the GDP of forestry only increased 6 percent while tourism increased 23 percent. Vancouver Island and Vancouver Coast and Mountains regions attracted most (79 percent) of that tourism activity for BC, so the hot spot is right here on the coastal islands. In 2011, tourism on Vancouver Island increased 4 percent in just 12 months alone, beating all other industries hands down. These statistics come from a recent government report called The Value of Tourism. One would think that smart government analysts would naturally prioritize budgets and land use decisions around the growth sectors. Yet British Columbia’s government is not doing that, which is surprising given it is led by a party that ran on a platform of jobs, jobs, jobs. So why not? Ralph Keller, owner of Coast Mountain Expeditions in the Discovery Islands for 27 years, asked that question five years ago when timber companies began in earnest to liquidate the wilderness that people were coming to his lodge to see. Many Victorians will be familiar with the Discovery Islands, which lie between Campbell River and Desolation Sound and include Quadra and Cortes along with many other lesser-known islands. Only a few hours drive from Victoria, they attract many of the eight million residents of the Salish Sea, along with international visitors. People go there to kayak, fish, sail, eat fresh seafood, watch grizzlies, beachcomb, wander under the old growth and gaze at the views. One of Keller’s guests, Francois, makes a typical comment: ”Coming from far away France, I couldn’t think of a better introduction to Canada than these islands, some of the last gems of our crowded and drifting planet.” Such tourists don’t travel from France to see clearcuts, hear chainsaws and avoid log booms in their kayaks. As Keller says, “In today’s sophisticated tourism market with tools like Google maps and TripAdvisor, people are checking out for themselves where they can find first-class wilderness and if they don’t see it, they don’t come.” So Keller talked to the other operators around the Discovery Islands and they started to do the math. There are over 120 tourism companies from lodges to marinas, which are completely dependent on tourism in the area. In just this collection of islands, the 120 businesses generate directly $22.3 million in revenue each year and employ 625 people full-time or seasonally full-time. Since the vast majority of these businesses are family operations like the Kellers, half the employment activity isn’t even captured in these statistics. If you add up self-employed business owners and contractors then the stats for jobs double. If you add in Campbell River businesses which rely on the Discovery Islands for their tourist clientele, those figures double again. The Discovery Islands came in as the second most lucrative marine wilderness destination in BC after Tofino/Pacific Rim for provincial tax revenues. So it’s no surprise that Victoria, as the entry port for island tourism depends on the Discovery Island/Tofino destinations for a large portion of its tourism dollars. The argument for good management of wilderness, therefore, lies very close to home. Let’s compare tourism revenues with what logging brings in—a sector that government statistics say only represents 11 percent of the overall GDP activity for the region. Tourism operator Breanne Quesnel who has been operating the Spirit of the West Adventures Company for 17 years with her husband and business partner, demonstrates a typical comparison, using her own business base at Cracroft Island, which is directly opposite Robson Bight, the world-famous orca marine reserve. This area brings in millions annually in whale watching and ecotourism revenues. Quesnel has calculated that their one operation employs 656 person days of employment annually. According to TimberWest, which has the lease to log the west slopes all around her operation, a one-off three-month contract for five logging contract workers is pretty much all the logging promises. There is little value-added since half of the wood from southern Vancouver Island gets exported as raw logs offshore. There is little stability because those contractors turn up for a few months then leave and never come back. Says Quesnel, “If it is a numbers game, we win hands down in jobs, revenue and taxes—every year, not just once every 100 years!” Once they had built their business case, Keller, Quesnel and the other 120 businesses organized themselves into the Discovery Islands Marine Tourism Group, and met with district forest managers and companies to present their economic arguments about why logging impacts in the view corridors needed to be reduced. After two years of such meetings, they were told that there was nothing the leaseholders or district managers could do and that it was a ministerial matter. So in November of 2011, they sent a letter to Steve Thomson, then (and now) minister responsible for forests and Pat Bell, then minister responsible for tourism. They had three moderate requests: that at least one of them come to the Discovery Islands and meet with them to see and hear their concerns first-hand; that a hold be put on the proposed viewshed logging in the three remaining unimpacted marine corridors until after the meeting; and that government strike a land-use committee of stakeholders to negotiate the demands of the different major economic interests. More than a year later, prior to the election, Pat Bell, finally told the Discovery Island operators that it wasn’t his job and to go back to the companies. Meanwhile Steve Thomson approved the BC Timber Sales’ tendering of the road building and logging in one of the three last intact corridors, the Lower Okisollo Channel, which connects Octopus Islands Provincial Park, Surge Narrows Marine Park and the tidal rapids at Cooper Point—pristine wilderness areas visited by tens of thousands of visitors annually. There was no shift in the existing logging intensity in the region. Over on Cracroft, TimberWest wouldn’t budge on clearcutting plans for the slopes around Breanne Quesnel’s operation despite various offers from the couple, including buying the net value of the trees to allow them to stand. Frustrated with the lack of responsiveness to their concerns, the operators went to the media and things started to change. The election saw a shift in the cabinet and the file was passed on to Naomi Yamamoto, the new minister for small business and tourism. At the end of this July, an inter-ministerial delegation of public servants went on a day-long boat tour of the region and lodges for a fact-finding mission with tourism reps. Keller reported to Focus on the results of that day from a satellite phone on his boat (it is the height of his season and he’s touring officials as well as his guests). “It seemed productive. They were suitably impressed! The delegation wanted to meet again in a month. But meanwhile, the logging is poised to start as soon as the first rains come in September.” Yamamoto’s office responded with a promise to Focus of an interview with the minister when she returned from holidays at the end of August, stating that the fact-finding mission was consulting various stakeholders in the region and would report back in September. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Forests appointed staff to review the visual quality objectives for all the tourism hot spots and make recommendations to the minister. Visual quality objectives (VQOs) are guidelines brought in to reduce the visual impact of clear cuts in high tourism corridors by locating cutblocks behind ridges in the view line. As Keller says, “This is a good step, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be confidence that what they say is going to happen will actually happen on the ground.” As an example, Keller cites skepticism around current ministry claims—and computer models illustrating—that the visual quality impacts of proposed cutblocks on Maurelle Island will be minimal. He points to the cutblocks on neighbouring Stuart Island, just across the channel from Maurelle: “The computer-generated VQO’s for Stuart Island didn’t look as bad as [the reality], so none of us trust the system. This view underscores the mistrust. And these cutblocks are going on everywhere.” The lack of trust that companies will follow rules is not just confined to the VQOs. On Sonora Island, TimberWest, for instance, was supposed to follow guidelines on old growth retention under the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement. When Fern Kornelsen and Ross Campbell of Mothership Adventures stumbled over flagging tapes in groves of endangered old growth trees, TimberWest had to “about face” and admit they had neither prepared high level plans identifying the endangered forest types nor even had a scientifically-accepted definition of old growth. Their definition was that “old growth forest becomes a second growth forest when younger trees growing up under the canopy of the ancient trees get bigger.” On both counts they have been sent back to the drawing board to try again. Mothership Adventures paid for the forest consultants to verify that TimberWest wasn’t doing their job and TimberWest is now revising plans. As Kornelsen states, “Why do citizens have to be the watch dogs over companies at their own expense? It is not our job; it is the forestry ministry’s, but it’s useless.” As Keller points out, the trouble is that even though the Discovery Island tourist operators’ demands are reasonable (“we aren’t even asking for parks, just a higher land use plan which recognizes the importance of the tourism sector to the economy”), the forest minister is limited in what he can do, because government gave away so many powers to regulate—including oversight. In 2003, radical changes were made to the Forest and Range Practices Act: Government threw away its responsibility to monitor and regulate. Instead, they rely on professional contractors, which is only as good as the professionals’ ability to distance themselves from the very small number of large corporate employers. Says Keller, “They’ve boxed themselves into a corner. What they need to do, especially in these hot-spot tourism areas, is identify the tourism values and get back control of these Crown lands for the public good.” The real question for Keller and others is: why would a government touting itself as pro-business, pro-jobs, with sound economic management, kill the golden goose? If the minister doesn’t provide a satisfactory answer in September, what is the group going to do? “Go back to the media,” Keller states. “We had National Geographic just up here rating us as one of the top places in North America to visit. Everybody else is seeing the real values here but the government. I thought these guys were businessmen but they’re back in the last century.” Briony Penn has worked part time in the marine ecotourism industry on the coast for over 20 years. Such work provides an important part of her income as other sectors that she works in—environmental education, journalism and art—decline.
  8. Pension-owned companies may be liquidating our forests, but some communities are fighting back. JOHN WOOLLEY, a retired public school teacher, recently blockaded a logging road with family and fellow islanders on Cortes Island to protect the 2,700-acre forest from an unlikely adversary—his own pension funds. Woolley is the latest kind of Vancouver Island activist: a pensioner appalled at the way his pension is being invested in the liquidation of private forest lands on Vancouver Island by companies in the portfolio of BC Investment Management Corporation (bcIMC). Says Woolley, “We are killing our own local economy and we are doing it to ourselves.” Woolley is outraged that the company managing his pension—and those of half a million other British Columbians—has moved aggressively over the last ten years into “destruction of habitat and the devastation of our forests, which is not responsible investing.” bcIMC owns 25 percent of Island Timberlands, 50 percent of TimberWest (the other half is owned by the federal Public Sector Pension Investment Board), and is a major shareholder of a Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) company that owns another 51 percent of Island Timberlands and 49 percent of Western Forest Products. Says Woolley, “This means that virtually every retired teacher, university professor and public servant at all levels of government is unknowingly invested in unsustainable and destructive industrial logging practices that weaken the economy of Vancouver Island and nearby coastal regions.” In correspondence with Doug Pearce, CEO of bcIMC, which touts its “responsible investing” practices, Woolley offered a challenge to the company: “As an institutional investor with massive influence, will they apply direct engagement to shift their heavily invested logging companies (Island Timberlands, TimberWest and Western Forest Products) toward ecosystem-based forestry practices that will sustain future generations?” Neither bcIMC or Island Timberlands returned calls to Focus, but David Vipond, Director of Collective Agreements with the BC Government Employees Union, who contribute to one of the five pension plans managed by bcIMC, had little to allay Woolley’s concerns. “We are not opposed to logging and if there is a problem with forest practices, then that is a public policy issue. The only company we have ever divested stock from was weapons and antipersonnel mine manufacturers because it was illegal. If people want to challenge the company’s practice, they can propose their own shareholder resolution at the company’s AGM.” Woolley’s reaction is symptomatic of the widening and deepening range of voices in this new “war in the woods.” Zoe Miles, a young Cortes Islander who helped deliver a petition of 7000 names to BAM’s corporate offices in Toronto, says, “With the spotlight on us at the moment, we want to shine it on an issue that is affecting every rural community, not just Cortes Island—industrial forest liquidation by large corporations and the pension funds that invest in them—and the alternatives.” Multi-billion dollar companies might not think a small island of 1000 people has much clout, but they might well be reconsidering in light of recent events. The Christmas blockade by islanders—both on land and by sea—that saw Island Timberlands back off temporarily, is now spotlighting ideas on sustainable economies that have been decades in the formation. Bruce Ellingsen, a fourth-generation islander who owns a local sawmill and is director for the Cortes Community Forest Co-op, advocates a type of forestry that sees logs, jobs and profits stay in the community rather than shipped off to mills and offices around the globe. “Cortes has a high proportion of people with knowledge and experience who are interested in a discussion of the future direction of rural economies. We have been meeting in our community hall for 20 years about how to manage our forests sustainably.” The issue started in 1990 after a bitter battle between islanders and then-Macmillan Bloedel. The islanders stopped the logging and MacBlo agreed to stop clear-cutting and come up with a plan that was sustainable. It took MacBlo four years, but the amount and rate of harvesting were still too high for islanders. Ellingsen says, “This firmed up the community’s attitude about what our bottom line was.” In 1998, islanders established the Cortes Community Forest Committee with an ecosystem-based management plan. Iconic forester Herb Hammond helped islanders prepare the plan that gave the community what it wanted—logs for their own sawmills, jobs for their own kids, a 200-year rotation with selective logging that maintains the major functions of a forest: watershed protection, conservation and social benefits. Making this type of forestry pay meant exploring diversified revenue streams through eco-certification, local log markets, developing tourism and recreation, and exploring carbon revenues, while saving money on avoiding flood controls and infrastructure. Unfortunately, MacBlo was taken over by Weyerhaeuser, which was bought by Brascan, which turned into BAM. And the rest is history. With the arrival of pension investment shareholders, the three major timber players converted themselves into asset liquidation and real estate companies. Ellingsen and other Cortes islanders approached Brascan about the community forest plans. “We were told ‘No,’—they didn’t want to join in an ecosystem-based management plan because the profit margin wouldn’t be large enough to be responsible to their shareholders, and that has been the story every since.” Carrie Saxifrage, a Cortes landowner and journalist, targets the inequity of the current forest policy: “The province has given the forest companies big financial breaks from the very start, including extremely low property tax rates. In return, the forest corporations are exporting raw logs and converting forests to real estate to fulfil the short-term expectations of shareholders. It is the province’s duty to protect the long terms interests of BC’s citizens by regulating forests lands for these purposes, or, if corporations want to liquidate forests without regard for local value-added jobs or ecosystems, by taxing their land at the rate of other private property.” As Zoe Miles points out, this two-decade-long discussion has positioned the community well to comment on current gaps in forest policy: the regulations are inadequate; the model of “professional reliance,” where government relinquishes oversight and puts it in the hands of the companies, isn’t working; and the checks and balances of what companies claim as “ethical investment policies” aren’t there. Anthony Britneff, an ex-provincial forester— and a pensioner—couldn’t agree more. The Private Forest Managed Land Council, which oversees the 2 million tax-exempt acres regulated under the Private Forest Managed Lands Act is “the fox guarding the coop.” The Private Forest Landowners Association is, according to Britneff, “perceived as a bullhorn for the huge corporations answerable only to holding companies and shareholders.” Down the Island Highway, Bruce Fraser, also retired from public service and now regional director for Shawnigan, is watching his pension’s impacts on private land logging in his own watershed. He estimates 70-80 percent of the forest cover has been removed—which, under provincial Crown land regulations that he oversaw as past-Chair of the Forest Practices Board, would be illegal and signal a red alert for flooding, erosion, ecological and visual impacts. He points out that the biggest legislative gap is that there is no mechanism to deal with the cumulative impacts of all these companies. Fraser asks, “Each cutblock might be regulated, albeit weakly, but who is watching over the ‘collective coop’? At Shawnigan, residents look up into a fragmented and devalued landscape, logging is continuing and there is not a thing that we can do about it, nor a mechanism to comment.” Back on Cortes, Zoe Miles points out that Island Timberlands has proposed token concessions to its plans—like saving single trees over 250 years old, or moving a proposed road out of a riparian zone where it shouldn’t have been considered in the first place, and leaving small, contested areas for a period of one year. “Essentially, it is a bunch of smoke and mirrors and it still remains industrial forestry. They are really talking about liquidating the forest and selling it as real estate, as they are doing everywhere.” Island Timberlands says they won’t log the old growth over 250 years , but Miles claims this just diverts people from the real issue at hand: “We want a fundamental change in the way forests are managed—not just saving a token 250-year-old tree surrounded by a clearcut.” Woolley, in correspondence with bcIMC’s Pearce, questions bcIMC’s claims as an ethical investor. Pearce claims that at 25 percent ownership, bcIMC is only a minority investor, and therefore has no say in day-to-day operations. Woolley argues that “does not excuse blindness to corporate responsibility.” But Pearce says Island Timberlands operations meet ethical investment standards under Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) certification, a certification that leading market campaigner and Cortes Islander Tzeporah Berman has plenty to say about. A recent report by ForestEthics, which she co-founded, describes SFI as a front for the paper and timber industries, from which it derives virtually all its funding. SFI does not perform rigorous audits or any chain-of-custody tracking, and there is a legal investigation regarding the legitimacy of this corporate “brand” by the US Federal Trade Commission and the IRS. Berman and Miles have launched a campaign aimed at the mills which buy SFI-certified raw logs and the retailers which sell the lumber: Home Depot, Lowe’s and ProBuild amongst others. Cortesians are mounting an offensive on all fronts including building a war chest to buy parcels of land—if all else fails. A recent offer by the Strathcona Regional District to purchase just 70 acres from Island Timberlands was rebuffed however, on the grounds that the timber prices were valued too low and not at international prices. Given the history of logging conflicts in BC, sooner or later intransigent companies fall victim to market campaigns. It worked in the Great Bear Forest, and they now have a legislated ecosystem-based management model with carbon revenues. It’s fair to speculate that between market boycotts, angry pensioners, impacted politicians and young women raised on sophisticated talk of sustainability, islanders might have some success in pushing the provincial discussion ahead. If the Goliaths think they can get off lightly on this one, they had better think again. Briony Penn PhD is a naturalist, journalist, artist and award-winning environmental educator. She is the author of The Kids Book of Geography (Kids Can Press) and a A Year on the Wild Side.
  9. A First Nations case before an international court could spell trouble for the government pension funds that purchased TimberWest. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN CANADIAN HISTORY, an international human rights tribunal, the Inter-America Commission (IAC), will hear a human rights complaint against Canada, one brought forward by six southeast Vancouver Island First Nations of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group (HTG). With the failure of our provincial and national treaty process, First Nations are taking their cases to such international bodies to seek justice and, judging from comparable cases in the Americas, are likely to succeed. All of us in the Capital region should be paying attention to this case as it could have broad and far-reaching implications—whether you are interested in human rights, urban sprawl, water quality, the future of our endangered forests…or your pension. Yes, pensions. Pension fund investments for many Victoria residents are involved in the complaint and might soon be found in violation of international law. The Hul’qumi’num have charged Canada with the illegal and uncompensated seizure of their ancestral land—an act of “egregious piracy”—for the benefit of corporations which have engaged in clear-cutting, deforestation and environmentally-destructive development activities. Together with Amnesty International and over a dozen Canadian First Nations governments and organizations, including the Assembly of First Nations, HTG has been presenting evidence that Canada has failed to recognize and protect their rights to property, culture and religion, as recognized under the Organization of American States’ principal human rights instrument: the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, as well as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. This is following on an earlier ruling by the Commission that the BC treaty process has failed to find a timely and effective remedy to land claims. The land in question—a full 40 percent of the land base of the southeast part of Vancouver Island, extending down into the backyard of the Capital Regional District—is part of the original E & N land grant stemming from 1884. BC awarded over 300,000 hectares, primarily old-growth forest and representing two-thirds of the HTG’s ancestral territory, to Robert Dunsmuir and his company in return for building the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway. Dunsmuir had launched his company, which also received substantial cash grants, with US investors who were buying the coal. Robert Morales, chief negotiator for the HTG, says: “We cannot accept the position of the Canadian government to let it go just because the theft took place over 100 years ago. We are suffering the impacts of that decision now, and there has to be some kind of restitution.” Three corporations are now the “successors in interest” to 190,000 hectares of that original land grant: TimberWest, which this spring was purchased outright for just over a billion dollars by two pension fund managers for federal and provincial government employee pensions; Hancock Timber Resource Group, owned by Manulife; and Island Timberland, an asset of the notorious Brookfield Asset Management Corporation, a company with multiple ties to BC Liberals, pension funds, and Western Forest Products (and on whose New York property Occupy Wall Street protesters are camped). Morales believes the Hul’qumi’num’s case will be successful: “I believe that the international jurisprudence is going farther than domestic jurisprudence. Under international law there is a duty to consult under the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent.” The decision is expected soon and if HGT wins, Canada will be in violation of international human rights law and will have to decide how it is going to redress this violation. International law standards demand a duty to return, replace or make compensation for the violation of seized lands. Victorians are implicated and affected in many ways by this case. Victoria is a government and armed forces town. TimberWest’s new ownership, BC Investment Management Corporation (bcIMC) has clients with public sector pension plans, insurance funds and public trusts, while PSP Investments is a pension investment manager for the federal public service, the Canadian Forces, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Reserve Force. All employees in these agencies, some of whom have shown leadership in socially responsible investment in the past, will have to ask some tough questions of their employers, their unions, their investment managers and themselves—about who was/is responsible; about the implications for redress; and about future investments and whether they will exclude those that breach the OAS human right declaration and the UN International Convention. Insurance holders with Manulife, of which there are a healthy number in Victoria, will also have to ask themselves these questions, as will shareholders of Brookfield Asset Management. From the perspective of ecological justice, the implications are huge. The HTG has compiled a compelling case of photographs, maps, reports and other evidence of environmental degradation in now-endangered ecosystems. Over 1000 photographs alone of the clearcutting and deforestation are lodged in the file. In TimberWest’s own management circular outlining the sale last spring, the harvesting rates are currently at 1.9 million cubic metres per annum, which already exceeds any sustainable rate of harvest, even by Crown forest standards. In another 2011 public document, the company states, “given TimberWest’s historical practices and emerging markets, harvesting will continue and will be accelerated to meet emerging market demand and future supply shortfalls due to the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic in the interior of BC.” The creation of TimberWest’s real estate arm, Couverdon, is described as “an enabler of growth on Vancouver Island…To accomplish its mission, Couverdon is actively working to entitle land for these end uses in and around communities on the southeast coast of Vancouver Island.” Over 55,000 hectares are slated for “entitlement changes”—new-speak for urban sprawl in rural areas. In the April 11 press release from bcIMC and PSP Investments on the purchase of TimberWest, they state, “No fundamental changes in the operations of the business are anticipated. It will be business as usual on the ground and existing operating systems and processes will remain in place.” “Business as usual” was laid out fairly clearly in a TimberWest PowerPoint presentation delivered to the McElvaine Investment Management 2010 Partner Conference on May 7, 2010. There are plans for resorts to villages and sprawl in-between, from Sooke to Port Renfrew, and the Malahat to Campbell River. For areas like Port Renfrew, it notes: “Opportunities best pursued after a five-year development timeframe due to lack of current development, a need for increased infrastructure or a change in the political environment.” [emphasis added] One wonders what change they are anticipating. And how objective will governments be in their decision-making around smart growth strategies and development of rural lands (consider the recent Juan de Fuca resort debacle) if civil servants’ pensions are relying on real estate development? (Not to mention the lobbying and political donations such large corporations often engage in.) The decision to find redress in the international tribunals is taking place against the recent announcements of the failed internal BC treaty process, with a half billion dollar debt incurred by First Nations to participate in the negotiations. Head of the BC Treaty Commission, Sophie Pierre, recommended both governments shut the treaty process down unless they can commit to the agreements reached by the negotiating teams. The HTG themselves have incurred a $22 million debt during the failed negotiations. Another very interesting element to this story is the recent announcement by TimberWest and Pacific Carbon Trust (PCT) that these same ancestral lands have been developed as a carbon offset project—the Strathcona Ecosystem Conservation Project. PCT wrote the forest protocol, and is the buyer and seller of the credits to public sector bodies, which in itself differs from other international offset regulatory bodies, like the Verified Carbon Standard. The project commits TimberWest to leave what’s left of the old growth—only eight percent remains on these lands. The conservation of the old growth is expected to reduce emissions by nearly 8,749,482 tonnes over a 25-year crediting period, which will net TimberWest and its pension fund owners a healthy return over time, depending on the price of carbon (currently $5-$25). Yet, it is only because of ancestral stewardship that the carbon is even stored on the land. This carbon has taken 500 to 1000 years to be stored in the old trees and soil—it certainly wasn’t done by TimberWest. The case that business-as-usual would have meant liquidation of old growth is made clearly in the Project Summary prepared by the Pacific Carbon Trust. It states, “In the absence of this project, old-growth forest would be harvested and converted to second-growth forest with higher timber production values.” While it’s encouraging that TimberWest is now bound by a legal agreement to not cut down old growth anymore, it is worrying that we have had to pay through our own public sector organization’s carbon liabilities to get that agreement. Also on the negative, the continued lack of separation between government employee pension holders, the Pacific Carbon Trust, government, land-use decision-makers, and the company are enough to make any conflict commissioner’s head spin. Come the Commission’s decision, Canada will have to respond. Redirecting these carbon revenues to the rightful owners, as is already being done in Haida Gwaii and the central coast for stewarding their ancestral lands, seems to me to be the first act of redress that the federal and provincial governments are supremely poised to make. Naturalist and writer Briony Penn, PhD has been working on forest carbon projects for a couple of years in the non-profit sector. She is author of A Year on the Wild Side and The Kids Book of Geography.
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