Western Canada Wilderness Committee

Strange things...

Stranger things have happened….NOT! Last week, I was invited to a special presentation by a high ranking BC government ministry staffperson at the monthly meeting of the Vancouver Natural History Society. The presentation was on spotted owls and featured Mark Zacharias as presenter. Mark is a new kid on the block who knows little of spotted owls but a lot about BC government policy on the environment. In fact Mark has been charged with coming up with a plan to “save” the spotted owl without impacting timber industry logging plans! Hmmmm. Interesting, I thought. Here was a senior government apologist making a presentation to sophisticated leaders of the local natural history movement....

Before I divulge the bizarre content of the meeting, a few words are due about the role of Mark Zacharias, who runs SARCO (the Species At Risk Coordination Office), a recent invention of Gordon Campbell and friends. In a time of severe cutbacks to Ministries, it is interesting to note that SARCO was created and granted status as a sort of stand alone “sub-ministry” within the Ministry of Agriculture, with responsibility for endangered species management. Now if you’re like me you may be asking what the heck is Pat Bell, Ministry of Agriculture, doing in charge of endangered species? Endangered species is logically a job for the Ministry of Environment under the helm of Barry Penner. But the weirdness does not stop here. When it comes to deciding what type of management activities can and cannot occur in the habitat of endangered species, the buck gets passed to Olga Ilich, Minister of Tourism, if it’s a ski resort, Richard Neufield, Minister of Energy, if it’s a mine, Richard Coleman, Minister of Forests, if its logging. The minister of Environment, Barry Penner, seems to have very little say in what noxious activities occur in the habitat of endangered species.

Why is all this weirdness happening? I figure it’s an attempt to diffuse a potential public relations catastrophe that could damage the BC Liberals. It goes like this: BC has all these endangered species, the most high profile of which like spotted owl, marbled murrelet, and mountain caribou, could soon have some or all of their populations in BC declared extinct due to logging, mining, resort development etc…But the BC government knows full well it has an environmentally active populace who will cause them grief if they let all these poor little beasties go down the tubes. So what does Premier Campbell do? He divides responsibility for all these endangered critters between a bunch of unrelated ministries, so it is difficult for the public to track what is going on and to determine who is responsible for nuking the habitat of endangered species.

A case in point is a letter I just received from the Federation of BC Naturalists about a ski resort operator who has just been granted access to operate in the home of an endangered herd of Mountain Caribou (its called Bearpaw Heli-Ski). The venerable leaders of the Federation of BC Naturalists start their letter to the Premier by saying they can’t figure out which minister is responsible, so they have cc’d the letter to all the Minister’s. Now you can bet that if the Federation can’t figure out who is responsible, then neither could you or I. So the Premier’s attempt to cloud responsibility is working beautifully. It certainly appears to me that multiple BC Cabinet Ministers are involved in the destruction of the habitat of critically endangered species.

But I digress. Back to the SARCO presentation at the Vancouver Natural History Society.
I got all excited prior to the meeting thinking that Premier Campbell, care of SARCO and Mark Zacharias, would be making some sort of announcement about their intentions regarding management of the spotted owl. Why else would SARCO be coming to the Vancouver Natural History Society, the members of which know quite a bit more about spotted owls than Mark Zacharias. I figured this meeting was all about an opportunity to talk policy with a senior political functionary. But NOOOOO! The much anticipated talk by Mark Zacharias was completely devoid of sticky political discussions. In fact, despite repeated attempts by the crowd gathered at the Planetarium, Mr Zacharias repeatedly, and steadfastly refused to discuss policy. Rather, he doggedly stuck to telling us all about he biology of the spotted owl – a subject that was already known by most of the audience.

So, the million dollar question is what the heck was Mr Zacharias doing presenting to the Vancouver Natural History Society? Perhaps it was to gauge the mood of this well respected and professional group of naturalists. What he got was an earful. He and the various government functionaries who are responsible for the destruction of endangered species habitat got lambasted for their apparent complicity in the decline of endangered species. Lets hope that the new federal government will rise to the challenge posed by environmental groups and scientists and force the BC government to follow federal law (the Species At Risk Act) and protect the habitat of the spotted owl, among other species at risk.