BC Liberals Pass the Working Forest's Enabling Legislation : WC Mediawire

BC Liberals Pass the Working Forest’s Enabling Legislation despite Overwhelming Public Opposition – But the Battle Continues

Yesterday the BC Liberal government passed Bill 46 (Land Amendments Act) through its third and final reading in the Legislature, despite overwhelming public opposition to the government’s Working Forest agenda. Today’s vote resulted in 46 BC Liberals voting in favour of passing the bill, and 3 MLA’s (the NDP’s Jenny Kwan and Joy Macphail, and Independent Liberal Paul Nettleton) voting against the bill.

The new law will empower the provincial Cabinet through “orders in council” to establish any land-use designations, make any resource allocations, and to grant licenses and leases to any private interests on Crown lands at any time – outside of any legislative debate or media scrutiny. The Working Forest Initiative that Bill 46 would empower the Cabinet to implement is essentially an “Anti-Forest Protection Act” designed to give certainty to the timber industry by undermining the establishment of new protected areas. The government has stated they intend to implement the Working Forest order in council around June 2004.

“Bill 46 is like giving the BC government an endorsed book of blank cheques, with the ‘recipients’ and the ‘amounts’ to be filled in at any future time, in secret”, states Ken Wu, WCWC’s executive director in Victoria. “For a designation as vast and significant as the Working Forest, spanning 45 million hectares or ALL of our unprotected public forests, it’s highly undemocratic to circumvent legislative debate and public scrutiny by using this all-encompassing ‘enabling’ legislation.”

While the BC Liberals promise that there will be “open Cabinet” meetings, these will be at their discretion, and are rehearsed with the outcomes already decided in advance. At any rate, the BC Liberals have already solicited public input on the Working Forest Initiative, which came back 97% opposed among the 2692 submissions made to government last spring (http://srmhttp://www.gov.bc.ca/rmd/workingforest/). Tofino’s Chamber of Commerce and town council have both asked that Clayoquot Sound be exempt from the Working Forest designation due to its negative impact on the tourism industry, yet Hagen insists “they don’t need to be exempted”. In addition, the majority of BC’s First Nations bands endorsed a statement last Thursday, Oct.16 against the Working Forest agenda - yet Bill 46 was passed yesterday, nevertheless.

Minister Stan Hagen made many false statements during the Legislative debate with NDP leader Joy Macphail, who raised many great points in opposition to Bill 46. Hagen claims that the Working Forest will simply be implemented as an outcome of regional land-use plans, and thus be subject to community input. This contradicts the government’s Working Forest Discussion Paper (http://srmhttp://www.gov.bc.ca/rmd/workingforest/ ), which states that “The Working Forest will guide the completion of future land use plans and objectives set by government” (pg.4). This means that the Working Forest Initiative and its designated permanent logging zones (ie. “timber investment areas” and “timber access targets”) will limit the extent of forest protections in future land-use plans – at the expense of the local communities’ input and desires.

Hagen also insisted, perhaps thirty times, that a section of the Land Act forbids the sale of public (Crown) forest lands for forestry purposes. However, he failed to mention that the Working Forest will nullify another piece of legislation, the Forest Act, which also currently forbids the sale of public lands for logging. Timber industry insiders such as Timber West’s CEO Paul McElligott and the National Bank of Canada’s financial analyst at the time Reid Carter told the Vancouver Sun last spring that the BC government was “sending signals” about a forthcoming sell-off of Crown forest lands during their second term, should they be re-elected (Vancouver Sun, C1, April 5, 2003)

Hagen’s promise today that the government will not remove this protective clause in the Land Act “while I’m still alive” rings hollow:

“The BC Liberals also promised as a New Era commitment to ‘Keep our parks and protected areas safe’ from commercial resource extraction, yet have just allowed logging to occur in interior parks in the guise of controlling beetle infestations. Similarly, they’re looking at downsizing our newest provincial protected area, the South Chilcotin, and possibly scores of other parks, for mining and logging companies. Hagen’s word has already been demonstrated to be no good,” notes Wu.

The Wilderness Committee will continue to escalate the campaign, MLA by MLA, Cabinet minister by minister, to prevent the implementation of the Working Forest Initiative.

“The Working Forest Initiative promises to be the BC government’s next Coquihalla – and it could be their final mistake,” says Wu.

For more info, visit: http://www.workingforest.org

For more info, contact: Ken Wu, WCWC Victoria (250) 388-9292

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BACKGROUNDER:
HOW would Campbell's Working Forest privatize our public lands?

Facilitating Outright Privatization by Removing Steps and Barriers to the Sell-off of Crown lands:

- It will eliminate 2 of 3 steps currently involved in selling-off public forests to private interests (the Ministry of Forests and Land and Water BC), thus leaving the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management as the sole decision maker in most cases (see page 14-15 in the government's "Working Forest discussion paper" available at http://srmhttp://www.gov.bc.ca/rmd/workingforest/ ) Thus, it'll become one-stop shopping for corporations looking to buy up our public forests to log and then subdivide.

- It will nullify 1 of 2 pieces of legislation that currently obstruct the sale of Crown forest lands for forestry purposes (right now you can buy Provincial Forest lands to log and then subdivide for real estate or to farm, but you can't buy it just to log). It will eliminate the existing Provincial Forest designation, and replace it with the new Working Forest designation (pg.12). This renders meaningless the provisions under the Forest Act that prevents the Provincial Forest from being sold off to companies for a "forestry purpose" It then leaves the Land Act (Section 23) as the sole barrier to selling-off public lands for logging.

- Hagen continually points to Section 23 of the Land Act which obstructs the sale of Crown lands for a forestry purpose. This can easily be changed in the future, and industry insiders are indicating it WILL be changed should the BC Liberals be re-elected for a second term. Earlier last spring, the Vancouver Sun reported that both TimberWest’s CEO Paul McElligott and the National Bank of Canada’s financial analyst at the time, Reid Carter, both stated that the government was “sending signals” about a forthcoming Crown lands sell-off for forestry purposes, should the BC Liberal Party be re-elected. In regards to these matters, Carter stated that “I have had many conversations with people in government, both elected and bureaucrats, who believe that privatization makes tremendous sense” (Vancouver Sun, C1, April 5, 2003).

- Also note that the BC government, and Stan Hagen in particular, are already heavily involved in the sale of Crown forest lands for real estate purposes. Hagen is mired in the centre of a controversy involving his Ministry’s sale of the Lannan forest in the middle of Courtenay for a golf course development. Hagen has also been bragging about how the backlog of applications to Land and Water BC (a MSRM Crown corporation currently in charge of most Crown land sales) have all been eliminated.

De Facto Privatization by increasing private, corporate rights on public lands:

- It will establish "timber investment areas" with "unique administrative provisions that minimize their shifts to other uses" (pg.8) ie. it excludes the creation of parks, watershed reserves, and other forest protections, as well as undermines First Nations treaty settlement.

- It will establish "area-based targets" (pg.10), primarily "Timber Access Targets" ,which right now only exist in the Cariboo-Chilcotin land-use plan (after which the Working Forest is partly modeled after), within each tenure. This is a quantification of the area of forest lands that must be made available for logging. It's designed to limit the geographic extent of smaller landscape-level protected areas, such as Ungulate Wintering Ranges, Scenic Viewscapes, Wildlife Habitat Areas (for species at risk), Riparian Management Areas, and Old-Growth Management Areas, which are still to be established under the Forest Practices and Range Act.

- Any increase in certainty increases the compensation price that logging companies can demand from BC taxpayers when denied access to public forests. This is because, while the Forest Act and Parks Compensation Acts define the threshold WHEN companies must be compensated (when they are denied 5% or more of their tenured holdings), there is no formula right now to calculate HOW MUCH they must be paid. So the more certainty logging companies have, the greater expectation they have to profit from logging the forest, and the more money they can demand when in government negotiations or in the courts due to new parks or First Nations treaty settlements.

Western Canada Wilderness Committee

Western Canada Wilderness Committee