News Coverage

Tsaxis, Kwakiutl Territory (Port Hardy), BC, July 2, 2014 /CNW/ – Kwakiutl First Nation Chief Coreen Child says the Tsilhqot'in court victory on Thursday, June 26, 2014, proves that Vancouver Island First Nations with Douglas Treaties already demonstrated Aboriginal Title over 160 years ago.

“We are deeply moved by the resolve of the Tsilhqot'in people. The ruling will have far reaching impacts on First Nations and the Crown governments. For Kwakiutl, the Supreme Court of Canada's declaration reaffirms that the 1851 Douglas Treaty proves Aboriginal title—and that the Government has not lived up to its promises,” says Chief Child.

Kwakiutl First Nation intervened on the Tsilhqot'in case to address two fundamental issues—the proper test of Aboriginal title and the application of provincial legislation on Aboriginal title lands.

The Tsilhqot'in win reinforces a BC Supreme Court decision, made on June 17, 2013, which found the Province of British Columbia had breached its legal duties by denying the existence of Kwakiutl's inherent title & treaty rights. Further, the BC decision found that BC and Canada had failed to implement and respect the Crown's 163 year-old Douglas Treaties, and 'encouraged and challenged' the governments to begin fair negotiations “without any further litigation, expense or delay.”

“”The Supreme Court of Canada rejected the “small spots” strategy argued by Canada and recognized and affirmed that First Nation view of Territorial Title is the basis for engagement with First Nations”,” says Councillor Davina Hunt.

Since 2004, the BC government has been granting the removal of private lands from Tree Farm licenses located within Kwakiutl territory without Kwakiutl consent. Consequently, businesses, companies, and governments have exploited Kwakiutl lands with impunity.

“BC forestry decision making is one example of Treaty infringement,” says Councillor Jason Hunt. “In 163 years, the Crown, first as Colony, then as BC and Canada, built entire economies on North Vancouver Island without First Nations consent. They have exploited our lands and waters, and marginalized our people.”

The Kwakiutl believe that Crown governments and industry will have to meaningfully engage on a deeper level with respect to Aboriginal title and Treaty when proposing to make decisions or conduct business on First Nations territories.

“The recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling reflects the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) in that a First Nation views and perspectives of Territorial Land Use must be dealt with in all government decisions consistent with Free, Prior and Informed consent” says Chief Bob Chamberlin, Union of BC Indian Chiefs Vice President and states further “that the Federal and Provincial Governments must engage with full recognition of the scope and intent of the Douglas Treaty as the basis of the relationship with the Kwakiutl First Nation.”

Chief Perry Bellegarde, Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief and portfolio holder for Treaties, supports this position. “The Crown has suspended its legal obligations to the Kwakiutl for nearly two centuries. Given that the historic Tsilhqot'in Supreme Court ruling confirms the principle of Aboriginal title, it is essential the Crown fulfills its covenant with the First Peoples of Canada. We strongly urge the federal and provincial governments to act definitively, and act now, in executing their duties to consult and accommodate with First Nations within the intended spirit and intent of Treaties.”

Read more: https://www.newswire.ca/en/story/1382055/tsilhqot-in-ruling-means-douglas-treaty-implementation-says-kwakiutl-chief

Big Lonely Doug, perhaps the loneliest tree in Canada, stands in the middle of a clear-cut on the west coast of Vancouver Island, surrounded by a field of huge stumps.

The giant red cedars and Douglas firs that once surrounded it were cut down and hauled away by loggers two years ago.

Big Lonely Doug was left standing alone, Ken Wu of the Forest Alliance says, because it was either designated as a wildlife tree, or it was left to provide cones for the reseeding of the forest.

Either way, it makes a rather sad sight sticking up out of a raw landscape of logging debris – and it serves as a reminder of just how inadequate British Columbia’s forest regulations are at protecting old, giant trees.

Recently, Mr. Wu’s group, which for years has been campaigning to save old trees like this, teamed up on a climbing expedition with Matthew Beatty of the Arboreal Collective, another organization that works to save trees.

They wanted to get to the top of Big Lonely Doug to see how tall it really was. It had been estimated at 70 metres. And they wanted to get some photographs to highlight the need to protect B.C.’s rapidly disappearing old growth.

Mr. Wu says 99 per cent of the old-growth Douglas fir trees in B.C. have been logged and 75 per cent of the original old growth forests on B.C.’s southern coast have been cut down.

Mr. Wu’s group has been frantically searching out the biggest trees and lobbying to protect them. A few years ago, they found the Avatar Grove near Port Renfrew, which the government did set aside, and which is now a tourism attraction. In the same area, they also identified what they named Lower Christy Clark Grove, in the hope the Premier would set it aside. Parts of that area were later protected, not to honour Ms. Clark, but as wildlife habitat because of the presence of endangered Queen Charlotte goshawks.

But Mr. Wu and his colleague, T.J. Watt, didn’t see Big Lonely Doug when they were hiking through the thick forest in the area, and the grove of giants it stood in didn’t get flagged for protection. When they returned in March, it was impossible to miss, however, sticking up all alone like that.

Members of the Arboreal Collective put climbing ropes up the tree and Mr. Watt, a photographer clambered up. Way up. From the top, they dropped a line – Big Lonely Doug is 66 metres tall, not quite as big as first estimated, but still the second largest Douglas fir in Canada.

“It was incredibly humbling,” said Mr. Watt of what it felt like up there in the tree. “It’s like climbing a living skyscraper. You only get a true sense of its mass once you are up there in the canopy and you see the trunk is still 6-, 7-, 8-feet wide. It’s almost unfathomable how large it is.”

From near the top, swaying in the wind, Mr. Watt looked out over the valley and felt a sense of wonder at how long the tree has been there. Ring counts of nearby stumps showed many of the neighbouring trees were 500 years old. Big Lonely Doug is estimated to be 1,000 years old.

From his vantage point atop the tree, Mr. Watt’s colleagues seemed tiny on the ground below. Across the valley, he could hear chainsaws and see trees falling as logging continued in the area.

“It was odd to be standing in this giant, record-size tree in the middle of a clear-cut and watching stuff fall not too far away,” he said.

Mr. Watt said it was “kind of sad” too, because he suspected there were more trees like Big Lonely Doug that might be stumps by the time his crew finds them.

“It shows the need to have legislation in place as quickly as possible to protect remaining old-growth forest so we don’t have to keep coming across these things too late,” said Mr. Watt.

Three years ago, the provincial government promised it would bring in regulations to protect the best and biggest groves of B.C.’s dwindling stock of giant old-growth trees.

Mr. Watt, Mr. Wu, and Big Lonely Doug are still waiting.

Read more: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/canadas-loneliest-tree-around-1000-years-old-still-waiting-on-help/article19064507/

Many of us have climbed a tree or two in our lives, but how many of us can say that tree was as tall as an 18-storey building?

A group of professional tree climbers scaled Canada's second-largest Douglas-fir — fondly referred to as Big Lonely Doug — and there are some amazing photos to prove it.

Climbers from Arboreal Collective partnered with Ancient Forest Alliance, a B.C.-based conservation organization that discovered Big Lonely Doug, to complete the ascension of the tree near Port Renfrew on Vancouver Island.

“We hope that our work to help highlight, research, and document the biggest trees and grandest groves in British Columbia will aid in their legal protection,” Matthew Beatty, spokesman for Arboreal Collective, said in a press release.

“Colossal trees like Big Lonely Doug are like the ‘redwoods of Canada’ that inspire awe in people around the world due to their unbelievable size and age. B.C.’s endangered old-growth forests urgently need protection before they become giant stumps and tree plantations.”

The tree stands 70.2 metres high and has a diameter that is almost as long as a mid-sized car, according to the B.C. Big Tree Registry. Big Lonely Doug is estimated to be as much as 1,000 years old.

View gallery and read more at: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/06/06/tree-climbers-big-lonely-doug-photos_n_5461824.html

British Columbia’s forests are 93-per cent owned by commoners and comprise a part of what has been known for centuries as The Commons.

As such, it is incumbent on policy-makers to ensure the common interest prevails over self-interest and government interest in the governance of these forestlands.

Unfortunately, misguided thinking is undermining the common interest as the government struggles to deal with the aftermath of the mountain-pine-beetle infestation in Interior B.C.

For over half a century, the forests ministry allowed vast areas of aging pine forests in the B.C. Interior to become increasingly susceptible to infestation by the mountain pine beetle.

Although scientists and forest insect specialists did not foretell the magnitude of the beetle infestation, they are in general agreement that climate change caused it and poor government forest policies exacerbated it.

The government’s initial response to the beetle infestation was to deal with the symptom (dead pine trees) and implicitly deny the cause (global warming).

The government immediately raised the rates of logging and the limits placed on allowable cuts to unsustainable levels in the mountain-pine-beetle zone with little regard for the cumulative affects it would have on the soil, water and animals, not to mention the people of Interior B.C.

The recession of the last decade allowed senior forest officials to deceive themselves into thinking that over-harvesting and unsustainable logging rates are in the best interests of forest-dependent communities for at least a couple of political election cycles, but not beyond. Yet, the government, while claiming to have spent a billion dollars on mitigating the affects of the beetle infestation, appears to have completely neglected to do any strategic planning needed to deal with the inevitable social and economic consequences of the predicted crash in available timber.

The only evident plan is to keep the rates of timber harvesting unsustainably high, thereby making the eventual collapse of available timber even more painful for forest-dependent communities, a policy based on the premise that it is better to have more jobs today and none tomorrow rather than fewer jobs today and some tomorrow.

Instead of focusing on the common good, on getting a reliable forest inventory and on defining a long-term vision for forestry in British Columbia with attendant strategies, goals and objectives, the government is preoccupied with rewarding an oligopoly of companies with exclusive timber rights over public forests within quasi-private timber farms (Tree Farm Licences)

In its zeal to justify further enclosure of The Commons and increased corporate control over the commoners’ timber, the government’s twisted thinking becomes so bent that it defines mountebank politics.

The false argument, or syllogism, goes like this. Area-based forest management is preferable to volume-based management. Tree-farm licences are a type of area-based tenure. Therefore, forest management on tree-farm Licences must be better than it is on volume-based tenures.

The government then takes that syllogism to the people and pretends to consult publicly by inviting selected stakeholders to a meeting with the consultation leader and by arranging an Internet blog on which the public can post comments and send written submissions by email.

The declared purpose of the consultation is to obtain input on the criteria to be considered in evaluating proposals for converting some or a portion of some volume-based forest licences to new or expanded area-based tree-farm licences. More tree-farm licences are a foregone conclusion. The public has no say.

The whole consultation process is a sham. The language used is a complete turnoff for any member of the public unversed in forestry jargon. To participate meaningfully, the public would need clear evidence of whether public benefits from previously awarded tree-farm licences have materialized as background to an open question as to whether more timber farms are desirable and in the common interest.

History shows forest tenure under tree-farm licences is a singular failure resulting in British Columbians being robbed of control of their forests and denied the promised benefits from them.

British Columbians need a full, public and provincewide discussion — not a phoney consultation — on what type of forest governance might best address the concerns and needs of forest-dependant communities during this century of rapid climate change.

Today, common sense is the cement needed to unite British Columbians to re-establish control over their forest commons. Until noon on May 30, use your common sense to say no to more Tree Farm Licences by sending an email to: forest.tenures@gov.bc.ca

Anthony Britneff recently retired from a 40-year career with the B.C. Forest Service during which he held senior professional positions in inventory, silviculture and forest health.

Read more: https://www.vancouversun.com/Opinion+Tree+farm+licences+failure+forest+management/9879112/story.html

Re: Area-Based Forest Tenures Consultation and Discussion Paper

Dear Mr. Snetsinger,

I intend to keep my remarks brief and to the point, partly because I want my comments to be clear and unambiguous, and partly because I believe this consultation process is simply a shameful subterfuge to justify the further privatization of BC’s public forests.

I have always been opposed to the creation of Tree Farm Licences. The public has also consistently rejected this particular form of forest tenure, as Forest Minister Dave Parker found out when the Social Credit government tried to convert all replaceable licenses to TFLs in the 1980s, and Minister Thomson found out when he experienced widespread backlash against Bill 8 last year. The reason is simple: TFLs have always enabled monopolistic corporate control of our public forests and, over the long term, have not maintained the public benefits that were promised when they were awarded. The sorry state of BC’s coastal forests and coastal forest industry, where the majority of current TFLs exist, provides all the evidence needed to reject the creation of any more TFLs: Western Forest Products now monopolizes the coastal log supply; TimberWest continues to hold a TFL despite the fact it has shut down all its processing facilities; and, what remains of our unprotected coastal old growth forests are increasingly being cut down for log exports.

Past processes for awarding TFLs have also been highly suspect, all too often involving questionable actions by elected officials. An extreme example of this was when Forest Minister “Honest Bob” Sommers was convicted in 1958 for taking kickbacks related to the awarding of this form of tenure, which at the time were called Forest Management Licenses. When the name was changed to Tree Farm Licenses in the 1960s many of us felt this was a more accurate description of what these tenures were really all about: farming trees, not managing forests. In reality, TFLs should be called Timber Farm Licences, as they have always and only been about maximizing “timber” cutting at the expense of forest ecosystems. West Fraser Mills’ submission to your consultation process speaks to this issue when the company states clearly that the reason they want an expansion of their current TFL is to effect an immediate increase in their AAC and achieve more efficient “timber utilization.”

In short, TFLs are all about maximizing timber cutting, not forest ecosystem management, and they have always resulted in monopolistic corporate control over our public forests with little long term public benefit. As such, for the sake of the future of BC’s public forest ecosystems, the BC government must not issue any more of these timber farm licenses.

It strikes me that this self-evident conclusion may be precisely why your consultation process isn’t asking the fundamental question of whether more TFLs should be awarded or not. Instead, your discussion paper merely asks for feedback on the evaluation criteria for awarding more TFLs and what benefits the government ought to ask for in return. As your first blog post points out:

“With regard to this consultation, the two questions are: What benefits should government seek if it allows the conversion of a volume-based forest licence to a tree farm licence? What criteria should government evaluate applications against?”

Your failure to ask for public comment on the primary question of whether the government should give itself the power to award more TFLs is precisely why I believe this process is simply a cynical attempt to justify the awarding of more TFLs.

As many other commentators have said, this consultation process is not about area-based versus volume-based forest management. In fact, it’s not about forest management at all. If it were truly about forest management, in the sense of the stewardship of our complex forest ecosystems, the history of TFLs would preclude the government from even contemplating awarding more of these timber farm licenses.

I would add the following observations for your consideration:

1. Issuing more TFLs without resolving aboriginal rights and title issues in this province will only add to the growing tensions between the provincial government and First Nations. Awarding more TFLs now will simply result in more court challenges and higher compensation claims from corporations when land claim settlements are eventually reached.
2. Converting replaceable forest licenses to TFLs without re-inventorying our public forests, especially in areas impacted by the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic, will result in more forest land base coming under corporate control than the existing volume-based licenses would warrant if the government had better inventory data and our interior forests were not impacted by climate-related pest epidemics.
3. Under the current Forest Act, TFLs can be traded or purchased by foreign national governments, and the BC government can do nothing to prevent this from happening. This potential outcome should be clearly communicated to the general public so they fully understand the implications of turning our public forests into what are effectively tradable commodities in a globalized marketplace in which foreign national enterprises are increasingly becoming the major players (as is evident in BC’s LNG sector).

Mr. Snetsinger, as a registered professional forester I believe you have an obligation to put the health of our public forest ecosystems ahead of the interests of the corporations that are currently pushing the government to give them more direct control over those public forests so they can create more timber farms. As you ought to know, timber farms will never have the genetic and species diversity or the resiliency to adapt to climate change, and the corporatization of our public forests will only make our forest-dependent communities even more vulnerable to the negative consequences of globalization.

As a former Chief Forester for this province I urge you to advise the government to stop trying to justify the creation of more TFLs and concentrate instead on much more pressing forest stewardship issues, such as:

1. Reducing the cut in the Interior MPB impacted areas to sustainable levels. By sustainable I mean levels that will ensure the remaining healthy forests are protected while the pine forest ecosystems ravaged by the MPB grow back.
2. Revisiting and making fundamental changes to FRPA. FRPA must be amended as soon as possible to ensure that all forest ecosystem values are protected and objectives for these values are legally enforceable. Otherwise, as we are experiencing, the government has effectively turned the entire public forest land base into timber farms, as it no longer has the legal means to protect the full range of critical values in our public forest ecosystems.
3. Consulting with the public on a new vision for the stewardship of BC’s public forest ecosystems. Decades of poor forest management, the implications of climate change, and a dramatically changing marketplace all demand that the public be fully engaged in the development of a new vision for the stewardship of their single, largest, renewable and publicly owned resource.

I know that others have made similar recommendations to you; it is my hope that you will include such recommendations in your final report.

For clarity, with respect to the questions you’ve asked in this so-called public consultation process I wish to make my position on TFLs clear:

1. The government has no social license to create more TFLs; the rejection of Bill 8 should have made this abundantly clear.
2. TFLs do not serve the public interest, only private interests.
3. There are no criteria, situations, circumstances, or rationalizations that would justify creating new TFLs.

Vicky Husband