Vancouver Sun
By Gwen Barlee
June 9, 2014

How would you feel if you were walking in a provincial park and a logging truck rumbled by, or if you were barbequing with friends in a protected area and the sudden whine of steel-cutting saws from pipeline construction disrupted the peace and quiet?

While these examples may seem far-fetched, in today’s British Columbia they are becoming a reality.

Just 14 per cent of our province is set aside in parks and protected areas. Our parks protect some of the best of B.C., including old-growth forests, flowering alpine meadows, habitat for endangered species, dry grasslands and secluded swimming holes. Parks help protect our quality of life, offer us the opportunity to reconnect with nature and are part of a public trust. They are meant to be thoughtfully managed by successive governments to ensure our children and grandchildren have the same opportunity to marvel at a grove of 800-year-old cedars, or just enjoy the tranquility of a picnic on an undeveloped beach.

Unfortunately, this legacy is at risk.

Internal government documents identified in December more than 30 B.C. parks, including Bridal Veil Falls, Sasquatch, Inkaneep, Finn Creek and Lava Bed, that could have their boundaries adjusted to accommodate industrial interests.

For more than 10 years the provincial government has had a little-known Park Boundary Adjustment Policy that provides a blueprint for logging, mining, oil and gas companies to remove land from our parks. Then, in March, the government supercharged that policy by passing Bill 4, the Park Amendment Act, which allows resource extraction companies to conduct industrial “research” in parks, which was previously not permitted. Now corporations can conduct “invasive research” to see where pipelines and logging roads should be built, and then they can apply to have that land removed from park boundaries.

Pipeline giant Kinder Morgan is conducting research now in five B.C. parks, including Bridal Veil Falls, to determine where its pipeline should be laid. Unfortunately, the incursion doesn’t stop there.

Tamihi Logging, on behalf of the Seabird Island First Nation, is holding public consultations on a proposal to remove land from Sasquatch Provincial Park near Harrison Hot Springs for a logging road. The proposed road would not only bisect the 1,217-hectare park, it would also run past campgrounds and well-used hiking trails. The notion of a logging road traversing a park and logging trucks rumbling by campers and hikers is made even more bizarre, and potentially dangerous, by the fact this park receives more than 275,000 visitors annually.

To rub salt in the wound, the B.C. government has also decided the same companies that want to remove land from our parks should also run the public consultation processes. Yes, you read that correctly. The very pipeline and logging corporations salivating to put logging roads and pipelines in our parks have been put in charge of running the public meetings and collecting comments. You might expect this process in a banana republic or perhaps Russia, but in a democracy such as B.C., this is an insult to British Columbians and a sure-fire way to erode our protected area system.

The list of insults doesn’t stop there. Information notifying the public about the logging road proposal is nowhere to be found on the B.C. Parks website page dedicated to Sasquatch Park. Furthermore, at the public meeting in Agassiz held by Tamihi Logging in late May, concerned people who appeared were encouraged to direct their concerns about the logging road not to B.C. Parks but to the logging company.

Since 1911, when our first provincial park — Strathcona Park on Vancouver Island — was established, British Columbians have worked hard to preserve a small portion of what makes this province special. Through blood, sweat and tears and a large amount of compromise, we have established more than 1,000 parks and protected areas ranging from tiny Memory Island Park, at less than one hectare, to mighty Tweedsmuir Park at nearly a million hectares.

Turning over B.C.’s parks and protected areas to oil and gas corporations and logging companies is a mistake of massive proportions. British Columbians have worked for more than a century to create an unparalleled protected area system, and we simply aren’t going to step aside and watch that system be degraded without protest. If the provincial government truly cares about the integrity of our parks and protected areas, it will revoke Bill 4 and rip up the Park Boundary Adjustment Policy.

Photo: Deer Lake, in Sasquatch Provincial Park (Gwen Barlee).