By Joe Foy

 

Wind blown mountain ridges and valley bottom devils club thickets are my natural habitat. Believe it or not I’m at my happiest when humping a pack up a bushed-in trail. I’ve even been seen laughing while running through slide alder swatting at a bunch of riled up hornets.

 

It’s the great indoors that I’m the most uncomfortable with. So it should come as no surprise that I was somewhat ill at ease the other day confined to a large meeting room in the Victoria Trade and Convention Centre. The occasion was the Budget Lockup. This is where a couple hundred folks get locked in a really big room, get given a stack of books that outline the government’s proposed budget for the coming year and get to ask questions from roving bands of bureaucrats.

 

Then, at some point the Finance Minister comes in and answers questions from a gaggle of media types surrounding the podium. In the afternoon, when the Minister begins to present the budget in the Legislature, the doors are unlocked and we are all free to leave.

 

Representatives for trucking firms, logging companies, social activist groups, unions, and environmentalists surge out into the hallways, cell phones fi rmly pressed to ear, relating to their various organizations what they have learned of the government’s intentions for the coming year.

 

It’s not a very wilderness-like setting, but hey, I’ll try anything if it has a chance of saving wilderness or wildlife.

 

I was there with Gwen Barlee, the Wilderness Committee’s endangered species campaigner. We had a giant stack of government finance documents on the desk in front of us, which both of us were sifting through.

 

Then I hit paydirt. It was a Liberal Whopper of massive proportions. On page 30 of the government’s Strategic Plan document I read that the Liberals had been successful at  “passing species at risk protection legislation for the first time in BC.”

 

It is true that changes to the law concerning endangered wildlife were introduced last year by the Liberals. But Bill 51 Amendments to the Wildlife Act actually does nothing to protect BC’s species at risk.

 

That’s because it is a kind of a fake law, designed to stave off federal intervention while actually doing nothing to protect endangered species and their habitat. Here’s how it works.

 

 

Consequently wild creatures are being pushed off the map all over the province.

 

Then, Gwen came up with another nugget buried in the reams of budget numbers.

 

Under the title “Environmental Stewardship” she found a line about how the Ministry of Environment plans to pay for activities concerning protection of species at risk. Cost recoveries are to be garnered from “stumpage from tree removal in parks and protected areas.”

 

“Wow, that sounds like they are going to be logging our parks and are claiming that they’ll use the money to pay for non-existent endangered species protection,” remarked Gwen. 

 

We button holed one of the bureaucrats and asked how much they fi gured on getting from “tree removal” in parks. He came back with a startling answer. He said “I am told we got a million bucks last year and we plan to get about the same this year.”

 

A million bucks in stumpage payments represents a lot of logging in our parks.

 

Environment Minister Barry Penner says his government doesn’t allow logging in parks, which goes to show you that if you really want to know what’s going on – just follow the money.