Do Citizens get the Government they deserve?
Do Citizens get the Government they deserve?
We are not getting the government we deserve. All governments hold great power to deceive
and divide the populace. Our burning BC
forests are a good example of this. When
tree farm licenses (TFL’s) to log on public forest land (unceded native land) were
first given out to private logging companies by the BC government, there was a
condition attached. It was called the
Appurtenance Clause. This clause demanded
that in exchange for practically giving away public forest trees (in those days
it was priceless old growth forests) the logging companies had to build saw
mills on the lands covered under the TFL’s. It was a government exchange; a give-away
of public forest trees for jobs, jobs in the forests, and jobs in the
mills. And the workers also had the
union (IWA) to look after their interests.
As time went on, commercial logging, with clear- cutting the
favored (and only) method of logging, soon begat enormous clear cuts that
disfigured the land, killed wild animals, poisoned the waters and displaced and
dispirited First Nations. The companies,
increasingly multi-national, continued to shift the responsibility of the care
of the forests to the government itself while still dictating how things should
be done (no controlled burns). The logging companies hated the worker’s union
(IWA) and the union leadership became corrupt, especially when the easy picking,
easy clear-cutting, valley old growth forests became scarce. IWA leader, Jack Munroe, finally stepped down
to take a plumb job speaking for the forest companies and against
the workers. The IWA began to dissolve .
New labour saving
machinery started replacing men in the forests as well as in the mills. Some of the mills didn’t make enough profit
to satisfy the multinational logging companies.
They advised the NDP they wanted out of the Appurtenance Clause; the
deal that insisted on mill jobs for workers in exchange for the give way of public
forests. And in 2003 the NDP government caved and
canceled the Appurtenance Clause. The NDP gave away BC public forests and mill
jobs for absolutely nothing in return. That we know of.
It is easy for me to say that the workers should have
demanded more from their union (I have been a union supporter all of my life), demanded
more from the corporations they worked for, and demanded more protection from the
government. However, the workers were
divided by the deal- making being made by the remnants of their treacherous
union. And the enviro groups of the day were also divided. Each individual environmental group was in
competition with the other enviro groups for scarce funding. Not only did we
not have enough communication between like groups, we certainly didn’t try hard
enough to engage the forest and mill workers themselves. Another thing that bothered me (from the
confines of my prison cell) was that among the leaders of the more predominately
well-funded enviro groups there was a decided air of elitism. And then selective leaders from this group of major environmental
elites made a deal with the BC Liberal government behind closed doors that if the
Great Bear Rain Forest would be preserved, there would be no more “War in the
Woods”.
I resented this behind the scenes environmental dealing by
select environmentalist groups at the time, especially with the succeeding
Gordon Campbell government, and I still do.
These groups can no more speak for people who are willing to do civil
disobedience, the when and where citizens decide to protest environmental
destruction, than I can. Civil
disobedience in defense of Mother Nature is always up to individuals. And we can see that saving (or partially
saving) a certain forested area in this
vast province in exchange for continuing with the uncontested rotten forest practices in the
rest of the province, practices that have led to massive, catastrophic fires,
is not a good idea. And logging in the Great Bear has continued. From Ian
McAllister of Pacific Wild: ‘”There is
no skirting the issue: “This agreement proposes
to log 2.5 million cubic metres of old-growth forest every year for the next 10
years,” he said in an interview. “The campaign was to stop ancient-forest
logging. Unfortunately this agreement
enshrines the idea that ancient-forest logging is part of doing business in the
Great Bear Rainforest. That’s been a
significant change in the conservation movement”.
The new NDP Environment Minister, George Heyman, has stated
that reviewing B.C.’s forest system is a top priority for the B.C. government. But as
yet there is no timeline. Perhaps the
continued burning of the province’s forests will set a fire under him. Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
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