Editor, The Times:
Last winter a person who burns slash at years-end showed me a video of a great pile of perfectly good logs going up in flames. I can't say the exact dimensions of this one particular pile or the truckloads that were in it but it was huge!
Something about the wood being too far away to be hauled economically or some bad excuse like that.
Ever since the Campbell-Clark (as Rafe Mair calls them) government took over (and they've been there a long time) the management of B.C's forest has been atrocious!
I've seen as many as six freighters lined up in Nanaimo harbor waiting to be loaded with raw logs plus three in Ladysmith harbor. Off to China to be sawn up there.
A year or so back I was on the Queen Charlottes – Haida Gwaii where I grew up. A friend was taking me for a tour of the former Macmillan Bloedel claim of Justkatla where he and I had both worked at one period of our lives. He took me up a road that had been built after I'd left. The view down into Stewart Bay was beautiful.
What wasn't so spectacular was the large number of big cedar logs lying by the roadside, simply abandoned. We shook our heads on that one.
Letting the wolves to tend the sheep flocks has not been such a good idea. Yes, no doubt the NDPs forest practices were too restrictive but this “Do what you want and we'll rubber stamp” it has been disastrous for B.C.'s forestry sector.
However, if one peruses B.C.'s media, one would never know. In fact, the Vancouver Sun and Province used a photo of a freighter loaded with raw logs as a symbol of B.C.'s forestry fitness. Just ship it all off to China, leave it in the bush to rot or be burned. In the meantime B.C.'s mills starve for wood. That's the way to do things — just close em all down.
The one thing I can be proud of – my union UNIFOR of which I'm still an honorary member, has called for an end to the horrendous waste of fibre.
Well they sure have an uphill battle there, with a media (the same media that tried to foist Honourable Harper off on us for another four or five years – they failed there) telling us that all is well in B.C.'s forests.
Plus, with a rubber stamp “let the foxes look after the chicken coop” Ministry of Forests, it's really going to a hard one.
Dennis Peacock
Clearwater, B.C.