Auditor barks, bites at B.C. government

First B.C.’s new children’s watchdog Mary-Ellen Turpel Lafond clashed with the B.C. Liberal government over its lack of progress in stabilizing programs for kids in government care.

Then Ombudsman Kim Carter forced a shake-up of the B.C. Lottery Corp. and its inspectors over inadequate controls on millions of lottery tickets and prizes.

Now Auditor-General John Doyle has sunk his teeth into the Gordon Campbell government over its private forest policy, provoking a nasty response that would have been a dumb idea even if an election wasn’t 10 months away.

Forest Minister Pat Bell’s personal attack on Doyle (“unprofessional, lacking integrity, he’s not done his homework”) made a bigger story than the auditor’s main finding. Doyle merely confirmed what many observers knew: the government released prime development land from forest licences without adequate consultation.

Local politicians on southern Vancouver Island are waiting for the final word on whether developers will have a crack at some of the waterfront land that was transferred to Nanaimo coal baron Robert Dunsmuir in the 1880s in exchange for building the E&N Railway. It’s been kept inside much larger government tree farm licences since the 1940s, by which time most of the prime forest was already logged, and places like surf hotspot Jordan River have been treated as public with the consent of a succession of corporate owners ever since.

Doyle’s greatest sin, viewed from B.C. Liberal-land, was to dredge up suggestions that there was a flurry of trading in Western Forest Products’ ailing stock just before the land release in January 2007, and that former forest minister Rich Coleman’s brother worked for WFP at the time. Neither of these claims amounted to anything, and they obscure the real story of private forest lands.

First, it was the NDP who started these major private land releases, with 62,000 hectares near Port Renfrew and Port Hardy in 1999. The Gordon Campbell government approved the next three on Vancouver Island, under minister Mike de Jong in 2004 and Coleman in 2007. There’s a bit more held by WFP on the north Island, and 4,600 hectares near Revelstoke that is awaiting release and sale to pay creditors of the bankrupt Pope & Talbot.

The government admits it needs to do a better job of consulting, and is trying to do so in the Kootenays. Some park dedications and development controls would probably do it, as they would have smoothed the transition around Jordan River.

Bell should also quit

pretending that private land rules are the same as for public land. Owners don’t have to protect streams, wildlife, aboriginal cultural use or views, and in some cases they don’t.

But the bottom line is that private forest lands are mostly gone, and B.C. needs to concentrate on the sorry state of its vast public forest land. That’s what will support what’s left of the forest industry.

Part of that task is to prepare for a new kind of private land ownership that will be much more sweeping than our early tycoons in beaver hats ever imagined.

Aboriginal people assert basically the same property right over enormous areas of B.C. In fact theirs goes deeper, from the forests on top to the minerals and gases below.

As more aboriginal people become owners of more land, they will act like owners and develop their resources as they see fit. Resource and treaty settlements have so far included land use and environmental agreements, and so have the recently created community forests.

The days of slash-and-dash forestry may finally be coming to a close.

No compensation

The Auditor-General’s review of the WFP land release started with a demand from academics and environmentalists that companies should pay compensation to get their own land out of tree farm licences. This was seen as just, especially if they get to keep exclusive access to surrounding Crown timber.

Doyle didn’t give a direct answer to that, either in the report or when I asked him at his news conference. He merely said that the transfer of land would be the government’s only real opportunity to do that.

Of course at the time of this application, WFP was already under court-supervised creditor protection.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press newspapers.

tfletcher@blackpress.ca