Environment, resources & sustainability

Pining for some straight talk

Mar 6, 2009
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BC Forests Minister Pat Bell grabbed plenty of headlines this week when he said that the threats posed to resource communities by the mountain pine beetle infestation may be overstated. Stories about a rapid deterioration in the quality of trees attacked by the beetles, Bell suggested, are wrong. In fact, the minister said, he expects… View Article

Memo to Colin Hansen: Time for forest industry reality check

Mar 2, 2009
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If Finance Minister Colin Hansen’s budget forecasts are right, British Columbia’s battered forest industry is in for a modest recovery this coming fiscal year and a more robust recovery in 2010/2011. Gian Sandhu isn’t buying it. Owner of the Jackpine Group of Companies in Williams Lake, Sandhu was a leading light in British Columbia’s interior… View Article

Axing the Forest Service: The Cuts Continue

Feb 27, 2009
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Well it looks like they’re getting ready to wield the axe yet again at the Ministry of Forests, and that the latest victims will join a long list of their sisters and brothers whose jobs were to protect the public interest and ensure that our publicly owned forests were responsibly managed. In its latest annual… View Article

“The (not so) slow de-industrialization of the province”

Feb 26, 2009
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Yesterday, Catalyst Paper announced the closure of the Crofton kraft pulp mill, a week after shutting the doors at its 350-employee mill in Campbell River and “restructuring” (laying off 127 workers) at its Powell River facility. That’s 850 job losses in basically one shot. It is not the first shot, either, and it definitely won’t… View Article

Where’s Our Danny Boy?

Feb 23, 2009
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Give Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams credit for leading by example and doing what no BC politician in recent years had the guts to do: force the issue on what, exactly, the public deserves by way of public returns from publicly owned resources. Williams’ well publicized decision in December to yank back AbitibiBowater’s public timber and… View Article

Happy Birthday, Carbon Tax!

Feb 18, 2009
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A year ago, in the 2008 BC Budget, a new tax was born. There was a hush over the House as its mother, the Finance Minister, prepared for delivery. The proud papa, the Premier, stood glowingly beside the new mom Carole and her baby tax, and basked in the glow of praise from climate scientists,… View Article

It’s about jobs

Feb 13, 2009
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Next week the provincial government releases their budget and I am looking for something, anything at all, for forest workers.Now I hate to be a total whiner, but since 2001, BC has lost 65 sawmills, four pulp mills and about 20,000 jobs in the forest industry. With the spin-off effect of about 1 to 3,… View Article

Getting in Hot Water: A Lesson in Climate Subsidies

Feb 9, 2009
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My hot water tank blew out just before Christmas. I had no idea, just went down to the crawlspace to get some wrapping paper and found the floor flooded around the old tank. We’d been expecting this for a while, having never had to change the tank since we moved in seven years earlier. Contemplating… View Article

The biggest forest crisis? A lack of imagination.

Feb 6, 2009
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Everywhere you turn it’s bleak news for BC’s forest economy. Sawmills and pulp mills shuttered left and right, and a provincial government whose lame response is simply to say we’ve got to tough it out until markets improve and some of those mothballed mills possibly re-open. Not exactly encouraging words if you happen to live… View Article