Region Archives: Canada West

Chiefs from the Dididaht, Huu-ay-aht and Pacheedaht First Nations faced off against protesters who were wearing masks and camouflage Thursday, as an illegal encampment and blockade grew in Dididaht territory near Nitinat. “We ask you to clean up your mess, pack up and leave as soon as possible,” Dididaht’s elected Chief Brian Tate told protesters. … “It’s quite shocking as far as respect goes”, said Jeff Jones, elected Chief of the Pacheedaht First Nation. The encampment is built at the very same spot, as the ‘Hummingbird camp,’ where the first arrests took place in last summer’s Fairy Creek protests. So the RCMP’s presence Thursday suggested there is growing concern this camp could grow into that. …What’s different at this new camp, which was set up three weeks ago, is that the protesters are calling themselves “We Are One” and some could be seen carrying weapons.

Additional coverage in the Victoria Times Colonist, by Nina Grossman: Logging protest camp ordered off Ditidaht territory by community’s leaders

Zain Haq

One Save Old Growth activist is expected to be released from custody while another remains in jail for another week after corrections staff failed to get him to his bail hearing. International student and SOG organizer Zain Haq, who turned himself into the Canada Border Services Agency on Tuesday, is expected to be released from the immigration holding centre in Surrey following his detention review hearing Thursday morning. “The (presiding) member of the immigration division has ordered his release on conditions,” Haq’s lawyer Randall Cohn told Canada’s National Observer Thursday evening. …Haq is also currently facing five charges of mischief. However, neither Cohn nor CBSA have clarified the actual reasons why the border agency is investigating the 21-year-old climate activist from Pakistan or the conditions of his release.

KAMLOOPS — Effective noon next Thursday (June 30), Category Three open fires will be prohibited throughout the Kamloops Fire Centre. In a news release from BC Wildfire Service (BCWS) Thursday June 23, the burning prohibition is to help prevent human-caused wildfires and protect public safety. Prohibited activities that would constitute a Category Three open fire include: any fires larger than two metres high by three metres wide; three or more concurrently burning piles no larger than two metres high by three metres wide; burning of one or more windrows; burning of stubble or grass over an area greater than 0.2 hectares. The prohibition will remain in place until Oct. 15, 2022, or until the public is otherwise notified. …However, the prohibition doesn’t ban campfires that are half-metre high by a high-metre wide or smaller and does not apply to cooking stoves that use gas, propane or briquettes. 

Following the devastating 2021 wildfire season, experts from the University of British Columbia are calling for more proactive prevention this year. Researchers from the university’s Faculty of Forestry say climate change is causing more wildfires and causing them to be much more intense. “We have to recognize that we need to coexist with wildfires,” said researcher Dr. Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz. She and her colleagues Dr. Lori Daniels and Dr. Kira Hoffman say that people need to start approaching wildfire management the same way we approach other natural disasters, like floods or earthquakes. …From a community perspective, they urge updating building codes, thinning commercial timber plantations to reduce fire fuel, and clearing fallen trees.

BC Timber Sales will be proceeding with plans for salvage logging and mitigation work in the Sicamous Creek and Wiseman Creek watersheds. The B.C. government agency says so in a May 31 letter to the District of Sicamous – despite concerns raised for the safety of residents of the Sicamous Creek Mobile Home Park. On June 3, a second evacuation alert was issued for the mobile home park. It was prompted by concern expected precipitation would increase the risk of a landslide in the watersheds above. …In response to BC Timber Sales’ (BCTS) plans to salvage harvest within the watersheds, both Sicamous council and the Columbia Shuswap Regional District called for a moratorium on logging. BGC Engineering recommended no salvage logging take place in areas affected by the wildfire until 2024, when the situation could be reassessed.

The discovery of three rare species of lichen in an Annapolis Valley forest has led the province to scale back a planned cut on Crown land in the area. Protesters are hopeful it won’t go ahead at all. Lichen found in 17 spots … have been reviewed by lichenologists with the Department of Natural Resources and “appropriate buffers of 100 metres have been applied to areas with confirmed sightings,” a spokesperson for the department. That has shrunk the approved harvest… from an initial 24 hectares to 10 hectares. …The province previously said it would proceed with logging in the area, but not in several locations buffering rare lichen. Protesters weren’t happy with that, saying there was a likelihood of more lichen still to be found. They launched a citizen-led search of the forest… Logging company WestFor Management Inc., said it will follow the department’s ecological forest management guidelines…

Katrine Conroy, B.C. Minister of Forests, was in Williams Lake on June 16 to make a $25 million funding announcement and tour Forest Enhancement Society of B.C.(FESBC) projects in the area. The $25 million will fund another round of FESBC projects aimed at reducing wildfire risk and enhancing wildlife habitat, reducing greenhouse gases, forest recreation and ecological resiliency. While in town for the day, Conroy toured previous projects supported by FESBC. …Tsideldel and Williams Lake First Nation development corporation projects have both been utilizing grinders to turn burnt trees and wood debris removed for ecosystem restoration and fire hazard reduction in the area into biomass fuel to help supply Atlantic Power’s Williams Lake Power Plant. Affordable biomass has been harder to source since demand for wood biomass has gone up, partially at least due to the expansion of pellet production.

After spending weeks at the soggy blockade, 17-year-old Miguel was back at his parents’ place in Nelson nursing a cold. He’d missed about a month of high school to help protect the Argenta-Johnsons Landing Face, an intact stretch of forest in southeastern B.C., from logging. …Forest protectors had been on site since April 24 in an effort to prevent the area from being logged by timber company Cooper Creek Cedar Ltd. RCMP arrived on May 17 … arresting 17 people, including Miguel… Over the decades, forest tenure changed hands a few times, but most of the face remained unlogged. Until now. Today, Cooper Creek Cedar is logging five cutblocks …on the face, but it also plans to build a network of roads, opening up a new, previously inaccessible region to logging. In turn, the long fight to include the face in the Purcell conservancy area has been reinvigorated.

[VIDEO includes additional content not included in the print version] Commuters travelling between West Vancouver and downtown were told to expect delays Wednesday morning as a protest temporarily blocked traffic on a major crossing. …Wednesday’s blockade is the latest in a string of traffic-disrupting protests that have aggravated commuters in recent months. The group says they want to see an end to logging of old growth forests in British Columbia through legislative changes. …Many of the group’s members have been arrested multiple times, including its co-founder, Zain Haq.  The international Simon Fraser University student has been arrested 10 times at various climate-related protests since 2020. And on Feb. 15, he was sentenced to two weeks in jail for criminal contempt of court after violating an injunction involving the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. Now, Haq is worried his climate activism has made him a target for deportation.

Terrance Coste

In the summer of 2021, the fight over old-growth forests reached a fever pitch. …The B.C. government was scrambling to …respond to the public uproar.  …By 2019, the NDP government launched its old-growth strategic review resulting in a report entitled A New Future for Old Forests, released four months later. …Premier John Horgan called a snap election 10 days after the report’s release and campaigned hard on old-growth, promising to implement all the report’s recommendations… Horgan announced in June 2021 that a second panel was needed. This one consisted of technical experts who would determine which ancient forests should be set aside. …The Horgan government has made some nice promises about the importance of ancient ecosystems. Because of the lack of immediate interim protection to ensure the best patches of old-growth don’t continue to fall and the absence of meaningful funding to make these protections possible, the B.C. government is still failing on that score.

Wildfires have grown in frequency, intensity and overall burned area due to climate change. This year, communities in B.C. and Canada are bracing for this pattern to continue. UBC forestry researchers Dr. Lori Daniels (LD), Dr. Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz (KCG) and Dr. Kira Hoffman (KH) are wildfire experts whose research focuses on how natural disturbances such as wildfires and droughts, human factors and climate interact to affect how easily—or not—forests burn. In this Q&A, they address how families and communities can prepare for more extreme wildfire seasons.

Activists planned to plaster a British Columbia ministry office with cedar shavings and wheat paste as part of an ongoing protest against old-growth logging in the province on Tuesday.  Protesters with the group Save Old Growth issued a statement Tuesday announcing they would cover the Victoria offices of the Ministry of Forests with “water-soluble wheat paste and cedar shavings” to “represent how the ministry is failing to protect old-growth forests.”  The targeted building at 1520 Blanshard St. houses the ministry’s forest tenures branch.  

…in Vancouver’s Jonathan Rogers Park… the peace was pierced by an older man hurling insults at a group of climate activists. …He began grabbing at their green and gold banners… Yet the activists did not respond. They sat. They stared. They smiled. Just as they were being trained to do in an actual protest event. …Before anyone is allowed to walk into traffic, co-ordinator Tim Brazier says, they must first be trained in non-violent techniques, including role playing where participants endure screaming and yanking while being encouraged to maintain their cool. “The central principle here, that everyone agrees on, is just how dire the situation is with the climate emergency,” said Save Old Growth co-founder and Simon Fraser University student Zain Haq, 21. …The National Observer has reported that Haq recently turned himself in, and was moved to an immigration holding centre in Surrey where he’ll remain until he has a hearing scheduled.

Randall Cohn and Zain Haq

…Zain Haq — an international student leading a civil resistance campaign to end old-growth logging in B.C. — was taken into custody in Vancouver and moved to an immigration holding centre in Surrey where he’ll remain until at least Thursday when he has a hearing scheduled, said SOG spokesperson Ian Weber. No details are available yet on the reasons why CBSA took Haq into custody, Weber said. The 21-year-old from Pakistan turned himself over to the border agency after it issued an arrest warrant for the co-founder of the protest group. …Before attending the border agency’s offices in the company of his lawyer Randall Cohn, Haq told Canada’s National Observer he was nervous but OK. “I do intend to fully co-operate. I was simply trying to get the appropriate legal counsel,” he said. Haq was optimistic the SOG movement would continue if he is deported. …“He’s sacrificing himself for the good of our planet,” Brent Eichler said. [Access to this story may require a National Observer subscription]

June is National Indigenous History Month, a time to learn and show support for the ongoing work of reconciliation. This month, B.C. and the Tahltan Central Government entered the first ever consent-based decision-making agreement under the Declaration Act. This agreement honours Tahltan’s jurisdiction in land-management decisions in Tahltan Territory, recognizing Tahltan’s title and inherent rights within its territory. It lays out how B.C. and the Tahltan Central Government will work together to support their respective decisions and resolve disputes throughout the environmental assessment process for the Eskay Creek Revitalization Project. …National Indigenous History Month is also a time to honour and recognize the rich history, heritage, resilience and diversity of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples across Canada. This week, we also announced $34.75 million in funding to support First Nations communities to revitalize their languages, cultures, arts and heritage. 

Every year in British Columbia, millions of tonnes of waste wood – known in the industry as slash – is burned by the side of the road. Land managers are required by law to dispose of this waste wood – that includes leftover tree limbs and tops, and wood that is rotten, diseased and already fire damaged – to reduce the risks of wildfires and the spread of disease and pests. The smoke from these fires is choking surrounding communities. It also impacts the broader environment, releasing some 3 million tonnes of CO₂ a year into the atmosphere, according to some early estimates. …Rather than burning it, it would be far better, they say, to use more of this potential resource as a feedstock for pellets that can be used to generate renewable energy, while supporting local jobs across the forestry sector and helping bolster the resilience of Canada’s forests against wildfire.

Young researchers aiming to provide data, tools and practical solutions to improve the resilience of Canadian communities recently converged in Quesnel for a three-day first annual general meeting.  The researchers are with the program Silva21, in which five universities supported by dozens of collaborators are undertaking 38 national research projects from 2021 to 2026.  In the Quesnel Forest District, nine research projects are underway, from thinning and the salvage harvesting of dead trees to the regeneration after catastrophic disturbance.  “Quesnel is probably the place in our cross-country project where the problem is the most obvious because of all the disturbances that have occurred here in terms of fire and the mountain pine beetle,” said Silva21 lead and Université Laval forestry, geography and geomatics professor Alexis Achim.

Researchers on BC Salt Spring Island are working on a plan to protect an important freshwater reserve. Maxwell Lake provides water for about half of Salt Spring Island, just off the east coast of Vancouver Island. Ecologists say agriculture and forestry in the area over the past century have left the forest overgrown, blocking out light and limiting the growth of understory, the low layer of vegetation in the forest that helps absorb water.  Without that water absorption, the forest becomes dry and at greater risk for fires. …The most notable part of that plan is human intervention, something fellow ecologist Pierre Mineau is passionate about. “By removing some trees, doing some thinning, selective openings and so on to allow understory to come in … more water [will be] coming into the aquifer,” he said.

Some B.C. experts say Ottawa’s directive that the RCMP stop using neck restraints, tear gas and rubber bullets should have happened years ago. Others, however, warn taking away some so-called “less-lethal” options may not be the right move. Tonye Aganaba, with Vancouver’s Black Lives Matter… cited recent police actions in response to protests by old-growth logging activists on Vancouver Island. “There was a lot of violence that happened at Fairy Creek,” she said. “A lot of the same strategies that we’re talking about right now were being weaponized,” she said. The Canadian government recently announced it will soon direct the RCMP to ban the controversial tactics. …But not everyone is on board with the directive. …Former RCMP officer Alain Babineau questioned the move. “If we start limiting the intervention tools for the police, then we are limiting the options they have,” Babineau said. 

With $25 million in new funding from the provincial government, the Forest Enhancement Society of BC (FESBC) is launching its 2022-2023 Funding Program today. FESBC is accepting applications to fund projects that will assist the Province of British Columbia in reducing wildfire risk and increasing community resiliency to wildfire. …communities start by creating a wildfire risk reduction plan. The plan identifies infrastructure and priorities that need to be protected… Next, areas of risk are identified…Then, after consulting with the citizens and considering other values … treatment prescriptions are written by forest professionals. FESBC funds all of these project activities from start to finish. …FESBC will host a virtual information session that will guide proponents on the criteria FESBC wants to see in the applications, as well as on the steps that need to be taken to put together an application through the online portal. 

We’ve seen a lot of protests in recent months and years in Canada, some more disruptive than others. From Black Lives Matter and Idle No More to the more recent anti-vaxxer protests on highway overpasses, not to mention the anti-vaccine mandate protests in Ottawa inaccurately labelled “trucker” protests, we’ve seen it all. But does protest work? Sociologists and political economists have studied the subject for years, and often protest does work. But sometimes, when protestors go too far… protest only turns the general public against the cause. …Recently we’ve seen motorists greatly inconvenienced by the Save Old Growth group who are protesting the logging of old growth trees amid a climate crisis. Great cause, yes, but the behaviour by this group, gluing themselves to highways, stopping drivers and vandalizing buildings in Vancouver, is not helping their cause.