An article by Ben Parfitt was published in Policy Note, a blog by the BC Office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). Parfitt reports that while the BC Government is promising protection of ancient forests, senior bureaucrats are instead protecting low-value scrub and permitting logging of high-value old-growth trees.

While British Columbia has the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, we need an Accuracy of Information Act. There should be sanctions when Ministers and Ministries make promises to the public while they work in secret to achieve the opposite.

Excerpts from Parfitt’s writing:

For months, officials in the Ministry of Forests have been working on a map that radically departs from the recommendations of a panel appointed by the provincial government to advise it on how to protect British Columbia’s imperiled old growth forests.

The mapping data, which was sent anonymously to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, reveals a troubling pattern whereby ministry officials appear to be rejecting much of the advice given to the government nearly three years ago by a five-person Technical Advisory Panel consisting of two biologists, two professional foresters, and one non-governmental organization rep.

…massive areas of forest containing the very best old growth trees ended up back in the logging column while deferrals increased in forests of little or no commercial interest to the logging industry.

[Vicky Husband]”The ministry’s backroom dealings are a breach of public trust, and the BC government must stop it before the last of the great giants fall and we lose our ancient forest legacy.”

Ministry moved a small amount of big-treed old growth deferrals into areas not recommended by the panel, it also moved a massive amount of “supported” deferrals into areas dominated by small and very small trees.

In some cases, those new small tree deferrals appear to be straw dogs, taking in areas of forest of negligible or no economic value to the forest industry.

Anthony Britneff, a long-time public servant who worked for 40 years for the Ministry of Forests in a number of senior professional positions, also believes that the ministry has a deeply-entrenched timber bias, and wrote as such in a recent commentary.

That bias, he says, is writ large in the map the public has until now not seen,

Leaked data reveals new threat to BC’s old growth forests