‘Broken Promises protest in Prince George calls out government failure to live up to commitment

“We’re seeing a continuation of decades long of neglect, of a rip it and ship it mentality in the province, that is purely driven by the profit motive rather than protecting critical primary and old growth forests, and we know that this is actually essential to maintaining our workforce and the sustainability of this industry.” added BC Green Party Leader Emily Lowan, who was in attendance at the protest.

Connolly explained this protest was specifically focused on a government report surrounding old growth forests in 2020, with the government later not holding up on protecting the land.

“They’ve failed to meet their own recommendations to set aside the rarest old growth forests in the province. They had a report done in 2020 called the Old Growth Strategic Review, and then they mapped and identified the rarest old growth in the province. And since that took place in 2021, many of those forests have disappeared, they’re gone forever, they were logged. We’re talking about irreplaceable ecosystems with trees hundreds of years old, sometimes older. So we’re asking them to stop allowing the logging of these rare old growth areas that were identified by technical experts in 2021,” Connolly said.

“We’re between a rock and a hard place right now, and this is because of decades of of policy failure. We see the harms of having corporate monopolies like Canfor come in and leave, leaving workers in the lurch,” Lowan added.

The issue focuses on both the environmental and economic aspect of sustainability, as protestors said the logging of old growth forests not only hurts vulnerable species and ecosystems, it also can leave workers jobless.

“We can expect to lose the habitat of species like fishers, goshawks, many other things that we aren’t even aware of. We’re talking about forest ecosystems that have been in development since the retreat of the glaciers millennia ago. So these forests have been self-managing for that long, and we’re systematically replacing them with plantations and other places that grow trees,” Connolly said.

“Across extractive industries, we’ve seen industry lobbyists get in on the ground floor with these cabinet ministers, they are relentlessly lobbying day in and day out by the forestry industry. It really feels like this cabinet is really corrupted by for-profit interests, and it’s frankly costing workers and our forests,” Lowan said.

As for what solutions the protestors would like to see, the group says it’s simple: respect our forests.

“We would like the B.C. government to halt the issuing of hunting permits in those specific deferral areas. They’re mapped, they know where they are, and the fact that they were mapped and identified is probably the reason that logging companies focused on logging those areas first,” Connolly said.

CKPG News reached out to the Office of the Minister of Forests Ravi Parmar, but did not receive a response by deadline.

Pattison Media is owned by the Jim Pattison group, a majority shareholder in Canfor.

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by Tommy Osborne

‘Broken Promises protest in Prince George calls out government failure to live up to commitment

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