By Larry Pynn North Cowichan council has assured the public that it’s no longer business-as-usual in the 5,000-hectare Municipal Forest Reserve and that the municipality plans to undertake meaningful public consultations to determine the “highest Read more…
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Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Evening Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Farhana Yamin discusses the need to answer the imminent threat of climate breakdown with direct action to force politicians to develop an adequate response (which, to be clear, does not include new pipelines or other subsidies for fossil fuels). Peter Armstrong reports
Continue readingCowichan Conversations: Sonia Furstenau: The Island’s old growth is under attack
Falling-boundary tape in one of the seven old-growth cutblocks that were proposed by B.C. Timber Sales near Juan de Fuca Provincial Park. Photograph By TJ WATT By Sonia Furstenau BC Read more…
Continue readingCowichan Conversations: The people and the resources of BC have been fooled again.
Don Maroc The people and the resources of BC have been fooled again. BC was born with the most lush and extensive Temperate Rainforest in the world. Through our own terrible management, today Read more…
Continue readingCowichan Conversations: The BCNDP Blinked Over Logging Port Renfrew Old Growth. Plans Cancelled For Now.
The old growth forests near Port Renfrew have been spared from the axe for now. The ingredients in the dispute were potentially explosive with broadly based opposition including the BC Green Party, First Nations-Pacheedaht territory, Read more…
Continue readingCowichan Conversations: To log or not to log North Cowichan’s municipal forest reserve?
By Peter W. Rusland To log or not to log North Cowichan’s municipal forest reserve? And if so, where and how? Those pointed, timely questions were aired and debated using factual power-point presentations during a Read more…
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Lana Payne offers a reminder (with reference to Lars Osberg’s new book) that extreme and growing inequality is a choice rather than an inevitability – but that it also represents a self-reinforcing trend: “The Age of Increasing Inequality: The Astonishing Rise Of
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian: Heartwood: How Vancouver Island lost 90% of its ancient rainforest
In Part 1 of this new 3-part mini-series titled Heartwood, filmmaker Daniel Pierce explores the endangered old-growth forests of Vancouver Island. Despite the reality that less than 10% of the prime, low-elevation old-growth remains on the island, these forests continue to be converted into second-growth tree farms. Pierce unpacks what the
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian: Filmmaker exploring new vision for forestry with video series
In 2012, I took a fateful trip to Cortes Island – a northern gulf island three ferry rides away from Vancouver – to document the Cortes community’s fight to fend off an impending logging operation by coastal timber giant Island Timberlands. Community members took us deep into the woods privately
Continue readingIn-Sights: Guest post: Paying for Information and Influence
I am no philosopher, nor am I even a scholar in democracy or politics, but I do like to know the numbers… and as a politician, I like to see transparency. So I like to submit freedom of information requests when I see a need.
Pay for Information
I submitted a somewhat detailed FOI Request to the BC Government for information on Wildfire contracts. You can see it further down this post. I did expected a modest handling charge, maybe $100 or so. However, when I received a response back from the (very helpful) FOI officer handling my file I was given this bombshell:
As it stands the fee estimation is at $1,210, but inclusion of all contracts would multiply that amount by seven in terms of hours required.
Obviously there is no way I, as an individual concerned citizen and elected representative with a family and no budget for this kind of thing, can pay $1210-$8500 for some binders of paper or trove of PDFs.
I question even whether a media organization, local newspaper or opposition party would be able to swing that kind of money.
Is this a way to block information? Why are contracts signed with public entities not readily available for the public to scrutinize? Why would this cause so much extra work for an individual in a ministry if we have an expectation for transparency and access to information by default in our public institutions? Or do we actually have that expectation?
Rather than abandon my request, I decided to try something different. A GOFUNDME donation drive to raise the required $1200. It is at:
gofund.me/bcwildfireinfo
Thanks to the surprise and common interest of dozens of other citizens I have managed to raise the minimum $1200 needed to pursue the request. Many donations were given ‘under protest’ at the very notion of having to pay for public information to be released. I hope to raise enough to cover up to the $8500 that was suggesting by the FOI office. If I raise more than needed, the surplus will go to the BC Burn Fund.
Please donate. And please ask your MLA why public information is subject to exorbitant fees in order for it to be seen by the public.
Aerial Firefighting and Political Donations
So what was the information request and why did I put it in? Well, say what you will about one plane or another (I’ve said enough), one fire or another or one company or another, when you see a Minister stand in an Airplane hanger (used by ConAir Aviation) and award a contract (and post it on his MLA webpage) you would expect that that is being done on the basis of its merits alone.
What are the merits of this plane? What are the merits of the company? What basis was this decision made and what is the history of aerial firefighting and the historic cost and performance of aerial firefighting groups working for the BC Wildfire Service?
In a time of increasing fire activity and increasing fire budgets, these seem to be critical questions. However, it seems they are questions largely without public answers aside from very broad numbers about the total cost of wildfire firefighting in any given year.
So with that front of mind after the awarding of the ConAir contract for the new jet plane, I submitted this information request to the Province of BC:
Records indicating the number of firefighting aircraft the province had on contract since the 2010 forest firefighting season, broken down annually by company and model and whether it was signed in advance, on call or on a master standing offer basis; The costs associated with each of those aircraft, including the initial contracts, costs to run and fuel the planes, crew costs and any additional costs; A copy of the contract(s) that Conair has signed with the province for the 2016 firefighting season.
The request is roughly in two parts. The first portion is to determine the actual costs of aerial firefighting in BC so that there is some hard data on what each type of aircraft can do, and perhaps how the current strategy and operational mentality helps or hinders the budget and the effectiveness of firefighting.
The 2nd portion has more to do with the relationship between ConAir and the Provincial government based on persistent conversations and concerns brought to me, particularly after someone passed me this link to the BC Elections Campaign Donation website that shows political donations from ConAir and Coulson.
And then a further link to provincial ministry of finance payment records that, when compiled together look like this:
The discrepancy in payment from the government could come down to a number of things that do not have anything to do with favouritism but it does seem something worth investigating. That is why I put in the freedom of information request.
We’ll see if the information I receive answers any of the questions, but at the very least the request has already proven that given a topic of enough public interest, a pay wall, as unjust as it may be, will not prevent the public in the age of the internet and social media, from attempting to gain access to that information. Whether it should be forced to through things like a GoFundme drive should be a matter of debate.
In-Sights: Guest post: Paying for Information and Influence
I invited Chris Alemany, a councillor for the City of Port Alberni, to write of his effort to gain information about a subject of broad public interest. It is unfortunate the BC Liberal Government demands that concerned citizens pay exorbitant amounts for information that should be routinely available. What’s even
Continue readingIn-Sights: Guest post: Paying for Information and Influence
I invited Chris Alemany, a councillor for the City of Port Alberni, to write of his effort to gain information about a subject of broad public interest. It is unfortunate the BC Liberal Government demands that concerned citizens pay exorbitant amounts …
Continue readingIn-Sights: A reader comments on forestry
Reader Ken Barry today submitted a comment to an article written last July – Log exports update. It reminds of a subject that’s close to my heart and, I think, an illustration of how wrong-headed the Liberals have been in natural resource policy. Here …
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian: Tensions grow over plan to log Central Walbran Valley’s ancient forests
Tensions are growing over plans to log an ultra-rare section of ancient forest in Vancouver Island’s Central Walbran Valley. Filmmaker Daniel Pierce offers stunning video of the region and coverage of the battle.
The post Tensions grow over plan to log Central Walbran Valley’s ancient forests appeared first on The Common Sense Canadian.
Continue readingIn-Sights: BC lumber exports drop $46 billion over 9 years
These graphs are drawn from softwood lumber exports data published by BC Stats. My aim is to compare results in recent years to those from the desperate nineties when wild-eyed anti-business socialists governed British Columbia. The NDP administered BC for nine complete fiscal years, April 1992 to March 2001. I have
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian: Industrial logging threatens Port Alberni drinking water: Alliance
Since 2011, the Watershed Forest Alliance has been focused on protecting the last pockets of old growth on Island Timberlands’ private forestlands around Port Alberni, Vancouver Island. They are also pushing for an end to industrial logging in the community’s watershed, where the citizens of Port Alberni get their drinking
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Jordan Brennan examines the close links between strong organized labour and improved wages for all types of workers: U.S. scholars have found that higher rates of state-level unionization help reduce working poverty in unionized and non-unionized households and that the effects of unionization
Continue readingThe Common Sense Canadian: Canfor, West Fraser overcut a million cubic meters of BC timber
Read this story from Peter Ewart on 250.org on the shocking overcut of non-pine timber by two forestry companies, Canfor and West Fraser, in northwest BC’s Morice Timber Supply Area. It is an outrageous amount. According to a document from the Ministry of Forests that was recently brought to light
Continue readingLeft Over: Vancouver Island: A New Provincial Idea…
Vancouver Island To Be A Province If Separatists Get Their Way The Huffington Post Canada | Posted: 08/06/2013 2:43 pm EDT http://viprovince.ca/ I have often spoken and written about Vancouver Island becoming it’s own province, and now someone is doing something concrete about it.. I have links, below, to both the Federal and
Continue readingBoreal Citizen: Boreal greenwashing: Mill-town politics in Northern Ontario
Every extractive capitalist economy needs a mechanism that allows corporate heavyweights to snuggle up with elected officials. In the US, there’s American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and if you haven’t yet been horrified by Bill Moyers’ piece on how ALEC essentially enables corporations to write state laws, you’re in for
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