Environmentalist Dan Bouman takes Suzuki, Berman, Horter to task over support for BC Liberals and disastrous environment record

Longtime environmentalist Dan Bouman of the Sunshine Coast is circulating this message through emails around the province. I think Dan makes some excellent points and am reproducing it here for your interest and comments.

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Dan Bouman

An Open Letter to BC’s Environmental Leaders:

Over the course of the Provincial election campaign, posturing from BC’s major environmental organizations has been embarrassing.

As the executive director of a regional conservation association with 20 years experience working with local governments and with the public on regional environmental issues, I wonder if my upper-level colleagues have gone completely daft.

Their campaigns to “punish” Carol James, or the “anybody but…” campaigns, or the one calling on the NDP to re-consider their position on IPP’s are just three examples of their misguided approach.

The Liberal government has used a common theme to address environmental policies; deregulation, public disempowerment, destruction of accountability, elimination of transparency, and disdain towards the democratic processes.

It started with the gutting of the BC Environmental Assessment Act and the conversion of the BC EA Office from one designed to safeguard the public interest, to one that only serves project proponents. This Act was once a key tool for assessing and mitigating climate change impacts -but is now little more than a source of orchestrated industrial advertising.

What happened to the Forest Practices Code Act under the Liberals tells a story: The old “prescriptive” code was replaced with a new “results based code” which is impossibly vague and unenforceable. As one example, a “result” specified by government is ‘the protection of drinking water’, unless this “unduly restricts the flow of timber”.

In the end, transparency and accountability in forestry -and participation of the public in forest planning- have been willfully destroyed. The Act now stands as one stark example of the supremacy of private interests at the expense of the public interest; the Liberal government’s legacy.

The Private Managed Forest Land Act (PMFLA) offers a similar illustration. A ‘Council’ of private landowners enforces the Act with no accountability to the public. A person can make a complaint but the Council doesn’t have to acknowledge the complaint or notify the complainant of an investigation (remember CNI’s instant municipality).

The complainant has no right to participate in, or even to be notified of, a hearing into the complaint. In the case of a finding against the landowner, the owner has the right of appeal.

The complainant has no such right. The whole process is remarkable for its starkly anti-democratic orientation. The PMFLA Council views its mandate to be the protection of forest landowners from the public, local government, and environmental regulation.

There are many other examples of legislation that has been passed to insulate private interests from public scrutiny; the Integrated Pest Management Act comes to mind, as does the new Health Act which has stripped away the powers of Local Boards of Health.

According to a West Coast Environmental Law survey in 2007, environmental law enforcement has been brought to a virtual standstill in BC.

This was achieved primarily through budget cutbacks to enforcement agencies like the BC Conservation Officer Service. Cutbacks have also been used to curtail the activities of most of the independent agencies of the legislature like the Forest Practices Board, the Ombudsman’s office and the office of the Auditor General.

The above are not esoteric legal issues. Community advocates see the loss of environmental assets as well as a constant parade of conflicts between private interests and the public. Meanwhile fish disappear, species-at-risk continue to drift toward extinction, drinking water sources are compromised, and carbon emissions continue to rise.

One approach that offered a comprehensive venue to address these and many other issues was Land and Resource Management Planning. Three regional districts, four municipalities and about thirty citizens’ groups in the Sunshine Coast Forest District campaigned strongly for this higher level of planning.

The Liberal government initially agreed to proceed, but reneged about a year ago when it became clear that land use planning could get in the way of private hydropower development. The Liberal government deliberately scuttled one of the most important tools to mitigate the effects of climate change due to opposition from private corporations.

The common theme of the Liberal Party is the well-orchestrated destruction of progressive democratic processes. In British Columbia we are seeing the rise of a plutocracy; government for the rich. My friends working in other social justice fields advise me that the same pattern of destruction of accountability, transparency and public empowerment has occurred in many other areas such as health, education, housing, poverty law, labour relations, social welfare, management of the judiciary etc.

There is no backlash against ‘green power’ or climate change mitigation. But there continues to be a concerted assault against the rights of the public and against democratic process. The so-called backlash is really just people trying to defend their families and their communities against an empowered corporate agenda.

Unfortunately some misguided environmental elites have responded to this situation by trying to punish Carol James, by supporting Plutonic Power and General Electric, and supporting the re-election of the Minister of the Environment!

These are absurd responses that show BC’s environmental leaders are politically naive at best and likely just plain indifferent to peoples’ experiences under Liberal government.

Just to make my views perfectly clear, I believe the NDP is right to oppose IPP’s because environmental and social impacts have not been openly and properly considered.

However crass the NDP's messaging has been, they are also fully justified in opposing the Liberals' approach to climate change.

The Liberal government has been consistently imposing legislation without debate in the legislature and without public consultation that genuinely considers the impacts on all parties.

The NDP, which has always stood for democratic progressive principle in Canada, cannot possibly support fundamental change when it is brought forward in an authoritarian manner, and in a manner that protects the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor.

The NDP must oppose authoritarianism -no one would support them if they didn’t. This is a political reality that seems to have escaped the handful of myopically-focused environmentalists that speak for the likes of PowerUp and the BC Conservation Voters.

Unfortunately, Tzeporah Berman and Will Horter, et al., are incredibly out of touch with the concerns of the public and, as today’s polls show, have had limited or no measurable impact on voters.

We must not blame the NDP for our own failures to communicate. I fear to consider what may come if the Liberals prevail for another four years.

A progressive and democratic process offers us the best hope for creating effective and enduring responses to climate change. If we continue down the current authoritarian path, we will all be dead before any effective changes are made.

On Tuesday May 12, I’ll be voting with a perfectly clear conscience for the NDP; they are our best hope.

Thank you very much!

Daniel Bouman

Founding member

Sunshine Coast Conservation Association
Sunshine Coast Water First Society
Tetrahedron Alliance

Co-author - The People’s Water – The Fight for the Sunshine Coast’s Drinking Watersheds