Falling fast

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Three decades after the so-called ‘War of the Woods,’ the logging of B.C.’s ancient forests goes on, prompting protest from a new generation of eco-activists

Watt’s ‘before and after’ photos have drawn worldwide attention to old-growth logging in B.C. (TJ Watt)

McLean’s magazine
April 13, 2021

It came as a bit of a shock to Shawna Knight, a 43-year-old mother of two who runs the Buddha Box, a locally sourced food outfit in Shirley, on Vancouver Island’s southwest coast. Co-founder of the famous Cold Shoulder Cafe in the local surfing mecca of Jordan River, Knight says she figured she was as clued in as anyone to what was happening in the wild world around her. “We hunt for mushrooms, we do nettles every spring. I felt like we were connected. But we weren’t. We so obviously were not.”

Knight says she’d taken it for granted that the days when British Columbia was internationally notorious for cutting down the world’s last remaining stands of temperate old-growth rainforest were well and truly over. She thought the “War in the Woods” that had brought thousands of protesters to Canada’s West Coast from all over the world, when she was in her teens, had been fought and won. “Boy, was I wrong,” Knight tells me. “I just assumed we weren’t old-growth logging anymore. Turns out we’re doing it as fast as we can, right now.”

The realization came like a bolt out of the blue following a chance find on a Facebook chat group last summer—the ancient trees were still falling. It’s what prompted Knight to shut down the Buddha Box and spend her time ever since, a week on and a week off, where I met her: at a blockade on a remote logging road known as the Edinburgh Main, a branch of the Gordon River Main, in the mountains above Port Renfrew, an old fishing and logging town about two hours’ drive northwest of Victoria.

The camp on the Edinburgh Main is one of a half-dozen protest sites that have been springing up and moving around since last August on roads that the Teal-Jones logging company has been trying to punch into the Fairy Creek watershed, one of the last unprotected old-growth valleys on Vancouver Island.

The Teal-Jones Group is a 70-year-old logging and milling firm that bought the provincial timber rights to a huge tract of Vancouver Island’s southwest forests—Tree Farm Licence 46—in 2004. Ever since the first blockade appeared last August, the company has been in and out of court, hoping for an injunction that would order the dozens of protesters who have been encamped on its roads to get out of the way.

Although no cutblocks had been authorized within the Fairy Creek watershed, Teal-Jones says it is within its rights to log there, and it intends to take trees from only about 200 hectares of the 1,200-hectare watershed. The company is just trying to build logging roads to get at the trees. It sounds like a fairly straightforward contest. But it isn’t.

It’s not just about the Fairy Creek watershed, and it’s not just about TFL 46. In some ways, it’s as though the War in the Woods that began in the mid-1980s and lasted a decade is still going on. “It never really ended,” Knight tells me.

***

But there’s a lot that’s different about “protest” this time around: digital technologies, the rise of social media, the new capacities available to First Nations authorities, the economic transformation of formerly logging-dependent communities, and the realigned roles of the federal and provincial governments.

It’s not even clear how it came to pass, exactly, that all those protesters suddenly showed up last summer camping in cars, tents and old buses in the mountains around Fairy Creek. But it would appear that word of a Teal-Jones logging road breaching a ridge line above the watershed first came from Joshua Wright, a 17-year-old activist and filmmaker with highly developed computer skills. Wright had been live-monitoring road construction in the area using advanced digital-mapping software from his home across the Juan de Fuca Strait and across the Canada-U.S. border in Olympia, Wash.

Knight in a camp bus at a blockade (Photograph by Jen Osborne)

That’s a far cry from what might be called the first shot fired in the War in the Woods back in the 1980s. You could situate that event on Nov. 21, 1984, when Tla-o-qui-aht Chief Moses Martin stood on the beach of Meares Island, just off Tofino in Clayoquot Sound, and addressed a group of MacMillan Bloedel officials and loggers who’d arrived to start clearing the forest. Martin told them their provincially issued logging rights counted for nothing against Tla-o-qui-aht law, and that they were welcome to stay for a meal but they’d have to put down their chainsaws first.

The MacMillan Bloedel party withdrew, but not without a fight in the courts. They lost, and so did the provincial government. Sixteen years later, Clayoquot Sound, with its giant trees still standing after 1,000 years, towering as high as 20-storey buildings, was a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Along the way, thousands of protesters had made their way to Vancouver Island to protest old-growth logging. In one protest, at the Kennedy Lake Bridge, 859 people were arrested and eventually convicted on contempt charges for violating an anti-blockade injunction. It’s still considered the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

The activists and the Tla-o-qui-aht won most of their demands, and further prohibitions on industrial-scale logging were secured in the nearby Megin River Valley, portions of the Walbran and Carmanah valleys and other remnants of ancient forest on Vancouver Island immediately north of Teal-Jones’ TFL 46. On B.C.’s mainland coast, where much of the readily accessible timber had already been taken out, the Great Bear Rainforest was made off limits to further large-scale logging.

Over the years, there were other compromises between the lumber and conservation interests as the industry went through a series of convulsions, including a pine beetle infestation that carried off much of B.C.’s Interior woodlands. Then came years of forest-protection backsliding during the Liberal party governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark.

When New Democrat John Horgan was elected with a Green-backed minority in 2017, hopes were high that Vancouver Island’s dwindling ancient forests would win some reprieve—TFL 46 falls entirely within Horgan’s home riding of Langford-Juan de Fuca. There was much consultation and study, including a key “Old Growth Strategic Review.” When Horgan beat back the Greens and the Liberals to form a majority in last September’s snap election, he had his eye on the public’s hardening mood: a 2019 opinion poll showed 92 per cent of voters wanted action to protect endangered old-growth forests, partnerships with Indigenous people and a more diversified economy.

Logging truck drivers protesting forest-industry layoffs in 2019 (Darryl Dyck/CP)

Teal-Jones, too, insists the company intends to meet the high standards the public increasingly demands. In a recent statement, Gerrie Kotze, the company’s chief financial officer, declared: “Our work on this tree farm licence will be done in a way consistent with our values of sustainable forest management.” Teal-Jones, he added, “is committed to harvesting with the care and attention to the environment.”

Conservationists heralded the Old Growth report and its recommendations as the makings of a welcome “paradigm shift” in B.C.’s dysfunctional forest policies, putting ecosystem health above all other considerations. While Horgan’s government committed to following the review panel’s recommendations, further consultations would be required. Horgan nonetheless pledged to protect “nearly 353,000 hectares of old-growth forests,” in nine large areas, saying, “that’s just the beginning.”

Then the caveats began to reveal themselves. The nine parcels weren’t being “protected,” exactly. Logging was merely being deferred for two years. As for the “old-growth” in the deferral areas, half the landscapes were either alpine bonsai trees, or not even forest, or second-growth, or old-growth that was already protected. The Ministry of Forests had to clarify that only 196,000 hectares of “old-growth” was involved. In any case, when would the “paradigm shift” laid out in the review actually begin?

Maclean’s reached out to newly appointed B.C. Forests Minister Katrine Conroy’s office for answers. Will the review’s recommendations be implemented within the deferral’s two-year timeline? Conroy’s spokesperson, Tyler Hooper, explained by email that it’s going to take time because the government is committed to “doing this right,” adding that the Old Growth panel’s timeline “related to when work should be under way,” not completed. Besides, he noted, the recommendations came before the COVID-19 crisis: “We’ve started high-priority work in keeping with the report’s recommendations. But it will take engagement with the full involvement of Indigenous leaders, organizations, industry and environmental groups to find consensus on the future of old-growth forests in B.C.”

A closer review undertaken by forest ecologists Karen Price and Rachel Holt with professional forester Dave Daust, authors of the report “B.C.’s Old-Growth Forest: A Last Stand for Biodiversity,” reckon that only 3,800 hectares of Horgan’s deferred 350,000 hectares contain forests of the type that the Old Growth panel classified as in need of immediate action. So about one per cent, in other words, was forest of the ancient, tall-tree kind that most people imagine when they hear the term “old-growth.”

***

You have to squint at all these numbers to notice the point that the activists are trying to make when they say the bad old days in British Columbia are back. It’s complicated, and that’s where Ancient Forest Alliance photographer TJ Watt comes into the picture. He’s one of the main reasons that a handful of activists who first met at Lizard Lake near the Teal-Jones Granite Main logging road last August have acquired so many friends and well-wishers.

The 36-year-old Watt has been cutting through the cacophony of data with photographs. After a childhood in rural Metchosin, just outside Victoria, and summers in Port Renfrew, where his parents ran a marina, Watt has emerged as a key figure in the campaign to save the few groves of ancient forest that remain on Vancouver Island’s southwest coast. He’d found himself enchanted by the forest early on, and by his early 20s he’d developed a fascination with photography.

Watt’s leadership in the Ancient Forest Alliance grew out of a random event, in his early 20s, when he came upon the Western Canada Wilderness Committee’s storefront office on Johnson Street in Victoria. He walked in and hit it off right away with WCWC’s veteran campaigner, Ken Wu, who put him to work taking photographs of a forestry protest rally in town. Ten years ago, after Watt and Wu struck out on their own and founded the Ancient Forest Alliance, Watt found himself drawn deeper into Vancouver Island’s distant groves of cedar, fir, hemlock and spruce.

“The more remote landscapes were a blank spot on the map to me,” Watt says. “You spend three or four hours on a logging road, and then you arrive in this wonderland, with cascading waterfalls and emerald green pools and rivers, and these ancient forests, with trees that are nearly five metres across. I was just blown away how these forests were not protected.”

Watt’s early photographs of the still-standing trees in the unprotected portions of the Walbran Valley, and his 2018 portraits of the just-felled giants in the entirely unprotected Nahmint Valley near Port Alberni, caused a sensation. The photographs were partly a catalyst for the Horgan government’s old-growth review.

But it was last November that his disturbing “before and after” pictures of Teal-Jones logging operations in the Caycuse Valley drew international attention. “That was an explosion,” he says. “People from around the world get it, when they see the striking contrast in a tree that’s lived for 800 or 1,000 years, and the next day, it’s gone.”

His methodology is straightforward. He finds a big tree, picks an angle, sets up his tripod, shoots his photographs, and keeps careful notes—measuring the distance from the camera to the tree with a range finder; taking reference photographs of his set-up; noting the camera lens he’s used; noting the focal length; and recording the GPS coordinates so he can accurately retrace his steps through the logging slash to the “before” location, to take an “after” photograph.

Watt posted his first Caycuse “before and after” photographs on his Instagram account on Nov. 24, and they’ve since shown up in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper, Outside magazine and countless social media posts. The scenes he depicted have been seen by millions of people.

“Humans are visual creatures, and photography allows you to understand an issue in an instant,” Watt says. “People see that it’s a permanent loss. Old-growth forests do not come back. We get one chance, and one chance only, to save these trees.”

Wu in the Avatar Grove forest (Photograph by Jen Osborne)

Because of the mischief they’ve been making in and around TFL 46, you’d think TJ Watt, Ken Wu and the Ancient Forest Alliance would be considered villains in a town like Port Renfrew. They’re not. They’re more likely to be considered heroes.

In the forests above the town, Wu and Watt have drawn widespread public attention to several patches of old-growth—like Avatar Grove and Eden Grove—and to individual trees with names like Big Lonely Doug, the San Juan Spruce and the Red Creek Fir. Avatar Grove, named after James Cameron’s blockbuster 2009 science fiction movie, is now classified as a forest ministry recreation site, and it’s become world-famous. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the strange and mossy stand of giants, while Port Renfrew has taken to billing itself as the “Tall Tree Capital of Canada.” What the forest industry took away, the tourist industry is giving back.

That’s another huge difference from the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, the whole point of forest policy on Vancouver Island’s west coast was to convert old-growth forests, with their wolves, Roosevelt elk, black-tailed deer, black bears and cougars, into monocultural tree plantations. In those pseudo-forests, as the celebrated B.C. environmentalist Vicky Husband used to put it, “a deer would have to pack a lunch.”

***

The Teal-Jones Group isn’t simply the villain of the piece, either. The company is one of the loudest industry voices behind a broad-based move spearheaded by environmentalists to push back on the pace and scale of raw log exports from B.C.’s coastal forests.

Dozens of sawmills have closed over the past 20 years, and B.C. forests ministry records show that from 1998 onward raw log exports to China, the United States and elsewhere grew from about one per cent of the coastal cut to 30 per cent by 2018, reaching a recent average of four million cubic metres annually.

To put that in perspective: because a standard logging truck can hold around 40 cubic metres of timber, the volume of unprocessed logs from coastal forests shipped out of B.C. has been adding up to the equivalent of 100,000 fully loaded logging trucks in a bumper-to-bumper convoy stretching roughly from Vancouver to Winnipeg, every year.

Another big change from the days of the War in the Woods: First Nations are increasingly becoming major players in the forest industry.

Watt’s photos of old-growth logging (like his drone image of Caycuse, above) exploded on social media (TJ Watt)

The Fairy Creek watershed, along with almost all of TFL 46, falls within the traditional territory of the Pacheedaht Nation, a community of about 300 Nuu-chah-nulth people. While the Pacheedaht forestry initiatives include a set-aside for 400 years’ worth of cedar sufficient for their traditional ocean-going canoes, the Nation now also manages or co-manages an annual cut of about 140,000 cubic metres and runs its own small sawmill. It takes a percentage of the stumpage fees from every tree cut down in its traditional territory and co-owns a portion of Tree Farm Licence 25 in the Jordan River watershed. The Pacheedaht have declined to take an official position in the Fairy Creek controversy.

Ken Wu, the veteran forest activist, has since moved on to establish the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, which works mainly at the federal level. Wu, who now works out of Montreal, tells me a major change from the 1980s and 1990s is that, while logging-road blockades are a necessary “catalyst” to action, the harder and more lasting work involves building broader alliances with “non-traditional” partners in the resource industries.

The Trudeau government has committed Canada to achieve 30 per cent protection of marine and terrestrial ecosystems by 2030. Wu says that’s not near enough. The Endangered Ecosystems Alliance is aiming for 50 per cent. As for holding the line to protect the last stands of Canada’s West Coast temperate rainforest, Wu says the key is offering Indigenous communities a viable alternative to the trap between a rock and hard place—between old-growth logging and poverty.

“The point is, there’s hardly any of the high-productivity old-growth left,” Wu says, “and we have to protect everything that remains. B.C. is one of the very last jurisdictions on earth that still condones and supports the large-scale logging of 500- and 1,000-year-old trees. It doesn’t grow back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.”

This article appears in print in the May 2021 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Falling fast.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

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‘War in the woods’: activists blockade Vancouver Island in bid to save ancient trees

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The Guardian
April 8, 2021

Activists block a logging road to oppose the cutting of old growth trees in the Caycuse watershed on southern Vancouver Island.
Activists block a logging road to oppose the cutting of old growth trees in the Caycuse watershed on southern Vancouver Island. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian

Loggers say blockades threaten their livelihoods as activists build fortifications and vow to remain

Hundreds of activists are digging in at logging road blockades across a swath of southern Vancouver Island, vowing to stay as long as it takes to pressure the provincial government to immediately halt cutting of what they say is the last 3% of giant old growth trees left in the province.

The situation echoes the 1993 “war in the woods” in nearby Clayoquot Sound, which saw nearly 1,000 people arrested at similar logging blockades in the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history.

Giant old growth trees stand in a small protected area called Avatar Grove, near the Fairy Creek watershed on southern Vancouver Island.
Giant old growth trees stand in a small protected area called Avatar Grove, near the Fairy Creek watershed on southern Vancouver Island. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian

Tensions are rising. Just this weekend, the activists stopped a team of old growth tree cutters – called fallers – from entering a logging area in the Caycuse watershed.

“You know this is illegal?” said Trevor Simpson, a logger, who told the Guardian he’s been a faller contractor for 29 years and relies on cutting old-growth trees. “This is my livelihood at stake.

A blockader named Owen, one of about two dozen on the scene, told the loggers through the window of their pickup truck: “The fact is, if we want our planet to be sustainable, we have to protect these ecosystems.”

Members of the Rainforest Flying Squad speak with logging contractors after refusing to let them cross a bridge to an active cut block.
Members of the Rainforest Flying Squad speak with logging contractors after refusing to let them cross a bridge to an active cut block. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian
Trevor Simpson makes a satellite phone call after being refused access to a cut block by members of the Rainforest Flying Squad.
Trevor Simpson makes a satellite phone call after being refused access to a cut block by members of the Rainforest Flying Squad. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian

Another logger said: “We have to work. Are they [the blockaders] going to pay our wages today? If we don’t work, we don’t get paid.”

The blockaders refused to let Simpson’s team pass, and eventually the frustrated crew left. They returned on Tuesday to hand-deliver a court injunction ordering the blockades taken down and setting the stage for arrests. Similar scenes are playing out at strategic blockades across the area.

A forest defender drives though an old cut block near the Fairy Creek watershed.
A forest defender drives though an old cut block near the Fairy Creek watershed. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian

After the loggers left the Caycuse blockade, activists went to work building fortifications, a giant kitchen tent, and even an outhouse made entirely of discarded old-growth cedar.

The movement started more than eight months ago, when an impromptu blockade of 12 people sprang up to stop road building into the headwaters of the Fairy Creek watershed, one of the last untouched watersheds in the region.

But what started as a campaign to stop logging in a single watershed has grown thanks to widespread frustration with the British Columbia government’s broader approach to old-growth logging.

A blockader counts the rings in a recently cut old-growth cedar tree in the mountains above the Caycuse watershed.
A blockader counts the rings in a recently cut old-growth cedar tree in the mountains above the Caycuse watershed. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian
Blockaders hold a meeting around a fire after turning away an old-growth logging crew.
Blockaders hold a meeting around a fire after turning away an old-growth logging crew. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian

Activists and forestry experts say a tiny fraction of the province’s giant old-growth trees are left standing, and an immediate moratorium on cutting them is needed. Meanwhile, forestry companies and the government say the cut must continue in order to protect jobs in an industry that has experienced steep job losses and mill closures in recent years.

The logging company Teal Jones Group says its plans for cutting in Fairy Creek have been mischaracterized, and the trees it wants to cut are critical for supporting hundreds of jobs.

“Most of Fairy Creek is a protected forest reserve or unstable terrain and not available for harvesting,” said Gerrie Kotze, the company’s vice-president.

Kotze said Teal Jones’ planned cut was a small area at the head of the watershed. The company would harvest the trees with care “and mill every log we cut right here in BC,” he said.

The government is caught between its election promises to protect old-growth forests and what it says is an undue risk to jobs in the forestry industry.

“We want to make sure people can appreciate old-growth trees for years to come, while supporting a sustainable forest sector for workers and communities,” said the forestry minister, Katrine Conroy, in a statement.

Activists erect a structure at logging road blockade on southern Vancouver Island.
Activists erect a structure at logging road blockade on southern Vancouver Island. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian
Activists build wooden walkways in a stand of ancient old growth forest that is set to be logged in the near future.
Activists build wooden walkways in a stand of ancient old growth forest that is set to be logged in the near future. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian

In September, the government released a long-awaited old growth strategic review. Citing the “high risk to loss of biodiversity” and “widespread lack of confidence in the system of managing forests”, the report’s authors made 14 recommendations, including immediately deferring all old-growth logging in at-risk ecosystems, all of which were accepted by government.

But critics say after more than six months, the government is not moving fast enough while chainsaws continue to snarl and ancient trees continue to fall.

Rachel Holt, an independent ecologist, argues that the government is drastically overstating how much giant old growth still exists. The latest government reports say just over 13m hectares of total primary forest considered very old, or ancient, is still standing. Holt and her colleagues agree.

“But the vast majority of that – about 80% – consists of small or very small trees,” Holt said.

Members of the Rainforest Flying Squad blocking a logging road stay warm around a fire after setting up a new blockade.
Members of the Rainforest Flying Squad blocking a logging road stay warm around a fire after setting up a new blockade. Illustration: Jesse Winter/The Guardian

Giant, ancient trees are the bones of coastal temperate rainforests. Whole ecosystems can reside within their vast, moss-covered branches. To think of them as just pretty things to look at missed the point, Holt said.

The new blockades are international. On his computer in Washington state, 17-year-old Joshua Wright has followed the developments closely. Despite working remotely, the young film-maker is a key organizer with the movement, which calls itself the Rainforest Flying Squad.

Wright, who grew up on Vancouver Island, said it took moving to the US to realize how rare British Columbia’s remaining old growth is.

“If we don’t stop logging now, in three to five years there’s not going to be any old growth left,” said Wright.

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Caycuse before & after photos are the cover story of the latest British Columbia Magazine

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AFA photographer TJ Watt’s shocking before & after photos of old-growth logging by Teal-Jones in the Caycuse Valley are the cover story of the latest British Columbia Magazine. These impactful photos are helping to raise vast amounts of public awareness around the threats facing old-growth forests, inspiring thousands of new people to get involved in the campaign and hold politicians to account. Grab a copy to see the photo essay and write-up inside.

Nanaimo city council votes to oppose logging of at-risk old-growth forests

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Nanaimo News Bulletin
March 30, 2021

City calls on province to fund a just transition from logging old-growth

Nanaimo Coun. Ben Geselbracht speaks at a forest march co-promoted by Extinction Rebellion and the Vancouver Island Water Watch Coalition last summer. (News Bulletin file photo)

Nanaimo Coun. Ben Geselbracht speaks at a forest march co-promoted by Extinction Rebellion and the Vancouver Island Water Watch Coalition last summer. (News Bulletin file photo)

The City of Nanaimo has now joined the protest to try to protect old-growth forests following a motion at this week’s city council meeting.

Council voted 5-4 on Monday night in favour of Coun. Ben Geselbracht’s motion to formally oppose logging of at-risk old-growth forests. The motion calls on the B.C. government to defer logging “in all high-productivity, rare, oldest and most intact” old-growth forests including at Fairy Creek near Port Renfrew, fund an “economically just” transition from “unsustainable” logging and forward the resolution for debate at the next Union of B.C. Municipalities convention.

Geselbracht’s motion suggested 75 per cent of “the original high-productivity, big-tree old-growth forests” in B.C. are slated to be logged.

“This is an unacceptable level of protection for the little that is left of such a globally valuable natural asset,” Geselbracht said.

He said he’s been moved by people mobilizing to pressure the B.C. government to meet its commitments to protect ancient forests and develop a more sustainable forest industry. He said some industry voices have tried to characterize his resolution as anti-logging, anti-forestry and anti-jobs.

“This could not be further from the truth,” Geselbracht said. “We have no choice but to develop an economy that operates inside ecological limits of the planet.”

The majority of councillors supporting the motion included Coun. Zeni Maartman, who said the province’s old-growth strategic review was an in-depth and comprehensive process and said it’s time for the province to step up and follow through on recommendations.

Coun. Tyler Brown was also in favour. He said he doesn’t envy the provincial government’s difficult decisions ahead regarding old-growth, but liked the idea of deferral of logging those forests in the meantime.

“That’s not to say we’re not going to log at all, that’s not to say that we’re never going to log old-growth, it’s just going to say there’s a little bit to unpack here,” Brown said.

He said old-growth forests have disappeared gradually, so once they’re gone, people won’t know what they’ve lost.

“We can be doing better from an environment perspective and we can be doing just transitions better and doing better for our communities in the long run,” he said.

Coun. Erin Hemmens said she was voting in favour because she thought the conversation should be elevated for discussion with other local government representatives, “because that’s where advocacy positions are developed.”

Most of the councillors who were opposed felt the Nanaimo city council table wasn’t the appropriate forum for the motion. Coun. Sheryl Armstrong said the discussion should be between the provincial government and First Nations, and Mayor Leonard Krog said it’s the B.C. legislature where forest policy decisions should be debated.

Coun. Ian Thorpe said Geselbracht’s motion put council “in the middle of a conflict” between government policy, Green Party philosophy, the lumber industry and environmental protesters.

“We’re in a no-win situation here … We’re going to be seen as either anti-logging, industry and employment, or anti-environment and I don’t think we want to be seen in either of those ways…” Thorpe said. “I’m not prepared to support this inappropriate and divisive motion. It plays to provincial politics and personal agenda and it doesn’t belong at this table.”

Armstrong, Krog, Thorpe and Coun. Jim Turley voted against the motion. City director of legislative services Sheila Gurrie said the motion comes too late in the year to be forwarded to the Association of Vancouver Island and Coastal Communities, but can go to UBCM.

Earlier on Monday, the B.C. Forestry Alliance asked Nanaimo city council to set aside Geselbracht’s motion as “counterproductive and not inclusive of workers and communities,” adding that halting old-growth harvesting would have an “immediate negative effect” on companies tied to the forest industry and on the city’s economy.

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B.C. government faces rising criticism for failing to protect old growth forests from logging

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Chek News
March 20, 2021

B.C.’s New Democrat government, once an ally of environmentalists in protecting the province’s ancient forests, is now facing increasingly heavy criticism for its failure to stop the logging of the province’s remaining old growth trees.

Premier John Horgan has recently seen his constituency office targeted for protest by those opposed to old growth logging, a forest company in his riding blockaded by activists and his forests minister grilled by the opposition B.C. Greens in the legislature. On Friday, as many as 300 environmental supporters marched through downtown Victoria to demand government halt old growth logging.

At issue is whether the government is following recommendations in an expert panel report it commissioned, one of which calls for a halt to old growth logging, in areas where ecosystems are at high risk of irreversible biodiversity loss. That pause was supposed to be in place by this month, according to the report’s timeline, to give the province time to craft an old growth plan.

Forests minister Katrine Conroy insists government has taken “a first step” by in September deferring logging in 353,000 hectares at nine locations, including Clayoquot Sound and McKelvie Creek on western Vancouver Island, as well as H’Kusam near Campbell River.

“It’s complicated,” Conroy said in an interview. “It’s not just as easy as to say, oh yes we’ll have a moratorium on all old growth in the province, which is actually something the report did not recommend. They recognized there is going to be some old growth logging in the province.”

However, only a small fraction of the old growth Conroy deferred from logging is actually high-productivity and at risk of logging — and in some cases the province is double-counting forests it has already preserved. It also isn’t actually banning logging in those protected areas, instead allowing companies to harvest second growth in and amongst the ancient trees. The reprieve comes with a two-year expiration date.

Environmental groups and the Greens accuse the NDP of dragging its feet on the file, out of fear of harming blue-collar forestry jobs in unions like the United Steelworkers, which continue to be power-brokers within the New Democratic party.

“Here’s the problem with how they’ve approached it, they come out and make announcements like, ‘Oh look at the good work we’ve done,’ and then you go pick it apart and realize it’s not an honest statement at all,” said Green leader Sonia Furstenau.

The province’s expert report. which was completed and released during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, recommended detailed consultation with First Nations, a new forestry framework, bringing forestry management into compliance with targets to maintain biological diversity for old growth, as well as more robust mapping, policy, and old growth classifications. Overall, B.C. should enact legislation that declares the conservation of ecosystem health and biodiversity as its overarching goal, the strategic review recommends.

Little, if any, of that has actually happened, say critics. Instead, they accuse the government of leading with rhetoric and platitudes from the premier and his ministers.

“I’m afraid we’re not going anywhere,” said Furstenau. “By the time anything actually starts to happen in earnest, the forest that will be lost by then, you can’t replace them, and that will be the legacy of this government. It will be a legacy of destruction of ecosystems that were astonishingly rare.”

‘Hardly’ any old growth left, say activists

B.C. has roughly 50 million hectares of forest, of which 13.7 million is considered old growth — trees more than 250 years old on the coast and 140 years old in the interior. But not all old growth fits the commonly-associated picture of gigantic and soaring Douglas Fir or Western Red Cedar trees — much of it is bog, or small high-alpine trees that are old but nonetheless small enough to grab with one hand.

Only 108,000 hectares is large, old, picturesque traditional old growth forest, and that’s less than eight per cent of what was there in the past due to logging, said Rachel Holt, a longtime old growth ecologist who runs Veridian Ecological Consulting and has crunched the province’s forestry numbers.

“There’s hardly any of it left,” she said. “It is highly endangered. If it’s not protected, it’s going to be logged in the near future.”

Conroy has responded to criticism by arguing September’s deferral of 350,000 hectares of old growth will give the province the time to do the consultation required with First Nations, forestry companies, environmental groups and forestry-dependent communities about how to balance valuable old growth logging with environmental protection. There are also aboriginal communities that depend on old growth logging and partner with forestry companies to provide jobs for their community, she said.

“For some people, it will never be enough what we do, because they have that laser focus only on old growth, not on any of the other issues that come up with this,” said Conroy. “There’s thousands of people across the province who have good family supporting jobs because of the forest industry, and we have to make sure we take that into consideration.”

The old growth report recommended government begin indigenous consultation and defer logging in ecosystems at very high risk within six months, so it can work on other goals that could take as a long as three years. That six months was up in March. Conroy argues both recommendations are underway, but environmental groups say the NDP is just stalling for time.

“The NDP are banking on a strategy which is that there’s a whole lot more rural working class votes than urban idealist tree hugging super leftist types in Victoria so we’re not going to be catering to that protest crowd,” said Ken Wu, who has spent 30 years campaigning to save old growth forests and is now executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance.

“But the reality is if you look at public opinion poling the vast majority of people, pervading different classes and areas, is we need to save old growth and log second growth.

“The NDP have read it wrong. They are classic old-school industrial union labour guys.”

Furstenau, Holt and environmentalists like Wu point to Conroy’s claim 350,000 hectares of old growth has been deferred for protection as an example of the NDP playing with numbers to distract the public from its inaction.

Of the 350,000 hectares Conroy deferred in September, 100,000 hectares is not forested at all, and a further 100,000 hectares doesn’t contain old trees, calculated Holt. The remaining approximately 150,000 hectares of old growth contains actually 5,637 hectares of productive old growth, and 1,849 hectares of that was already protected, she said. That means less than one per cent of what the minister announced as protected is actually what the public would consider traditional large old growth forests, she said.

The goal is to give the perception of progress where little exists, said Wu.

“They are like, let’s let Ken Wu sputter about productivity distinctions in complex phrases while we trot out our simple sounding catchy statistics and words, and then let the confusion set in to buy time to talk and log,” he said. “But I think people are getting more and more aware.”

The flashpoint of the entire dispute is Fairy Creek, an ancient temperate rainforest and valley near Port Renfrew. A group of protesters have blockaded access to the area for almost eight months in a bid to prevent forest company Teal Jones from logging in the area.

“This is the last stand for old growth forests,” said Joshua Wright, a spokesperson for Rainforest Flying Squad, the environmental group running the blockades.

Teal Jones is in B.C. Supreme Court this week seeking an injunction that, if enforced, could see the protesters arrested.

Wright said he expects a similar scene as in 1993, when almost 1,000 people were arrested for protesting logging Clayoquot Sound, in what became known as the War in the Woods. That incident also occurred during the last NDP government in B.C.

“There was the war in the woods in the 1990s — that was 30 years ago, but it’s still going,” said Wright. “If we don’t stop it now … they will all be gone in a matter of years. What we’re planning on doing is taking a last stand for these forests.”

Conroy said the province has to take the time necessary to craft policies that balance logging and forest protection, or else the system won’t be sustainable for the future. Forestry companies need to partner with local First Nations and pursue diverse long-term goals as well, she said.

“My goal is to have a sustainable forest industry,” she said. “I look at my grandkids, if they want to work in the forest industry I want to make sure if when they are old enough they can. And if they want to go for hikes in the woods and see old growth forests and see those forests, that they have that opportunity too.”

Furstenau said the province simply needs to have the courage to follow the expert report’s call for a paradigm shift in how it protects old growth forests. Anything short of that is a betrayal of what Horgan has previously promised, she said.

“It is disappointing but not out of character,” said Furstenau. “This is what we’ve seen from successive governments from this province, and now we’re at the point where we’re literally talking about the last bits of remaining old growth and whether we just let it all get chopped down or do we actually make an effort to change things.”

The B.C. government is facing criticism it has failed to protect old growth forests from logging. (Photo by TJ Watt, submitted to CHEK News)

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6 months after old growth report, Island’s Green MLAs rap NDP for lack of action

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Vancouver Island Free Daily
March 18, 2021

Forestry minister reiterates commitment to change, First Nations consultation

The Green Party of B.C. has been raising questions about old-growth logging in the legislature this week and last, challenging the government on its stated commitment to implement the 14 recommendations made by the old growth strategic review panel last year.

For three days, Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau argued that the NDP has missed the six-month deadline for immediate action to protect the highest risk old-growth forests, and has still not committed to a timeline on the project. On Wednesday, she and fellow Green MLA Adam Olsen read out submitted quotes from three Vancouver Island First Nations — Kwakiutl, Ma’amtagila, Nuchatlaht — who have old-growth concerns in their territory.

In response, the Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, Katrine Conroy repeatedly said that the government is committed to implementing the recommendations and to engaging with Indigenous leadership. She listed the nine old-growth forests where the government temporarily deferred logging in September — none in the territories of the nations quoted — and reminded the MLAs that one of the authors is a Tahltan First Nation member from northern B.C.

Dorothy Hunt, an elected councillor for the Kwakiutl First Nation near Port Hardy and Port McNeill said:

“The Kwakiutl First Nation is not opposed to logging, but we have had a ban on old-growth logging in our territory for over 10 years. Yet new logging approvals continue to move forward without meaningful consultation and consent.

“We asked this government for deferrals in all remaining old-growth in our territory more than five months ago, and yet we still see new old-growth logging being approved in our salmon-bearing watersheds.”

The report, A New Future for Old Forests, was commissioned by the government in 2019 and released to the public in Sept. 2020 with 14 recommendations that would overhaul how old-growth forests are managed in B.C.

Two of the key recommendations were to engage Indigenous leadership, and “defer development in old forests where ecosystems are at very high and near-term risk of irreversible biodiversity loss.”

In September, the government temporarily deferred logging in nine old-growth forests it considered high risk in B.C., including Clayoquot Sound, McKelvie Creek and H’Kusam on Vancouver Island. Conroy, who wasn’t minister at the time, said those deferrals were made in consultation with First Nations in the areas.

None of those areas are in Kwakiutl territory, and yesterday Furstenau criticized the protected old growth as “stubby sub-alpine trees” that are not the big, ancient forests the old-growth panel was referring to.

“You can’t consult about trees that are already cut,” Olsen critiqued.

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Critics cut into B.C. government’s protection plan for old-growth forests

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National Observer
March 15, 2021

Environmental groups and the BC Green Party say the province’s failure to defer old-growth logging will exhaust the last remaining stands while a new forestry plan is developed. Photo by Louis Bockner

B.C.’s forestry minister made clear a moratorium on old-growth logging is off the table as she responded to critics of the government’s progress on a promise to overhaul its approach to forestry on Thursday.

BC Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau pressed Minister Katrine Conroy during question period tooutline what meaningful actions government was taking to immediately protect critical old-growth forests, suggesting instead that the NDP was employing the “old strategy of talk and log.”

The questions arose after a coalition of environmental groups issued the province failing grades six months after it promised to act on recommendations stemming from a review of B.C.’s old-growth forestry practices.

Government intends to implement the old-growth panel recommendations to develop new holistic approaches to old-growth forests, Conroy said, adding a divisive, patchwork approach to the management of ancient forests took place in the past.

“Those who are calling for a return to the status quo are putting B.C.’s majestic old-growth and vital biodiversity at risk, and those who are calling for an immediate moratorium are ignoring the needs of thousands of workers and families in forest-dependent communities right across our province,” she said.

“We want old-growth forests to be appreciated by people today, and in years to come,” Conroy said.

“It’s also a priority for our government to support good jobs for people in B.C.’s forestry sector.”

Katrine Conroy, B.C.’s minister of forests, lands and natural resource operations, says the provincial government needs time to consult First Nations on old-growth strategy while critics say it is a “log and talk” and approach. File photo courtesy of the B.C. government

The old-growth panel’s recommendations did not call for a complete moratorium on old-growth logging, but rather a deferral of operations within the first six months of the staged process to shift to a new approach to forestry, Furstenau clarified.

“The government has not responded to the advice that was given,” she said.

“The first step is the immediate interim protection across B.C. to create breathing room and protect what we have left.”

“When the minister says, ‘We can’t rush this,’ it’s like hearing we can’t rush CPR when someone needs it,” says Torrance Coste of the Wilderness Committee on the urgent need for the government to defer logging in B.C.’s #oldgrowth forests. #bcpoli

Government has already initiated two of the immediate recommendations, Conroy said, pointing to the collaboration with First Nations to establish old-growth logging deferrals in nine areas across the province.

Action has also started on other recommendations to improve public information and compliance, Conroy said.

“While we’ve taken these important first steps as recommended by the panel within six months, we know there is much more work to do,” Conroy said.

“We are dedicated to continuing in this important work with government-to-government discussions with Indigenous leaders, and talking to our partners in labour, industry, environmental organizations and communities.”

Torrance Coste, a campaigner with the Wilderness Committee — one of the trio of environmental groups that issued the negative report card on the province’s progress around the panel’s recommendations — agreed it was a critical priority for government to engage with First Nations to make the focus shift from timber harvesting to prioritizing ecological integrity in old-growth forestry management.

However, during that lengthy consultation process, it is urgent to protect what little remains of B.C.’s big-tree, old-growth forest ecosystems, Coste said.

It’s urgent to protect what little remains of B.C.’s big-tree, old-growth forest ecosystems while government crafts a new forestry mangement plan, says Torrance Coste of the Wilderness Committee. Photo courtesy of the Wilderness Committee

“Absolutely, government needs to engage with First Nations. These forests grow in their territories and any solution needs to be centred in Indigenous rights,” Coste said.

“But if 10 years down the road, First Nations want to make the choice to either log their old-growth or protect it, they won’t have that choice if government doesn’t implement those deferrals now.”

The Wilderness Committee, along with the Ancient Forest Alliance and the Sierra Club BC, wants the province to meet the old-growth panel’s recommendations to develop a staged plan for its forestry transition, complete with concrete milestones and funding for the process, particularly for First Nations where logging deferral will cause economic hardship.

The Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO) did not clarify if any more logging deferrals are planned — as promised by the NDP during the election — or whether concrete funds or timelines for the transition are being established.

“The economic impacts of its recommendations need to be analyzed,” FLNRO said in an email Friday.

The panel’s timeline for recommendations indicated when work should be started — not completed — and the timeline was developed prior to the pandemic, the ministry added.

“COVID-19 is impacting every community and (First) Nation in the province, presenting added challenges to the engagement process,” FLNRO said.

“That said, we are moving forward with this engagement process, but it will take time.”

Coste disputed there is any time left to avoid old-growth deferrals, particularly for the most at-risk, valley bottom old-growth, as it’s more easily accessible, worth more, and being targeted by logging companies.

There is only around 400,000 hectares of big-tree old-growth left in the province, he said.

“What you picture when you close your eyes and think of old-growth forest, that’s very, very scarce,” Coste said.

“You might think it’ll get protected because that’s what the panel recommended.

“But, when the minister says, ‘We can’t rush this,’ it’s like hearing we can’t rush CPR when someone needs it.”

Rochelle Baker / Local Journalism Initiative / Canada’s National Observer

[Editor’s Note: This story was updated Monday morning to correct a figure in this story that stated there were 200,000 hectares of old growth in B.C. when it should read there are 400,000 hectares.]

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Nothing but delays: Old-growth logging continues as B.C.’s commitments to change slip

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The Globe and Mail
March 14, 2021

A forest defender places his hand on an ancient Western Redcedar in Eden Grove part of the ever-shrinking base of ancient trees near Port Renfrew, B.C.PHOTOS BY CHAD HIPOLITO/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

British Columbia’s rare and ancient trees continue to vanish into sawmills at worrying rates despite the Great Bear Rainforest agreement reached with great fanfare five years ago to protect the largest coastal temperate rainforest on the planet.

The province’s NDP government, re-elected last fall with a commitment to lead a paradigm shift in forestry, is mired in planning and consultation.

“The promise of the Great Bear Rainforest was to change this broken system,” said Nicole Rycroft, executive director of Canopy, a non-profit group that partners with forest-product customers – including Penguin Random House, Kimberly Clark, Scholastic and The Globe and Mail – to advance conservation.

Some of the biggest names in the print publishing world gathered for a virtual conference in early Marchto hear how B.C. is living up to the Great Bear Rainforest agreement. They left disappointed.

“Things are clearly substantively behind schedule,” Ms. Rycroft said. Representatives for companies partnered with Canopy “left the call with a number of questions around how the government could be clearly not fulfilling the public commitment that was made.”

The 2016 Great Bear Rainforest agreement, the product of 20 years of negotiations between environmentalists, forestry companies, Indigenous communities and the provincial government, was forged under market pressure. More than 80 companies, including Home Depot, Staples and IKEA, had been persuaded to stop selling products made from B.C.’s old-growth forests. The deal’s signing brought those customers back – with the promise that buying B.C. forestry products would help them meet their own commitments to environmental values.

British Columbia reaped international accolades for the deal, which applied to 6.4 million hectares of the coast from the north of Vancouver Island to the Alaska Panhandle.

The agreement promised to protect 85 per cent of the region’s old-growth forests, with logging in the remaining 15 per cent subject to the most stringent standards in North America. But since it was signed, more than 10 million cubic metres of timber have been harvested in the Great Bear without the enforcement mechanisms that were supposed to ensure ecosystem-based management is being applied.

An ancient stump in a clearcut area near Port Renfrew, B.C.
Big Lonely Doug, an ancient Douglas Fir stands alone in a clearcut area near Port Renfrew, B.C.

Instead of setting aside the rare and iconic big trees for protection, “there are a lot of very big stumps,” said conservation biologist Jody Holmes, an architect of the agreement.

Canopy is proposing to halt old-growth logging in the Great Bear until individual logging plans are approved – and so far, not one plan has been approved. B.C. Forests Minister Katrine Conroy, who would not provide that commitment, told those at the March meeting that progress is being made, but the issues are complex. “We have to do this right; we can’t rush this,” she said later in an interview.

Marilyn Slett is the chief councillor of the Heiltsuk Nation, whose territory encompasses a substantial portion of the Great Bear Rainforest. “We’re not thrilled with the pace of change,” she said in an interview. The Heiltsuk want to protect old growth in their territory, and there is frustration that the targets in the agreement have fallen behind schedule. The process is overly complex, she said.

“But relationships take time, and we are in it for the long haul,” she said.

British Columbia is home to 57 million hectares of forests, but ancient, temperate rainforests are astonishingly rare. A recent study found that those highly productive, intact ecosystems make up less than 1 per cent of B.C.’s remaining forests.

In 2019, the government set up an expert panel to review the divisive issue of old-growth logging. The panel’s report was not released until last fall, and during the election campaign, the NDP promised to enact all of the panel’s recommendations.

But the timeline for these changes is also slipping, and one long-running act of civil disobedience captures the dismay with the lack of progress.

For more than 200 days, protesters have maintained a remote forest blockade against logging in a valley on Vancouver Island. Fairy Creek is part of Tree Farm Licence 46 and features increasingly rare intact stands of Western redcedar and yellow cedars, trees that are up to 800 years old.

Camp set up with all of the amenities at the Fairy Creek blockade near Port Renfrew, B.C.
Signage at the Fairy Creek blockade, where demonstrators could soon face arrest.

The Fairy Creek demonstrators could soon face arrest. An application brought by the logging company, The Teal-Jones Group, will be heard in court on March 26. The escalating conflict unfolding in Premier John Horgan’s riding underscores the gap between the Premier’s campaign commitments and the unabated harvesting of some of the biggest, oldest and most valuable trees left in the province.

Mr. Horgan says his government is moving towarda new way of practising forestry,one that sustains the biodiversity in B.C.’s ancient forests while allowing forestry companies to extract more value from the timber that is harvested. There are no shortcuts, he said.

“This is an intractable problem in British Columbia, and I believe we’ve laid the groundwork for a positive resolution, but it’s a paradigm shift in how the industry operates,” he said in an interview Friday.

“It is not my intention to see the last big tree felled – quite the contrary. “

He knows the iconic status attached to those old-growth forests, but he said big trees will continue to fall while the new rules are developed.

His party was in government in the 1990s when more than 850 people were arrested at Clayoquot Sound, a fight that was dubbed the War in the Woods. The fight to protect the Great Bear Rainforest, although waged in boardrooms, was the province’s second major land-use war.

Dallas Smith is president of the Nanwakolas Council,which represents six of the First Nations in the Great Bear Rainforest, and one of the Indigenous leaders who signed the accord five years ago.

Forest defender Duncan Morrison looks at fallen trees blown over most likely by a windstorm part of the ever shrinking base of ancient trees at the Fairy Creek Blockade.

The blockades at Fairy Creek are a symptom of rising tension, he warns, because the province has been dragging its heels on reform. “To have the audacity to campaign on old growth, and then still just not do anything. … I see the War in the Woods 3.0 coming pretty quick,” he said.

Gerrie Kotze, vice-president and CFO of The Teal-Jones Group, noted that his company consulted with local First Nations before starting its harvesting plans this year.

“Engagement and reconciliation with First Nations is core to our values,” he said in a written statement. The province already does balance conservation with economic activity, he said. “We support this balanced approach to the province’s land base, and respect that significant stands of forested lands have been set aside for conservation.”

While the blockade has halted Teal-Jones’ logging operations in Fairy Creek, the company has been logging nearby, in the Caycuse watershed.

Environmentalists are concerned.

Artist-in-Residence at the Eden Grove Protection Camp and forest advocate Jeremy Herndl works on his 6ft x 5ft oil painting of an ancient Western Redcedar in Eden Grove near Port Renfrew, B.C.

“That’s the best old-growth forest that’s been destroyed on southern Vancouver Island in the last five years, and it was planned, applied for, permitted, and logged after the government commissioned the old-growth report,” said Torrance Coste, national campaign director for the Wilderness Committee. “Every week that we wait, there’s less and less old growth to protect.”

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Environmental group issues report card on B.C. NDP government’s old-growth forest promises

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An environmental group is giving the B.C. government a failing grade on its promises to protect old-growth forests. Paul Johnson has reaction from the province and more from the Canadian musician who’s lending his voice to the cause.

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Province failing to protect old growth forests, environmental groups say

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Times Colonist
March 12, 2021

Fairy Creek rainforest. TJ WATT

The province is running out of time to take action to protect old growth forests, says a coalition of environmental groups.

The Sierra Club, Ancient Forest Alliance and Wilderness Committee released a “report card” Thursday ­giving the B.C. government a failing grade for inaction on meeting the short-term milestones for old-growth protection recommended in an independent report released six months ago. 

Jens Wieting, a senior forest and climate campaigner and science adviser with Sierra Club, said the Old Growth Strategic Review represented a “moment of hope” for old-growth ­protection when it was released in ­September. “This report really outlines a blueprint for solutions. It shows what steps the B.C. government must take to have this paradigm shift that the panel calls for,” he said.

The report provided a three-year framework to improve management of old growth forests, including the recommendation that development be deferred in old growth forests at high risk of irreversible biodiversity loss within six months.

In September, the province announced the deferral of old-forest harvesting in nine areas, totalling 353,000 hectares, but that represents “a small fraction” of the most at-risk forests, Wieting said.

“What we are seeing is there’s no work plan with milestone dates, there’s no funding,” Wieting said. “Not a single dollar has been committed.”

Doing nothing means logging of old growth forests continues, he said, and at the current rate of old-growth logging, “many endangered old-growth ecosystems like those in Fairy Creek will be logged to the brink within three to five years.”

A group of protesters have been ­preventing logging company Teal Jones from accessing a cut block near Fairy Creek for seven months. Teal Jones has responded by applying for an injunction to remove the blockades. Last week, a judge granted the activists a three-week reprieve to allow their legal team more time to assemble materials.

Joshua Wright, a spokesman for the protesters, said the province needs to take responsibility for the conflict at Fairy Creek.

“This is us doing their job for them, in a way,” he said. “They committed to protecting extremely high-value ecological areas within six months and they haven’t, so we’ve been out there instead protecting it for them.”

Torrance Coste, national campaign director for Wilderness Committee, said the lack of action to protect old growth forests should be just as upsetting to loggers as it is to environmentalists.

“We’re going to run out of old growth, and then what’s the plan for the industry?” he said. “That’s a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. It’s a big question, and so far government seems to be avoiding it.”

Katrine Conroy, minister of forests, lands, natural resource operations and rural development, said in a statement the province is developing a new approach to how old-growth forests are managed.

“We know some are calling for an immediate moratorium, but this approach risks thousands of good family-supporting jobs. We know others have called for no changes to logging practices, but this could risk damage to key ecosystems,” Conroy said.

The province committed to implementing all 14 recommendations in the report and took action on four recommendations in September, she said. “Our commitment to this important work has not changed.”

regan-elliott@timescolonist.com

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