WATERSHED UPDATE – November 12th, 2007
As of today, there have been 129 positive responses to the question “Are you in favor of a town hall meeting with Premier Campbell?” where we want the Premier to inform the Community, just exactly what he has in mind in terms of protecting our drinking water on the Sunshine Coast.
For all those residents who have responded and answered the question on our watershed web site www.yourwatershed.com we appreciate you taking the time to answer the question and also for your support.
Before we approach the Regional District to make the request to the Premier for a town hall meeting, we will need to have a much larger number of residents answering the question. So please talk to your friends and neighbors and make them aware of this idea for a town hall meeting with the Premier and ask them to cast their vote on our watershed web site.
At this time in our Provincial Government there seems to be a general movement away from the democratic process and a movement towards “privatization” of British Columbia’s public assets and resources.
MLA Corky Evans wrote the following letter and even though the letter is quite long, it is well worth the time to read Corky’s comments as they relate to what is happening currently in the Province. You may also wish to visit Corky’s web site and blog, etc.
The Big Lie
The following letter was written by Corky on November 4, 2007. It is
meant to inspire thoughtful dialogue. Since many folks send interesting
and insightful comments after reading one of Corky‚s letters, we have decided
to put this one in a blog form. That way, you can see each other‚s comments.
Look for it at www.corkyevans.kootenayactivist.ca/blog
Dear Friends:
Back a few years, before the election of 2005, I was working in the town of
Nakusp. Walking down the street one day, I ran into a guy I used to know
who has served many years as a Social Credit Cabinet Minister.
It was winter and, in winter in Nakusp, pretty much everyone you meet on the
street is someone who lives there. The unlikely meeting of two historical
political combatants on the streets of a little town on the Arrow Lakes made
for a sense that we were on neutral turf. We struck up a conversation
more personal than public.
He asked me if I would run for office again and then, surprisingly, he almost
begged me to re-enter politics. I knew this fellow by virtue of our
mutual years as enemies, so I asked him why he cared. His answer surprised me.
I am only now beginning to understand. He said, “Because Campbell
is running the worst government in history and we have to bring him down before
he destroys British Columbia.”
“We?” I thought. This SoCred icon and me are now “we”? This was
interesting and I wanted to know what might have caused such a shift. I
suggested we go for a walk and I steered us to the empty waterside walkway
where I was pretty sure we would be alone in the wind and he might be inclined
to tell me what had caused such a conversion in alliance.
“I like this new life,’ I said. “Why should I go back into the chaos we
both know is public life? Why is Campbell, as you describe, the ‘worst
government in history?”
He said, “Your Party and my Party have always fought over who should run the
province, who should work for us, and how much we should pay them. We did
not fight over whose land this was, though, because we agreed, everyone agreed:
It belongs to us.”
“We own it from the electrical power system to the trees to the bridges and the
railroad. Campbell doesn’t believe what we believed. He believes
the idea of public ownership, of the concept of the Crown, is a failed idea
that needs to be dismantled.
“Your governments and mine, Corky, were rich or poor according to the price of
what we had to sell, like coal or lumber or electricity or gas. When
prices were good we ran surpluses and people were happy. When prices were
poor we ran deficits and cut services and people hated us. Campbell
doesn‚t need to care about the price of what we produce on the farm. He
is selling off the farm, itself, piece by piece, and running government on the
cash flow he gets from the auction of our assets.”
“I am from the business community; the ‘old’ business community. We like
to build commercial enterprises and make money. We believe in our right
to do work and make a profit. Campbell isn’t interested in whether or not
British Columbia business makes a profit. He is interested in selling the
businesses, not running them. If this is allowed to continue, both your
Party, and the people who do work, and my Party, and the people who run
businesses, will be working for people we don’t know making decisions we don‚t
understand because we no longer own the province.”
I am chagrined to admit that I didn’t believe my newfound political ally.
I had fought his kind all my adult life and I was not paying much
attention to parliamentary affairs. I pretty much decided he must have
been just talking out of sour grapes because his era in power had been eclipsed
and his Party had been destroyed by Liberals and he missed the limelight.
We made small talk for a while as I led us back to the main street where
we had met. We said good-bye. I returned to my life and my job and
the much less lofty preoccupations that had normally filled my days.
That was four years ago.
Lately, I have come to understand that I had been given a short course in the
‘real politic’ of British Columbia and I had, at
the time, no idea how real and how wise were the words my former SoCred
newfound friend had spoken.
More and more I think we live in an illusion: a lie, even.
When I was a kid I was late home from school a lot. I liked to play
ball in the park and I would miss dinner and then make up some story to cover
my behavior. One night my dad ran out of patience with my excuses and
said, “Corky, if you are going to tell me a lie, don‚t tell me a little one
that I can understand and figure out. Tell me a whopper that is too big
for me to comprehend and poke holes in.”
It was many years before I understood that my dad was really talking about the
Joe McCarthy era he had just lived through, and not my little stories about why
I was late for dinner.
I am reminded of that lecture all the time now as I realize, more and more, how
Campbell has governed and why my SoCred mentor was so right in his analysis.
Remember those early years of this century? Remember how we were
consumed, sometimes almost daily, by the savage cuts to seniors‚ services and
childcare and government workers and every possible sector of human services?
While we were reeling from change, and two lonely women in the legislature were
trying to hold up the whole sky by themselves, the Liberals were quietly
dismantling the very idea of what „is‰ British Columbia. And only now is
it even beginning to sink in.
I was stunned into huge depression last year by my failure to save Formosa
Nursery (in Maple Ridge) from the stupidity of being cut in two by a road that
for 40 years has been planned to run next to, not through, their farm.
When I first met the farmers and saw their trouble, I thought, “No problem.
This is too stupid to happen. We will fix this.” Only after
months of failure to ‘fix’ the mess did it sink in that the road could not be
moved back to where it belonged, even if the municipalities and the ALC and the
Ministry of Highways wanted to move it off the farm, because the Province had,
literally, sold the road to a private company. The people we trust to run
the Province no longer controlled the outcome of their own decisions.
About the same time as we were dealing with Formosa, the woman who sells feed
for animals in my village yelled at me that we ‘politicians’ were destroying
her business. I told her I had no idea what she was talking about.
She explained that there was some law that was making it illegal to raise
pigs or chickens or cows for farm gate sale, so her customers weren’t‚t raising
animals, so she couldn’t‚t sell feed and it was ‘the politicians’ fault.
I told her, just as I had told Ting and Risa, that I was sure she was wrong and
I would figure out what the misunderstanding was. How could it be illegal
to do what we had always done? If she were right, it would be like making
it illegal to breathe or eat or live.
Sure enough, it turned out that back in 2003, when nobody was looking, with no
debate, Campbell and the big companies had quietly passed a law, that would not
take effect until after a provincial election (so it could not become an
election issue), that it would be a criminal act to sell meat to your neighbor.
Then I attended a meeting in Vernon, of people from the length of the Okanagan
from Anarchist Mountain to Kamloops who were all
in a struggle with trespassers digging up their land and diverting their
streams. I learned at the meeting that the laws of trespass had changed,
too, and now it was okay to invade someone‚s property if you had a Free Miner‚s
permit. This time I was not so dumb as to say, “This can‚t be true” in
public, but I thought it inside my head. When the rules are the rules for
your whole life, and you believe in the rules, it is hard to imagine that we
could now be living under different rules without even knowing what had
happened.
(When my kids were little, I remember attending a lecture on parenting, where
the expert told us: “The way to make your children crazy is to change the
rules as you go along. If the same action on the kid‚s part has different
outcomes, they will not have any idea what is okay and is not okay. They
will learn that ‘authority’ is really just power, and the definition of ‘Okay’
is whatever they can get away with and the definition of ‘Not okay’ is whatever
they get caught at.”)
Then, last spring, I was asked to visit a farmer in Delta I had known years ago
when we, as government, had returned his expropriated land. The farmer
showed me a letter from BC Rail re-expropriating his land to accommodate a new
port development at Tsawwassen.
It was hard not to believe him, standing as I was in his potato field and
holding the letter. In this case, something that I had, personally, tried
to make right was being undone to accomplish a massive industrial development
that had, originally, been stopped 30 years ago by Dave Barrett‚s government.
In trying to learn about my farmer friend‚s troubles, I became educated about
the Tsawwassen Treaty, the ‘Gateway’ project to
add $7 billion worth of roads (through farmland) in the GVRD and the plan to
pave farmland to make a parking lot for containers from Asia
to accommodate the transfer of goods to big box stores in Central Canada.
Now my father‚s words about the ‘Big Lie’ were coming back to me on a daily
basis, sometimes hourly.
Now we are coming to the part that affects my friends in the Arrow Lakes
Region. A month or more ago, one of you said to me, “There is a rumor in
Nakusp that Pope and Talbot is going to sell their private lands in TFL 23.”
And I said, “That cannot happen. Nobody can sell the private land
component of a contract with the Crown, without breaking the contract and
losing the Crown land.”
For the first week I was so sure I was right that I forgot to ask anybody what
was really happening. How could I be wrong? I have worked in the
Forest Industry or in Government all of my adult life. This isn‚t a case
of not understanding ‘The rules’. The rules are the same for every rancher
with a grazing lease or logger with a woodlot. If you sell off your
private land, you lose your access to Crown land. Period. Most of
those rules were put in place by Social Credit a half a century ago, to make an
economy and to ensure that both private and public land would be managed
according to some kind of plan and not exploited by any owner or government.
And then, when the Regional Director and the Mayor of Nakusp asked me about the
same rumor, I wrote to the Minister of Forests to ask him what was going on.
When he didn’t‚t answer, I began to listen to other MLA‚s talking
about similar land sales out of Tree Farm Licenses on Vancouver Island and,
together, we asked questions in the Legislature. Sometimes the Minister
called us ‘Socialists’ for suggesting that legal and social contracts were
being broken. Sometimes he just was absent.
The upshot, of course, is that we learned that way back in 2003 Campbell
changed the rules. Not for ranchers or woodlot owners or the little
sawmills in the area, just for corporations. Now they can do anything
they want. Full stop. They can sell the private land that they put
up to make a contract with the Crown and the Crown will not withdraw their
license to public land. Worse, their Tree Farm License with the people of
BC is no longer a ‘right’ that they receive as a contract from the people in
exchange for jobs: Now it is a ‘property’, a ‘commodity’ that they can
sell for money to anyone they want any time they wish.
Do you begin to see how big this lie is? We, the citizens, have the
illusion that we govern. We citizens have the illusion that we own the
roads or the bridges or the crown land and that we manage those assets through
the Legislature.
British Columbians have the illusion that we have protection for farmland and
we manage that through the Agricultural Land Commission.
We have the illusion that if we buy property we have the right to exclude
trespassers.
And those things are all true for the little people, the citizens of BC.
They are even true for most of the businesses in BC that my SoCred friend
spent his public life defending.
But they are not true for the super-rich, the corporate classes of the world
who are, now, invited not so much to invest in BC as to pillage, legally, what
used to be ours.
I want to close this letter with something hopeful. But it is hard and
maybe even inappropriate to do so.
Two friends in the last year have talked to me about hope. The first one told
me that hope and fear are opposite ends of the same emotion. If you have
hope, she said, you would also have fear that your faith may be false, that you
will fail; and fear is a bad place to start anything.
The second friend said it differently. He said my idea of hope was, in
fact, a weakness because, if events did not unfold in the way that I ‘hoped’, I
was made sad or angry or depressed, none of which leads to good leadership.
What I think, today, is that the huge lie that the Liberals tell - the lie that
says that British Columbia is prosperous and that our prosperity is sustainable
(while they sell the farm) and the lie that we live in a democracy that we
control - needs to be exposed, not by me, but by a thousand thousand
conversations between the people.
I think that historical differences between old SoCreds and new Greens and New
Democrats have to be set aside for a while as we concentrate on what we have in
common as the people who believe in and used to own this place.
I think the antipathy between union and non-union needs to take a rest while we
focus on the rights of citizens.
In places like the Arrow Lakes, the wedge between those who log (in Nakusp) and
those who work in the mills (in Castlegar) needs
to be replaced with a dialogue about who owns this land and why we made rules
about who holds the right to harvest the bounty of the land.
I think we need to talk about what a Government ‘is’ before we talk about
‘who governs’. Government must be more than just a real estate function.
Everyone who votes has a right to believe they elect a government, not a
lackey to world powers called corporations.
We need dialogue more than hope. We need to see the lie in order to name
it and we need to name it in order to talk about it.
I admit that the old SoCred on the street was right. I didn’tt
understand.
I admit that I was wrong to promise the farmers in Maple Ridge or the
landowners in the Okanagan or any of you that I could fix what was broken.
I did not even understand the changes: How could I have believed I could
fix them?
We need to get this debate out of the Legislature and into our homes, churches
and halls; and onto the street. We need to take it back - this province
that is ours to manage for the future - before we raise a generation who
didn’t‚t even know we had it.
I have often included newspaper articles in these watershed updates regarding the recent removal of private forests lands from within Tree Farm Licenses (TFL’s) and the lack of public consultation and with no financial benefits to the BC taxpayer. Attached please find copy of another newspaper article titled “forest land deal betrays the public“
Regards
John Bebbington