KootenayVille
Here in British Columbia we no longer have a Ministry of the Environment.
Instead we have a creature called the 'MLWAP'.
Otherwise known as the Ministry of Land, Water and Air Protection.
Unfortunately, although not unexpectedly given our current provincial government's track record on syntactical gymnastics, it looks like the 'protection' part of the name change is bunk.
I am most familiar with the situation at Cathedral Grove Park which sits in one of the last easily accessible stands of first growth forest on Vancouver Island, but it turns out that similar things have been going on at Grohman Narrows Park near Nelson.
Mark Hume had the story in today's Globe:
"A developer who owns land directly across from the park had to align his access road with the park's for Ministry of Transportation safety reasons. He proposed, and the government accepted, that instead of building a new road himself, the one in the park would be moved, at a cost of about $100,000.
Bill Barisoff, Minister of Water, Land and Air Protection, approved the project."
Which would have been the end of the story, except for the fact that a longtime provincial government worker named Gordon McAdams, who had a sneaking suspicion that habitat was at risk because he'd been involved in writing the guidelines for such projects, ignored the Orwellian name change, went to the drawer, pulled the files, was shocked by what he found, and acted appropriately.
"Mr. McAdams said he knew he could get in trouble for leaking the documents but he wanted to get the facts out -- so he swore an affidavit for a lawyer representing the West Kootenay Community EcoSociety, which had filed a petition with the Supreme Court trying to overturn the minister's decision.....
....The construction was delayed by the court action and then, in a ruling last week, Madam Justice Sinclair Prowse of the B.C. Supreme Court set aside the minister's decision saying it violated the Park Act"
And how was this hero and whistleblower feted?
Well, he filed the affadavit on Monday April 25th and he was fired on Friday of the same week.
Which was also the day he was set to retire.
Welcome to the start of the Golden Decade.
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Update: Apologies to Paul Willcocks. He had a very good, and scathing, piece up on this subject yesterday and I just flat out missed it.
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