quote: Either way it looks like the Greens have finally found an enviro issue they can really attack under this government

Actually, HalfRed, there are and have been legions of enviro issues that this Liberal regime has given opportunity to be attacked on--ones that mainly the NDP has taken on with, as expected, no coverage in the corporate dominated media.

Just a few of these are park privatization, park services and maintenance cuts, pulp mill effluent increase permits, gutting the Forest Practices Code, cancelling and divesting the clean energy and motors project started by the NDP government, expanding coal bed methane extraction without any ecological safeguards, promoting offshore oil drilling, completely butchering long-term sustainable development and transportation plans for the Lower Mainland and pushing for knee-jerk freeways expansion projects with little regard for their effectiveness or their impact on communities. The list goes on.

The ecological atrocities of the BC Liar regime are multitudes. It's the NDP, which has a lot of in-depth policy on these matters, that has addressed them--again with little or no attention.

As for Clayoquot Sound and what's happening there now, it's quite clear the major forest firms and their Liberal puppets have found a new way sell plain old fashioned rape-and-run practices to the public: shadow them behind First Nations development.

I don't totally fault the Nuu-cha-nulth Tribal Council for caving into some of this stuff. That nation is desperate for work opportunities for its members, and this is about all that's likely to come up in the next few years, or at least as long as the Liberals are in power.

None-the-less, from what I can gather about this plan is that it's not really a First Nations development plan since it's clear the Nuu-cha-nulth aren't anywhere near the drivers seat.

It may be true that they have little choice but to partner with forest companies to get the labour, skill and equipment needed, but they clearly would need to be the ones calling the shots--and it's clear they're not.

In addition, when the final decision on Clayoquot Sound was made by the NDP government in 1995, it dictated that the maximum area designated as commercial logging forest was to be 38 per cent, and that it needed to be logged under severely reduced cut block size and minimum road building.

It was determined by scientists at the time that any further expansion of the harvest area would great increase the risk of permanent damage to the temperate eco-system.

If this new plan expands that harvest area, then that's trouble. Add to this, that the BC Liberals changed the FPC to allow for expanded cut block size and further road building. That adds more trouble to the mix.

Also the whole AAC and tenure system has been messed around with to give forest company bosses more exclusive decision-making power over how much to cut and at what pace (market "rationalization" I think they call it).

SO Minister Bell can bloat about the “highest standards in BC” all he wants. The fact is his government has lowered those standards significantly. If scientific research shows that expanding the harvest area in the sound, and lowering the FPC standards, greatly risks damaging the sound permanently, then it shouldn’t happen, period.