Excerpt:
"Before talking a bit about where the opportunities lie to strengthen the hands of resource-dependent communities through forest policy changes, I thought it would be instructive to look at two events that occurred in and around one community in BC’s Interior earlier this year. The community is Quesnel. And the events capture, I think, why more community tenures are required in BC and why the province should be thinking far more carefully and creatively about how it allocates publicly owned timber in the months and years ahead."
Environment and sustainability
Six years ago, anyone who said that the provincial Liberals would try to forge a “new relationship” with First Nations would have been laughed out of the room.
Yet that is precisely what has happened. Though they began by opposing the Nisga’a treaty and unabashedly aligning themselves with opponents of native rights, the Liberals have made a significant turnaround. In just a few years they have managed to sign more than 120 forestry agreements with First Nations, agreements in which cash and timber are flowing to First Nations like never before.
(VANCOUVER)
BC should turn half of the roughly $1 billion it collects annually in
stumpage fees from forest companies back to First Nations. A new report
by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says such a move would
be an important step towards a lasting “new relationship” with
Aboriginal people.
It seems that the environment has finally made it to the top of the political agenda – at least for the federal opposition parties. The new Liberal leader Stephane Dion joins the NDP’s Jack Layton and Elizabeth May of the Greens as a party leader with a history of engagement in environmental issues. Making bold statements about the environment has become good politics and this will hopefully lead to comprehensive federal action on the environment.
Ontarians will go to the polls next October to elect their provincial government.
If last September's provincial by-election in Toronto is any indication, energy policy and ethics will play a major role in the next election. Indeed, the new NDP MPP who won the by-election claims energy was the defining issue in that campaign.
It should come as no surprise that energy would break out from the pack of issues to dominate the campaign, outstripping health care, education, crime, and mud-slinging in this inner-city riding.
Recent statistics from the United Nations on the distribution of the world’s wealth tell us that the number of people with financial assets of $30 million or more has soared to 85,400, an increase of more than 10% over the previous year. These “ultra-high-net individuals,” we are informed, now control nearly a quarter (24%) of global wealth. At the bottom of the income pyramid, nearly a billion people in abject poverty still struggle to survive on $1 a day.
Whether the human species will survive this century is now—or should be—the main concern of everyone. It’s no longer a far-fetched Chicken Little “the-sky-is-falling” bugaboo. Enough evidence has been found to show us beyond doubt that the next several decades will be the most perilous to confront humanity since the dawn of recorded history.
(Vancouver) The new Canada-US Softwood Lumber Agreement, if it is ratified by the Canadian Parliament, spells bad news for BC's forest-dependent communities. According to a new Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives report, the deal will dampen efforts to move BC's forest industry up the value chain, and will lead to more raw log experts, both of which mean fewer jobs in BC's forest sector.