VICTORIA – For the past six weeks, a logging company has been squaring off with the provincial government in Prince George Supreme Court, and the way things are going, the powers that be in Victoria may well be on the hook for up to $150 million.
The case involves an inordinate amount of bureaucratic arrogance and political shenanigans, the latter of which achieved new heights last week, when Carrier Lumber of Prince George was finally able to produce documents it had requested under the province’s freedom of information legislation.
By all appearances, the government had tried every trick in the book to delay turning the documents over to Carrier Lumber, which prompted Judge W. Glen Parrett to order an investigation into a possible government cover-up.
"There are grounds for the gravest of concerns as to what is going on in the Ministry of Forests and their disclosure of relevant and material documents in this case. I am appalled by the inferences that could be drawn from these documents, and the timing and method of their disclosure," Parrett said.
"Whether it was deliberate and calculated or the results of utter incompetence is an issue that, in my view, must be resolved," he added. Those are pretty strong words from a judge, but more about the documents later. First some background.
The matter goes back to 1983, when Carrier Lumber was granted a 10-year licence to cut five million cubic feet of beetle-infested timber on the Chilcotin Plateau, about 200 kilometres west of Williams Lake.
Carrier Lumber intended to harvest the timber with modular, pre-fabricated mills to be transported to locations in the Chilcotin. The method was widely hailed as a pioneering venture, on a scale never before seen in British Columbia. More than 200 people were employed in the venture.
Disaster struck Carrier Lumber in 1991, when Native bands put up roadblocks, preventing the company from logging.
Trying to settle the dispute, then Premier Harcourt first tried to talk the Natives into mounting a joint venture with Carrier Lumber. When that failed, he promised the Natives there would be no logging without their permission.
It was then left up to the forest ministry to find a way of making Harcourt’s bungled decision stick. And since there was no legal and overt way of cancelling Carrier’s licence, a sneaky and covert one had to do.
In cancelling the licence, the ministry claimed that the company had not lived up to its silviculture obligations, basing its case o a law passed in 1987 by the Social Credit government. That legislation, however, was meant to apply only to large companies which held licences practically in perpetuity, not for smaller firms such as Carrier Lumber, whose licence was non-renewable.
The government steadfastly claimed that the legislation had been intended for all companies. That claim was solidly trashed during the court proceedings.
But the government’s defence began to get really shaky when Dick Byl, Carrier’s lawyer, presented documents he had at long last obtained under freedom of information rules, including one from an Indian band linked to the case.
The documents were clearly relevant to the case and should have been made available to Carrier Lumber and, more important, the court, at the start of the trial, not midway through.
Paul Pearlman, acting on behalf of the government, appeared at a loss. "I don’t have any satisfactory explanation," he said, adding that he was concerned that there may be more documents to be produced.
The judge postponed a decision on Carrier’s request to throw out the government’s defence and rule in favor of the company right now. For the moment, the case has been put on hold because a key witness became ill.
And just about now, if I were Forest Minister David Zirnhelt or any of the forest ministry bureaucrats involved in the mess, I’d be starting to get worried. The government and the forest ministry may finally learn that they cannot do anything they want.
