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Subject: Cathedral Grove

Column Here is Stephen Hume's Column from the Vancouver Sun Thursday Dec. 20th

 Parks, not parking Cathedral Grove symbolizes the rift between a nature-loving public and the Liberal government's rigid bean-counters

Stephen Hume Vancouver Sun

Want some insight into why Premier Gordon Campbell's popularity is spiralling into free fall?
Visit Cathedral Grove, the postage-stamp sized park, which exemplifies British Columbia's rain forest wilderness, about halfway between Parksville and Port Alberni.
 Since 1947, more than eight million visitors may have strolled the banks of the swift green Cameron River there, enjoying the mossy silence where shafts of sunlight lance through gloomy corridors between trees as high as 25-storey buildings and so big around at the base that it takes 15 people standing shoulder-to-shoulder to complete the circumference.
The park offers a salutary lesson in the growing disconnect between the number-driven values of Premier Fix-it and his obsessive, bean-counting advisers and the broader B.C. public.
 That public certainly wants reasonable fiscal control, but not the total reconstruction of the provincial economy according to the discredited voodoo economics of the Reagan era.
President Ronald Reagan, please remember, made massive tax cuts that benefited mostly the rich and wound up generating the biggest deficit in United States history, leaving his successor an economic quagmire that handed the White House to Bill Clinton for two terms.
 The growing gulf between Premier Fix-it and his public is now showing up in the polls. This week's Ipsos-Reid survey suggests Campbell's doctrinaire approach has deeply divided the province, creating fear and uncertainty which can only harm the economy. It also shows his failure to comprehend the nature of B.C. and its underlying values.
 Less than half of us now approve the government's inflexible agenda, which ignored the advice of leading economists and is now in the process of running the province into debt faster and deeper than any government in B.C. history.
The polling data shows the Liberals' approval ratings plunging by 22 points and Campbell's by 19. Even the polling experts say they are surprised by the depth and severity of the plunge.
Which brings me back to Cathedral Grove and how the little park represents a growing gap between an economic strategy based in outdated dogma that denies the premier manoeuvring room and a growing public concern that Liberals choose to dismiss as the insignificant clamour of the ignorant, the ill-informed and the partisan.
Where visitors to Cathedral Grove have long sought tranquillity and inspiration, the provincial government saw only inefficiency and an opportunity to maximize revenues from "tourist through-put."
So last summer the province moved in with proposals for a 200-car, 20-bus parking lot, a gift shop, a food concession, an interpretive centre and the expanded washroom facilities and picnic area necessary to service all these additional visitors.
All this development for a tiny 135-hectare park that's already in danger of destruction.
 Back in 1997, winds whistling out of logged areas that private interests have been permitted to advance to the park boundary blew down large numbers of trees that were already 350 years old when Sir Francis Drake sailed off this coast in 1577.
Now, reports Annette Tanner of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee in Qualicum Beach, another major blowdown has occurred in the private lands where selective logging has been going on immediately adjacent to the park boundary.
What's probably under way here, as any logger knows, is the progressive unravelling of the park's forest fringe. As more surrounding forest buffer disappears or is thinned by variable retention logging, the more vulnerabl e the remaining old growth becomes to strong winds.
The people who live in the area have been lobbying to have the park's boundaries expanded so that there's a greater degree of protection for what's left. They did manage to obtain a stay on the lunatic plan for a massive parking lot, pointing out that when the existing lot was full, Cathedral Grove was already at capacity.
But they are lobbying a government which -- in order to meet arbitrary cost-cutting targets forced by its self-imposed revenue shortfalls -- is already planning to so dismantle the remnants of the environment ministry and its parks branch that it might as well not bother having one.
In light of the decision to ditch a world-class South Chilcotin park reserve so that industrial interests could re-open demands for prime pieces of its pristine landscape for resource development, the ignoring of basic science to relaunch the grizzly bear hunt and the rejection of concerns over mountain caribou and mountain goats in order to issue helicopter skiing permits, perhaps the dismantling of B.C.'s environmental legacy is part of Premier Fix-it's silent agenda.
Budget cuts of up to 50 per cent had already devastated the former environment ministry's ability to fulfil its legislated mandate to manage and protect parks and the habitat required for the survival of B.C.'s wildlife.
Under Premier Fix-it, the ministry was next dismembered, with part of it going to Stan Hagen whose decisions consistently seem to favour development at the expense of the environment and the remnants going to Joyce Murray, who seems content to fuss over the arrangement of the deck chairs while the Titanic sinks beneath her feet.
The word is out within what's left of Murray's ministry that the next round of cuts will further reduce the parks budget by 35 per cent and the budget for wildlife, fisheries and habitat protection by as much as 50 per cent.
Make no mistake, cuts of this magnitude mean the sacrifice of many of the core values for which British Columbians spent a century fighting and that most of us still hold dear.
 The public rage that will accompany this sacrifice apparently hasn't yet dawned on Premier Fix-it and his urban apparatchiks. If he doesn't figure it out soon, it may yet cost him his political career -- and when the backlash affects his caucus, it might come sooner rather than later. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ *Landwatch is a communications outreach service of the BC Environmental Network (BCEN), provided with the assistance of ONE/Northwest (Online Networking for the Environment). *To submit a message to landwatch, send it to: landwatch@onenw.org *To subscribe to landwatch, a current landwatch member must send a message to the list manager recommending you to the listserv *To UNSUBCRIBE from landwatch, send a message to majordomo@onenw.org with the following in the text of the message: unsubscribe landwatch