A couple of Falls back my neighbour who burns logging debris at this time of year showed me a video on his smartphone.
It was a great pile of logs, several actually, going up in smoke (without Cheech and Chong). I was told that there were about 100 logging trucks in that conflagration and it wasn’t the only time he had seen this. In fact, he had helped set fire to the whole mess. Something about it being uneconomical to haul or something like that.
Of course, there was no penalty on anything like that for the horrendous wastage of timber that has gone on for far too long. It’s been especially bad under the Campbell-Clark Liberals. They changed the rules essentially putting the wolves in charge of the sheep, letting forest companies do what they wanted. The end result, wasted timber and mill closures.
But let a man cut a pile of firewood, much of it coming from the wasted slash, they come down on him like a ton of bricks. Okay, okay the rules may have bent a bit here. But it was nothing. And people need that firewood. Like a number of those interviewed in Sean Brady’s recent Kamloops This Week article entitled ‘Retirement fund tied up in wood seizure’, I used to cut all my wood, but at 78-years-old I find it easier to buy at least part of my winter’s wood.
But what is happening to Rick Farr, the subject of Brady’s article, is part of a larger syndrome. Like the couple getting pushed off their land because they live in a travel trailer and there’s some obscure badly thought out bylaw, this is more of this, “We will do it to you because we can!”
Does anyone remember the great three-day blitz on the highway, RCMP and MOT crawling all over the place — oh, safety, etc…Well, all it was — a war on older cars egged on by Gordon Campbell’s car salesman. One day, fine. Two days questionable. Three days, ridiculous! But then the name Campbell is synonymous with corruption and sleaze.
In the meantime, people will have to do without their firewood. What’s next? A ban on wood stoves? They tried that before!
Nothing stopping them from trying again,
Dennis Peacock,
Clearwater, B.C.
