The Minister for Forests, Lands and Natural Resources, Doug Donaldson, is urging Vancouver Island residents to conserve water to protect flow levels in salmon streams.
Meanwhile, he continues to allow the logging of old-growth.
It’s time to make the connection: for years the government has known of the intertwined risks of climate change, logging, lower stream flows, and salmon survival but logging to the old-growth headwaters of our community watersheds has only increased in pace.
The government cites a risk to jobs. Thousands of jobs in the forest industry have been lost to technology, mill closures, a lack of secondary manufacturing, and raw log exports; not conservation. Job loss is tolerated because it brings greater profits to multinational companies and shareholders. The environment on which we all depend pays the price (the penny may finally be dropping). Taking us and the salmon with it.
If the minister was genuine in his concern for salmon, his first act would be a moratorium on all logging of old-growth on Vancouver Island, not just the piecemeal patches he recently announced.
AJ Vaughan,
Black Creek
