The notion that we have of ourselves as Canadians is very much tied to our relationship to the land, as farmers, as fishermen, and as hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Canada is a resource-rich country, with bountiful forests and magnificent lakes and rivers, and oceans to the east, the west, and the north.
In the early years of 20th century British Columbia history, MacMillan-Bloedel — founded by native Northwest timber barons, Prentice Bloedel and Harvey Reginald MacMillan — became one of the world’s most powerful forestry corporations, dedicated to long-term resource management policies that were far ahead of their time.
By the time the company was sold to Seattle-based Weyerhauser in 1999 — embroiled as it had been for years in controversies over their unsustainable forestry practices, most egregiously, the logging of old growth forests — the company was a former shadow of itself.
With control of our provincial forests wrested from the hands of the likes of Bloedel and MacMillan, just what is the current state of forestry practice under the multi-national Weyerhauser regime? This essay in Counterpunch, written by Jeffrey St. Clair — author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature — provides some insight.

Upon taking office in May 2001, the newly elected provincial Liberals launched a full-scale review of expenditures across government Ministries, none more meanspirited than the review of the Ministry of Human Resources. Tapping into widespread public discontent, the provincial Liberals played to the notion that a goodly number of those in receipt of public assistance funding — particularly those in receipt of ‘disability funding’ — were likely committing fraud, and their review of government spending would root out wrong-doing.
On Tuesday, British Columbia’s auditor-general, Wayne Strelioff, released a report which found that less the one per cent of the Ministry’s 62,000 disabled clients were ineligible for assistance, and following further review only 46 persons — or less than .1% — had their cases closed entirely. Mr. Strelioff’s conclusion: the review provided “no cost-benefit analysis … (and) no serious effort to check the reliability of the assumptions.”
The Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer offers his analysis of the review fiasco.