Sunday, February 05, 2006

Logging deaths and corporate profits

How to separate the two? Well, not with Gordon Campbell and his cabinet in office. Gordon Campbell married these two entities, logging deaths and corporate profits, that had only been loosely living together before. For what reason? Haste. Campbell and the corporations want all of the valuable old growth trees cut out of public forests as soon as possible before everybody, including First Nations, wake up to the fact that when old growth trees from public forests leave BC they are actually stolen property. How so? Because they come from public forests. The government is supposed to hold these forests in trust for our children and grandchildren, not liquidate them. Besides, a lot of these parcels of forests are being contested by First Nations. By allowing these huge, American invested or US based corporations to take the trees from Canadian public forests is in itself an act of treason by provincial governments. And when Gordon Campbell encourages this process he knows he isn't acting in the interest of British Colombians, native or non-native, but in the interests of his god...privitization.

And secondly, the desperate, drastic ways in which our public forests are being liquidated serves Gordon Campbell and the corporations quite well in another way...By contracting out. Don't you just love that phrase? Contracting out. Oh, yes. Two birds killed with one stone. The little contractors who have been hired to cut for the logging giants will work their men furiously to get the last of the old growth out. They have to work furiously because they are operating on a thin margin. And then the same little contractors will be blamed for doing the actual cutting in sensitive areas. Oh, but Campbell and the corporations are shrewd! They don't give a contenential damn how many loggers and truck drives are killed with the frantic lessening of safety rules as long as they can blame the men themselves. For carelessness, of course. And then also point fingers at the little contractors for permitting the lessening of the rules which the holy truimphate (Gordon Campbell and his cabinet and the huge corporations) not only encouraged, but by their polices, mandated in place. Which has resulted in the unprecedented numbers of deaths of forestry workers.

I have been writing (and yelling) for a long time that the clear cutting of our ancient forests shows disrespect for life itself, a disrespect that is now being echoed in the deaths of forest workers themselves. The only ones profiting out of the death in and of our public forests is the corporations. And Gordon Campbell, of course, in paying homage to his god, privatization.

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