Green Attacks on BC Natural Resource Professionals

By W.E. (Bill) Dumont, RPF
Tree Frog Editorial
October 12, 2018
Category: Forestry
Region: Canada, Canada West

Bill Dumont

Green MLA Sonya Furstenau continues her relentless attacks and crusade in the media and elsewhere on the more than 10,000 natural resource professionals in BC. She claims the public and environment have suffered by relying on professional decision-making, and implies that I (a professional forester) and thousands of other resource professionals do not act in the public interest.

Furstenau is driven by and remains personally annoyed that her complaint to the Engineers and Geoscientists BC over the Shawnigan Lake waste dump issues involving a professional engineer were investigated and found to have no validity. From this she has wrongly concluded that professional reliance doesn’t work and the public interest can’t be protected by natural resource professionals, without a new sledgehammer of excessive government control. 

Her demand, inserted in the Green/NDP agreement following the last election, compels the NDP to put in place a huge and expensive government bureaucracy to oversee not only my profession, but also BC’s engineers, biologists, agrologists and technicians.   This unprecedented move is universally opposed by the five professional groups affected.

Furstenau’s blind endorsement of a recent 135-page advocacy report with 120 recommendations for pervasive government oversight forcing the five professions into bureaucratic and direct government control is ill-conceived at best. Government has always been integral to the operation of these professional organisations through existing legislation, including direct appointments to their governing boards.  These organisations have not always done a perfect job in dealing with public interest issues but the tabled proposals are way beyond reasonable and are not necessary.

If this proposal were similarly imposed for financial planners, accountants, educators, nurses, doctors or lawyers there would be a huge legal and political backlash against such overwhelming government interference and control and undermining professional independence. The proposed new model is so broad there is really no need to maintain the existing organisations.

I served for many years on BC’s public forestry watchdog (Forest Practices Board of BC), and was an elected President of BCs forest professionals. Having  practiced forestry for over 40 years in BC and internationally I can say with confidence that I, and the overwhelming majority of my colleagues, have upheld the ethical and moral responsibility to protect the public interest in every recommendation affecting public forest lands. There is no “crisis of public confidence” that needs to be corrected here.

There has been little or no public demand, interest or rational justification for the proposed government intrusion into these five professions. The only support for the proposal has been from the public sector union, some special-interest groups and a very few individuals. 

I am pretty sure Ms. Furstenau well knows, as confirmed by  many surveys of public opinion, that politicians rather than resource professionals tend to be one of the more ethically challenged groups in our society and don’t always act in the public interest. The public could ask themselves if Furstenau’s initiative really is in their interest.

W.E. (Bill Dumont), RPF
Cobble Hill, BC, Canada

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