Environmental stewardship of BC parks lacking

Photo by ShuNews

British Columbia’s Auditor General has just released a report on the conservation of ecological integritiy in BC parks and protected areas and the news is bleak. His findings were that environmental monitoring and enforcement in the BC Parks system is critically lacking and he blames lack of funding and resources.

BC Government Employees Union (BCGEU) Chair of Environmental, Technical and Operational Component, Byron Goerz, knows full well the dire situation. “Sadly, these findings are not news to our members who work in BC Parks as conservation officers, scientific technical officers or as parks personnel,” he says.

“Proper environmental stewardship in BC parks requires a compliance and enforcement capacity that is now lacking. Environmental workers are the public’s eyes and ears on the ground in BC parks. They are committed to their jobs and have the duty of protecting our wilderness, but simply lack real capacity to fulfill their mandate. The Auditor General’s findings are entirely consistent with what our members have been saying for years.”

Mr. Goertz concluded, “This is about so much more than defending public sector jobs, this is about conservation and environmental responsibility.”

The monitoring and enforcement activities that were flagged in the Auditor General’s report as being inadequate, had been documented as long ago as 2004 in a report by West Coast Environmental Law, which was appropriately entitled ‘Please Hold. Someone Will Be With You.’ These same areas which today are of concern to the Auditor General were reported in 2004 as having been subject to budget cuts, partial or complete office closures and severe staffing cuts between 2001 and 2004. That earlier report included some interesting statistics:

• There was one full-time park staff at BC’s Manning Park for every 858,154 visitors to the park, which is a 3-hour drive from Vancouver.

• Alberta had more than double the number of conservation officers on the ground than BC.

• Saskatchewan, a province with less than a quarter the population of BC, had 50 per cent more staff devoted to environmental protection.

That was in 2004. Since then, the situation has become much worse. Repeated small budget cuts between 2008 and 2010 have added up to another $7 million. And the March 2010 Service Plan for the Ministry of Environment indicates that the provincial government has no intention of spending any more money on the province’s parks and protected areas until at least 2013.

Next year British Columbia will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of BC parks. Various government officials will likely make expansive speeches across the province, extolling our parks and, once again, boasting about BC’s leadership in environmental action.

But perhaps the BC government needs to pay a bit more attention to the Auditor General. BC says it wants to become a green-economy example for the world, yet one has to wonder what the bureaucrats and politicians really mean by ‘green’. Is it ‘sustainable’ development without environmental or ecological protection — green in word only?

If the government fails to pay attention now, it may later face an environmental backlash when the world discovers what the locals already know — that it’s just green hot air and not really green on the ground.