Dear Friends,
First off we congratulate Randene Neill on her victory in winning our riding for the NDP in last months provincial election. I met Randene during our Blackberry Festival when she came by our booth to sign up and pledge her support. I spoke with her for a few minutes and I remember commenting to someone afterwards “ If she wins she’ll be in cabinet”. And she did and she is now Minister of water, land and resource stewardship. Now something many of you may not know is that Randene has been employed as a communications consultant by B.C. Parks Foundation, a foundation committed to purchasing land for park space. So her heart’s in the right place. Let’s see how effective she can be in helping our quest. https://www.prpeak.com/local-news/cabinet-position-a-privilege-powell-river-sunshine-coast-mla-9832114
Congratulations are also in order to Rob Southcott who as a municipal councillor has been appointed to sit on our qRD, replacing George Doubt. Rob is a strong supporter of FOSBA and is a president of the Malaspina Land Conservancy Society. The stars appear to be lining up in our favour. Support at the qRD, support at the Provincial level and close to 500 friends. What next.
ORGANIZE
When Mosaic Forest makes a decision to log an area of PMFL (privately managed forest land) such as Lot 3040 (Stillwater Bluffs) they follow a process as those folks living along Crowther Road on the Malaspina Peninsula recently bore witness to. The process begins by informing local residents through various means followed by hosting a meeting where a small manageable number of local residents are invited. Plans are described with careful language such as “very early planning stages” and “preliminary field work” Questions from locals are entertained and they are given vague assurance that the companies professionals will meet all regulatory and legislative requirements. But make no mistake. This act of informing the locals is a performance act. It’s called “due diligence” and it’s purpose is to maintain a semblance of social licence. It’s all just part of the modern process that turns trees into currency without so much as an ecological after thought. Don’t expect the sharing of any professional assessments or even a summary of their conclusions. Those are proprietary. Don’t expect any changes due to local concerns. But do expect the soon to come blasting and building of spur roads followed by full on logging. Trees must be felled and bucked and hauled away quickly, and efficiently. You don’t survive in the business unless you are efficient Mosaic Forest Products is very efficient.
Understanding the rough outline of the process and the professionalism of the company involved we at FOSBA feel that to combat the threat none of us like to even imagine, we need to fine tune our organization to meet such threats in a coordinated and efficient manner. We have close to 500 friends. We have your email addresses and phone numbers. We can easily send out email notices however the effort will be far more effective using the telephone as well. We are asking for volunteers to agree to contacting a list of members. If we have 500 “friends” and we have 50 phone volunteers then each would get a list of 10 people to phone. The process would work like this:
An issue arises and our directors are informed.
An e-mail goes out to all 500 friends describing the threat with as much detail as possible.
A second e-mail would follow once we determined a strategy. i.e. - a letter campaign targeting certain individuals or a show of support at a meeting or perhaps a demonstration etc. This would be followed by a phone campaign to enlist as much support as possible for the action described where each of our volunteer “phoners” would phone each person on their list and beg and plead them to take part.
We have at present some 15 phoners. We could use many more. Simply reply to this bulletin.
One other thing. If you are new to FOSBA and want to learn more about it a good place to go is to our website https://www.fosba.org and go to the upper right corner and hit menu and then click on bulletins. Happy readings.
One last thing: We always need more friends. If you know of a good candidate (perhaps someone who likes talking to strangers on the phone), send them to https://www.fosba.org
Happy winter everyone
Lauritz
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