Rich Coleman – Tree Farm License land removal

Posted July 17, 2008 by Sacha Peter - Link
Category: Scandal Comments (1)

BC Auditor General John Doyle released a rather scathing report (local link) on the removal of approximately 28,000 hectares of private land from tree farm licenses (TFLs) on Vancouver Island. Since this is an area of government that not many people are familiar with, the report does contain a lot of background information on TFLs and the processes surrounding them.

The media has also been stirring the fact that Rich Coleman’s brother apparently was (and still is) an executive at Western Forest Products – the company owning the tree farm licensed land. In fairness to him, the application by WFP was submitted at a time when Coleman’s brother was not part of the company – WFP bought out that firm subsequent to the application submission.

The conclusion by the auditor general was the following, directly quoted from his report:

We concluded that the removal of the private land from TFLs 6, 19 and 25 was approved without sufficient regard for the public interest.

The information provided by the ministry in support of its recommendation to allow the land removal was incomplete. The information reflected a narrow view of the stakeholders possibly affected and of the potential impacts. Also, the recommendation put greater weight on assisting the licensee’s financial restructuring than on other public interests, including the potentially negative impacts on the forest and range and on other stakeholders, but the information included no analysis to support this position. Overall, the recommendation was not clearly supported by ministry analysis to demonstrate how the removal on the terms proposed was in the interests of British Columbia. The Minister was the final check in the process and the statutory decision-maker but, given the importance of the decision, he did not do enough to ensure that due regard was given to the public interest. Meanwhile, the ministry is not adequately monitoring its other land removal decisions to better inform future requests, to assess stakeholder capacity to deal with decision impacts, or to ensure that conditions agreed to by licensees are met.

This leaves a few questions.

1. Was Coleman removed from the Ministry of Forests preemptively to this report?
2. Will Coleman be formally implicated in a conflict of interest ruling?
3. Will any of this resonate with the public at election time?

I don’t know the answer to question 1, but I will guess that 2 will be “no” and would conjecture that the answer for question 3 will be a flat-out “no”. Governments typically accumulate baggage during their reigns, but it is not remotely close to extreme, which is the level it typically takes for the public to vote governments out of office. For the 1996-2001 NDP government, the snapping point where to public said “too much” was the Fast Ferries Fiasco.

This issue brought up by the auditor general is nowhere close in scale to the fast ferries.

I very much doubt that this government will be plagued by the “Coleman Tree Farm License removal” scandal in 10 months, although this data point certainly does not help them.