Dear Editor:
Re: We're reaping 'benefits' of long-leash policy, Editor's Letter, Pat Tracy, The Record, Aug. 22.
As a former biological technician for the department of fisheries and oceans and then Environment Canada (1968 to 1984), dealing with water pollution in B.C., I read your column with interest. A shift began many years ago, in the midst of my tenure, towards allowing companies and their consultants to do the field monitoring we originally routinely did. It is a kind of corruption. We even began hiring consultants to write reports and analyze our own data; a process aptly summed up by one fellow employee as "lending someone your watch so they can tell you what time it is." The companies and their consultants were grossly biased. Some of us in government were too. I don't think I was.
And the public, the press and the NGOs were often way off base, resulting in us engaging in some very silly things unnecessarily.
One example is the great salmon kill-off caused by the Eurocan pulpmill in Kitimat. It was front-page news and the TV top story for days. Two hundred thousand or more coho salmon had been killed. Local SPEC (Society Promoting Environmental Conservation) members discovered the kill on the way to work at the Alcan aluminum smelter.
I was sent on a plane to Kitimat to investigate. When I arrived, the fisheries officers showed me a few specimens they told me were herring and not salmon. "They're not herring," I told them, "they're some kind of smelt." I flipped through my fish book and determined they were capelin, which spawn and die yearly on beaches. A trip to the kill site - very, very close to the Alcan smelter, and many miles from the Eurocan pulpmill - and a few dissections, revealed that the dead female capelins were ripe with eggs and the males with milt. I found an ancient First Nations elder who told me the fish had come there at the same time of year for many decades.
The media dropped the story like a hot potato without a hint of retraction. Many years later, I was still being told of this horrific environmental outrage by indignant newshounds, none of whom would believe me because it was "in the paper"; and when I was appointed for a short time to the SPEC board in Vancouver and raised the issue I was severely berated for suggesting it was not true.
We also started to hire technicians with experience in the industries we were monitoring, incorporating pro-industry biases.
I just got back from a hunting and fishing trip; overwhelmed, as always, by the enormity and complexity of the regulations, permits, etc. governing fishing, hunting and firearms; while contemplating the de-regulation of industry (in light of the tailings pond breach) as well as the self-policing of professionals, and of course the police themselves. If it's such a good idea for industry and professionals, why can't we citizens police ourselves: turn ourselves in whenever we speed, run a light, cheat on taxes, hunt or fish out of season? The stats will look great! Crime rates will plummet to near non-existent.
In discussing this with fellow hunters, we came to the conclusion that we do not have democracy; that elites run society and pretty much get to do what they want; that the Magna Carta was more about businessmen getting the rights of aristocracy and increasing our subservancy, than freeing us. We, like First Nations, need self-government.
Don DeMille, by email
