The BC Timber Sales (BCTS) response to Elphinstone Logging Focus’s (ELF) court challenge of the auction of cutting rights on block A93884 in the Clack Creek area says the agency was acting within its authority and ELF’s petition for a judicial review “lacks merit.”
In the petition filed with BC Supreme Court in Victoria on April 23, ELF argued that plans to harvest timber from the block should not move forward until the government acts on recommendations from a 2018 Forest Practices Board report on at-risk plant species, and the province and shíshálh Nation complete a new land use plan.
BCTS went ahead with the auction and earlier this month it awarded the Squamish-based company Black Mount Logging the rights to remove roughly 29,500 cubic metres of timber. The company is not expected to start the work before September.
ELF said in a press release May 14 that it was shocked by the move to hold the auction before its petition was heard by a judge.
“There is ample information available to BC Timber Sales regarding the value of this forest and the availability of other timber outside the proposed park expansion area,” said Matthew Nefstead, ELF’s lawyer in the case.
“This block did not need to be listed for sale now, and we are asking the court to overturn that decision. BCTS should have realized that there are other stakeholders in this critical land use decision and made every attempt to ensure that it would not be logged to allow a transparent process to unfold.”
In its response, filed with the court May 24, BCTS said the area manager was acting within the agency’s statutory powers and the decision to auction the cutblock does not meet the threshold for eligibility for judicial review.
BCTS’s lawyers further argued that ELF doesn’t meet the test to have standing before the court to challenge the decision on the basis of “public interest.”
“While it has a genuine interest in disrupting logging near Mount Elphinstone Provincial Park, it does not have a ‘genuine interest’ in the legal issues raised by the case,” the response reads.
The BCTS court filing also claims a provincial assessment of “ELF’s Elphinstone Park Expansion Proposal” completed on May 7, 2018 found “the proposal would add limited benefits in terms of the key values identified by the province.”
It also describes lands in the area of Mount Elphinstone Park as “among the most productive and commercially valuable forest lands in British Columbia” and says that trees on the Clack Creek block are “almost exclusively second growth” and “some taller, non-old growth, Douglas firs that have been excluded from forest harvest for biodiversity reasons.”
On the question of the new land use plan being developed by the province and shíshálh Nation following the October 2018 Foundation Agreement, BCTS said that on Oct. 11, “Chief and council for the shíshálh Nation confirmed support for harvesting in the Clack Creek TSL.”
The court is yet to rule on the claims in ELF’s original petition or those in the BCTS response.
