'Hawaii Point Oh Eight Oh - book 'im Dano' ... the latest classic line developed from our potted premier predicament -g-
Yeah the pine lobby ... they have always been with us, and always will be ... fully as 'subsidised' as we are, of course - plantation production of yellow pine got its first great push under the Roosevelt regime, with the CCC ['civilian conservation corps'?] ... then following the second war, as a means of both aiding the under-employed and of utilising old worked-out land that had been growing cotton and the like, also timberland that had been creamed off and neglected, allowed to grow higher proportion of uneconomic species .... same here, only different - here we had large areas of undeveloped timberlands, and to make use of them the thing was to build highways and a railroad from the lower mainland up to the north of the province .... then to attract investment in mills, blocks of timber were allocated to those who were willing to generate employment with it, in the developing areas ... quite a rational plan, all in all, considerable corruption along the way with it of course, E.P. Taylor and Robert Sommers and W.A.C. Bennett were names that got mentioned, but they were by no means alone with their snouts in the trough
So much of the province got developed that way, and the TFL ['tree farm license'] system was added to existing forms of tenure, and not always consistently - TFLs are not all alike, they can vary in numerous ways, as well as in their renewal dates ..... an already complex system was made more complex, with the claims of various factions often overlapping in particular areas, even before the indian land claims came up as an issue .... not a simple situation, bit of a jungle, as might arguably be expected in a province with such polarised politics
Generally, for many long years now, the majority of credible players in the forest industry have worked toward change in the direction of a free market system ... and it's coming, one step at a time - our point one four nine man is the best premier we've had for a long long time, his government was elected with all but two of the seats in the house, and the name of his party, Liberal, is [unlike the federal version] backed up generally [and theoretically] by a classical definition of that term in its policies, i.e. leaning heavily toward free market solutions, self-responsibility, personal freedoms, etc
The pine lobby knows this, has known it a long time - they have spies here of course, just as they have bagmen inside the Beltway ... they also know that there is no discernible net 'subsidy' to producers here - the citizens of this province would not stand for their timber being given away cheap, we are shareholders in the land, and have interests in the matter from both perspectives .... so far the pine lobby can obfuscate with their rhetoric because of the superficial differences between the systems, of which the US population understand little, but in a few years they won't be able to do that either ... they'll be having to take some new line of lies .... which, for them, shouldn't present too much of a problem |
