Cortes Currents

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - Chief Kevin Peacey of the Klahoose First Nation joined host Manda Aufochs Gillespie on Folk U Radio Friday October 22nd at 1 p.m. on CKTZ 89.5FM or cortesradio.ca.

He talked about the Klahoose Nation, the new council and their goals, and more about their many enterprises including QCMC and the Klahoose Wilderness Resort, Klahoose Coastal Adventures, Klahoose Aquaculture, Cortes Forestry General Partnership, and their new acquisition of the Gorge Marina.

Folk University’s new What is Essential series asks: What must we know, practice, and study to prepare ourselves for living in the world we now inhabit and the world we expect to come to inhabit? Together, Folk University and YOU are creating the syllabus of the future. Send your questions for Chief Peacey or your thoughts on What is Essential to [email protected]

Folk U Radio is taking old school viral every Friday at 1 and Mondays at 6:30 @CKTZ89.5FM or livestreamed at cortesradio.ca. Find repeats anytime at www.folku.ca/podcasts.

Manda AUfochs Gillespie/Folk U - This Friday on Folk U Radio at 1 p.m. host Manda Aufochs Gillespie speaks with the Rural Islands Economic Partnership about how rural islanders and rural island based businesses can support, share, and thrive together.

The Rural Islands Economic Partnership grew out of a recognition that while each Salish Sea island has its own unique community and culture, all islands share many common experiences and needs. Before the RIEP, there was no formal channel for island voices to communicate, plan, advocate. Learn more about this Partnership from Francine Carlin, board chair and about their signature gathering the Rural Island Economic Partnership Forum from Mitch Miyagawa.

Individuals, businesses, self-employed peoples, and organizations are encouraged to participate in this year's RIEP Forum.

Strengthening Connections Across BC's Rural Islands

Join Us For The All-Virtual 2021 RIEP Forum!

October 20 & 21

9 AM – 12:30 PM Each Day

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The RCMP returned to Fairy Creek last Friday, October 16. A post on the Fairy Creek Blockade Facebook page states 7 cars drove up, and 15 officers wearing blue standard-issue rain gear walked into the Forest Defender Headquarters.

“They were coming and checking out the mountain before they came in full force Monday,” explained ‘Whirly-Bird,’ a Metis Forest Defender.

Many thought that the fight over what has been called the last intact old growth ecosystem in Southern Vancouver Island ended on September 28th. That was when the BC Supreme Court denied Teal Cedar Products application to extent the injunction prohibiting protesters from interfering with their logging operations. Justice Douglas Thompson cited problems with the manner in which the RCMP were enforcing the injunction:

“disquieting lapses in reasonable crowd control”;

“exclusion zones that are more expansive than the law permits”;

removing ‘individual identification”;

and “wearing ‘thin blue line’ patches in contravention of RCMP policy.” (Thompson notes that “‘thin blue line’ patches deeply offend some citizens.”) 

“Moreover, the media’s right of access continues to be improperly constrained.” 

”It goes without saying that unlawful measures imposed by those given authority to enforce the Court’s order does no credit to the rule of law or the Court’s reputation, especially when those measures trench on civil liberties in a substantial way,” he wrote.

However, on October 8, the BC Court of Appeals ordered a stay of the recent decision to not extend Fairy Creek injunction, pending an appeal by Teal Cedar products.

In her reasons for judgement, Madam Justice Stromberg-Stein explained  “Teal Cedar [is] engaging in government-authorized, legal activity, unobstructed by unlawful actions. The status quo is the long‑standing injunction. No matter how unsavoury the protesters find Teal Cedar’s logging, their quarrel is with government policy.There is a stark difference between peaceful protest and unlawful and dangerous interference.”

She added, “In a situation where the criminal law has not been effective, it is in the interests of justice to grant this interim stay to prevent serious prejudice to Teal Cedar.”

The RCMP press release for Monday, October 18th was written in a style not seen for weeks: “Police enforcement of the injunction order in the Fairy Creek Watershed area continued today.”

The stream of posts on the Fairy Creek Blockade Facebook page abruptly stopped at 5 PM Monday, with an article stating the RCMP denied Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones “access to his own land. They said they will arrest him if he passes by them.”

This is presumably a reference to the fact the Fairy Creek watershed is in traditional Pacheedaht territory.

When new photos were finally added to the Facebook page, Wednesday night, they include pictures of Elder Bill Jones sitting defiantly in front of the RCMP.

In the interval, the Forest Defender’s Headquarters has been pushed off the mountain to the highway below.

In the podcast above, Cortes Radio DJ ‘Hiway Hippy’ and ‘Whirly-Bird’ describe the last three days of an intense struggle.

They also explain why this stand is so vitally important to them.

Wednesday’s police press release states, “Since enforcement began, the RCMP have arrested 1128 individuals; 110 of whom were previously arrested with a combined total of 261 times.”

“These forest defenders are not leaving this forest. We are going to keep going back and going back,” said ‘Hiway Hippy.’

Photo credit: Screenshot of Whirly-Bird and Hiway Hippy taken during ZOOM interview

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - It has been twenty years since George Sirk, then the island’s Regional Director, put up Cortes Island’s first Newt crossing signs. More recent arrivals probably know him better as the host of Cortes Radio’s ‘Nature Boy.' In today’s program he talks about the island’s most celebrated salamander.

While highly informative, George is probably Cortes Island’s most outrageous stand up comedian. Forget reading this post, listen to his antics in the podcast to learn:

What was the first reference to Newts in the English language?

Why you don’t want to eat a Newt

How Newts cross the road

Why they go back to the pond

Why you only find Wandering Salamanders on Marina Island, and there are no Newts there!

Have you heard the tree frogs in the forest?

How George Sirk became Nature Boy

Do you remember the Newts 60 years ago?

What Bertha should be asking in the Cortes Marketer

Why there aren’t many Newts on Quadra Island, or around Hollyhock

the story behind Cortes Island’s Newt crossing signs

New scientific research on regeneration in Newts

And - after a two year sabbatical - George promises he will soon be bringing Nature Boy back to the airwaves.

Roy L Hales / Cortes Clean-up - The Campbell River Association of Tour Operators finished (CRATO) cleaning up Vancouver Island’s shoreline from Comox to Chatham Point, at the entrance of the Johnstone Strait, and is now working in the northern Discovery Islands.

“It is such an inspiring story to see how the tour operators of Campbell River came together to not only clean things up, but train a whole new generation how to do that,” said Mary Ruth Snyder, Executive Director  of the Campbell River & District Chamber of Commerce. 

CRATO was awarded the contract, to remove marine debris, garbage and used fishing and aquaculture gear from about 350 kilometres of shoreline by the BC governments the Clean Coast, Clean Waters Initiative.

They started the clean-up in Comox, last month. Bill Coltart, President of CRATO, attributes the progress of their first five days to the fact they were working in an area that was heavily populated.

“We did find a lot of debris, don’t get me wrong, but the sheer volume relative to what we are seeing now was significantly less. What that tells me is that people that live along the waterfront, between Comox and Campbell River, do a lot of their own beach clean-up on a regular basis,” he explained. “We were certainly seem some large pieces: large tires, blocks of foam, large pieces of plastic - that aren’t easy to remove - but we’re seeing a much denser volume of marine debris the further isolated we get.”

They expected to be loading a barge every week, but found it only takes a day to a day and a half of beach cleaning.

CRATO had collected about 15 tons of debris by the time Cortes Currents caught up with them at Chatham Point, and Coltart expects to have between 50 and 80 tons when this project ends.

“As tour operators: we’re in those waters every day, be it kayaking or whale watching. You just don’t see what’s up in that high tide line. What’s hiding behind those logs. Once you have the opportunity to walk those isolated stretches of beach, it becomes a bit shocking - at the volume that is hidden there that you just don’t see from the boat,” he said.

The debris is taken to sorting facility in Campbell River. When they have a truckload, Coltart guesstimates 80-85% of the debris will end up in the Ocean Legacy Foundation recycling facility in Richmond. A small amount, 7-8%, goes to landfill.

More in podcast.

Photo credit: weighing the debris - Photo courtesy CRATO

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A massive beach clean-up is underway in the intertidal zones of the Southern Discovery Islands.

“The volume of debris we are finding is mind blowing. We are focusing on the larger items instead of the tiny little microplastics. We’re trying to get the larger items out before they become the microplastics,” explained Breanne Quesnel. “I know we have some very responsible aquaculture operations in our region, but the amount of aquaculture debris is mind boggling: trays; baskets; nettings and things that have just gotten away at one point - or derelict sites.”

Her company, Quadra Island based Spirit of the West Adventures on Quadra Island, obtained the the contract to clean up between 200 and 400 kilometres of shoreline on Quadra, Maurelle, Read, Cortes and Marina Islands. It is part of the Clean Coast, Clean Waters Initiative, a provincially funded program support coastal communities as they recover from the COVID-19 economic downturn and loss of tourism.

“We have just over a month to get to all those, and so far we are on track,” said Quesnel.

Spirit of the West was working in Granite Bay and Kanish Bay, on the northern end of Quadra, when Cortes Currents caught up to them on October 14th.

“Yesterday we were just focused at the very [southern] tip of Quadra Island, Francisco point around to close to Tsa Kwa Luten Lodge. We have a 28 foot landing craft that we are using as part of this and it was stuffed to the gills. We had to stuff more debris, in order to come back for it,” said Quesnel. “So far we’ve cleaned around Marina, some of the north end of Cortes and south end of Quadra. We’re kind of weather and tide dependant, so it’s picking the best place, the best time.”

She expects to collect 50 tons of debris.

There are 4 crews of 5 in the field, and a support team working behind the scenes.

Most of the debris is destined for marine debris specific facility, in the Lower Mainland.

The Oceans Legacy Foundation established this connection, when it teamed up with Fishing for Plastic for a beach clean-up last Spring.

Kelli Turner, Managing Director at Desolation Sound Ocean Protection and Research Foundation (as well as the new Cortes Bay to Lund water taxi service), was one of the participants.

“Shoreline clean-up is one of our big and true heart loves. We try to support a lot of that stuff with the funds we are able to get from moving people and growing the company,” he said.

Turner said they cleaned the eastern shore of Cortes Island, from the northern tip down to the Twin Islands, as well as “a good chunk of Desolation Sound,” Hernando Island and Savary Island.

“It can be very easy to be overwhelmed by the staggering volumes of debris, not having real control and it getting to the ocean in the first place. A lot of this is docks and industry, as well as consumer goods like plastics,” said Quesnel. “I think we just really need to focus on what kinds of changes we can make on a daily basis and what we can control. Starting at home and thinking with small and then just using our voices, of course, to try and encourage the government and industry to be more proactive so that this debris doesn’t end up in the ocean in the first place.

Photo credit: courtesy Spirit of the West Adventures

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler advises environmentalists to stay home, international conferences like COP 26 are a waste of time.

“These climate conferences are not addressing the real root problem, which is overshoot of the human species on earth, and they are not doing anything about the one symptom they are addressing, which is climate change,” he said.

There have been 34 climate meetings since 1979, when the first global conference was held in Geneva.

“What I expect from COP 26 is what we’ve seen from the last 25 COP meetings and the dozen climate meetings before that,” said Weyler. “Everything they agree on is full of loopholes for the governments and corporations to get out of their commitments.”

Fifty years ago, when he entered the environmental movement, Weyler believed that people would respond when they heard “the facts of what was going on with species collapse, climate change, toxins in our environment.”

Some have, but the level of response “feels almost insignificant” and society as a whole largely remains oblivious.

Weyler was shocked by the world’s failure to react in 2008, when it was first revealed that the Arctic permafrost is melting. The methane being released is a far deadlier greenhouse gas than CO2 and could trigger runaway global warming.

“It didn’t get a mention anywhere in the popular public media and was successfully ignored by all the governments in the world.”

He doesn’t know what scale of crisis it will take to inspire significant change.

Meanwhile, every year, close to 90 million new humans are brought into a world that doesn’t have the resources to support them.

“We’re not even addressing the problem of human population. We are ignoring that, pretending that is not an issue. We’re not really addressing our consumption habit. We are trying to come up with technological fixes that will allow us to continue with business as usual,” said Weyler.

He cited three examples of population overshoot in nature: among wolves, locusts and algae. While there were massive die offs in each case, a remnant of the species survived.

This is most likely what will happen to humanity, but “people are not going to necessarily remember how to achieve all the technological systems that we have in place now.”

“We’d be a lot better off if we could organize a soft landing at a lower population with a much lower consumption,” said Weyler. “Right now our population is growing at about 1.2% a year … If we could institutionalize women’s rights, so that women had the right to control how many children they had, and if we made contraception available worldwide, that alone would probably reduce our growth rate from 1.2% to maybe minus 1% or 2%.”

If humanity’s population was contracting at the same rate it is now expanding, in 70 years there would be 4 billion people.

Eventually there would be 1 billion, a number that Weyler believes our planet could sustain forever.

Photo credit: Crowd by Michael Kleban via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - It has been more than three months since the village of Lytton burned to the ground, displacing nearly 1,300 people, and the Strathcona Regional District (SRD) is reaching out to see if it can help.

This initiative was inspired by a commitment made in the Regional District of Mount Waddington (RDMW), in northern Vancouver Island.

“To help Lytton rebuild, the Electoral Area Directors of the RDMW will contribute one dollar for every person in their representative areas. ln doing so, the Electoral Area Directors of the RDMW wish to challenge all other local governments to make a similar gesture.”

At the Wednesday October 6th SRD Board meeting, Mayors Julie Colborne of Zeballos, Martin Davis of Tahsis and Mark Baker of Sayward all spoke in favour of the SRD making a donation.

Colborne mentioned to the 2018 fire, which damaged 7 buildings above the village and could easily destroyed Zeballos.

Tom Yates, corporate services manager at the SRD, said it would cost the district $44,000 to $45,000, but they would need to figure out how they could set up the donation. (It is not, for example, a grant in aid.)

Director Brenda Leigh suggested that this topic be referred back to the SRD’s Emergency Services Co-ordinator, Shaun Koopman, asking that he draw up a report on how much money has already been given to Lytton and what was needed.

Director Claire Moglove said a report was unnecessary. They city of Campbell River decided to contact Lytton directly to ask what the needs are.

That was the motion that Davis brought forward, Director Kerr seconded, and was carried at the SRD Board meeting.

Image credit: Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The widespread belief at-risk southern resident killer whales are starving due to a lack of chinook salmon has been debunked.

A UBC led study found there are actually more than four times as many salmon in their territory than that of their supposedly better fed kinsmen north of Cortes Island.

This was not what the authors expected to find, when they compared the numbers of Chinook entering the Strait of Juan de Fuca to those just north of Campbell River, in the Johnstone Strait, during the summers of 2018 and 2019.

“Measurements from drone footage has shown the southern resident killer whales are thinner on average than the northern residents — which supports the common belief that the southern residents are experiencing a food shortage,” explained Dr. Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at UBC, and one of the study’s three authors.

When the southern residents failed to return for four consecutive summers, people assumed that was because there was no Chinook for them.

This is the first study to employ hydro-acoustic technology in an acoustic survey of salmon populations at sea. Up until now, researchers have had to rely on counts of salmon returning to rivers. Fishermen helped point the team to areas where their state-of-the-art fish finders should be deployed. Researchers caught sample fish to validate the accuracy of their equipment.

“There is a food problem, but we are not seeing the problem as being here during the summer time,” concluded Trites. “The reality is killer whales have to eat everyday of the year.”

While BC’s Chinook salmon population is in decline, he suspects the real threat to the southern resident population may occur during the Fall and Winter, when they are south of the border. Prior to the introduction of logging, dams and irrigation, California’s rivers had some of the biggest Chinook runs in the North Pacific Ocean.

“Those runs were destroyed, they used to support four runs of Chinook,” said Trites. “Here we think of Summer and Fall runs, but they also have a winter run that came in around Christmas time and a Spring run as well. Historically their habitat had food throughout it for different times of the year. They haven’t had a proper meal, say in terms of that Christmas dinner, since the 1800s.”

He concluded that if scientists want to find out why southern residents appear to be malnourished, they need to extend their research throughout their entire range - which includes the West Coast of the United States.

Photo credit: A southern resident killer whale seen from a drone swimming past a school of salmon near the mouth of the Fraser River. (photo. K. Holmes, Hakai Institute and University of British Columbia).

De Clarke/Cortes Currents - When Justice Douglas Thompson refused to extend an injunction against old-growth defenders blocking a logging road at Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, his decision made headlines around the world.

Justice Thompson referred explicitly in his decision to “enforcement […] carried out by police officers rendered anonymous to the protesters, many of those police officers wearing ‘thin blue line’ badges.” The significance of this language may not be clear to every reader; but the judge’s reasoning was important — to more than just the struggle over the fate of the pathetic remnants (one or two percent) of BC’s old-growth forests.

The judge raised crucial and timely questions about the culture and practise of police work.

The “thin blue line” symbol worn by police officers has a long history. Derived from the “thin red line” of Scottish Highlanders who stood their ground in terrifying circumstances during the Crimean War, by 1922 the phrase had been used in the US to describe police officers. By the early 50’s, LAPD police chief Bill Parker used it often as a rhetorical device, conceptualising the police force as “the thin blue line” that stands its ground between a virtuous citizenry and an onslaught of violence and anarchy.

Today the symbol has acquired less heroic meanings. In 2018 a law review article noted that it can mean the code of silence by which police officers cover up for each other’s misconduct. And by 2014 it had become the rallying symbol of “Blue Lives Matter,” a backlash directed against the Black Lives Matter protests.

In the context of intensifying protests against racial bias in policing, and specifically against the murders of Black Americans by their own police forces, the Thin Blue Line quickly became associated with anti-BLM sentiment and hence with American White Supremacist ideology. White Supremacists began to display the symbol on their web sites and in person, at rallies and marches.

RCMP ban on wearing of the symbol by on-duty officers

Police officers are in general not encouraged to modify their uniforms by adding “loyalty symbols” of any other organisation or group. Recognising the inflammatory potential of the Thin Blue Line symbol, RCMP in October 2020 issued a directive banning officers on duty from wearing the symbol. In response, the police union defied orders by providing its members with Thin Blue Line patches to wear.

Individual municipalities such as Victoria and Saanich have felt the need for directives banning the wearing of the controversial emblem. RCMP officers throughout Canada continue, however, to defy the October 2020 ban. Many of the officers arresting (and mistreating) protesters at Fairy Creek were seen by eyewitnesses and in photographs wearing the Thin Blue Line badge.

The editorial continues in the podcast

Photo credit: RCMP E Division headquarters in Surrey, BC by Waferboard via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)