Cortes Currents

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - There was an increasing number of wolf sightings and encounters on Cortes Island during the closing months of 2008. A number of posts in the Tideline over the course of the next two years mention 'an awful lot of them on the island, in an awfully short time.' There were mixed reactions. A Squirrel Cove resident wrote that 15 ran through one of their neighbours yards at 4 AM. Someone had a 'magical encounter' with a large black wolf, standing on the foot bridge over the channel connecting Gunflint and Hague Lakes, as she paddled through with her canoe. Another resident reported that three wolves killed her dog, only 70 feet from her house.

More than 150 people gathered in the Linnaea School, on January 17, 2009, when local biologist Sabina Leader Mense brought in two experts to share their experiences with wolves. Conservation Officer Ben York thanked the audience for bringing him in to discuss the situation, rather than put an animal down. He also stated that some of the wolves on Cortes ‘are very habituated’ and ‘˜there is a level of tolerance for these animals that is endangering them.’

The other expert was Bob Hansen, a wildlife/human conflict specialist in the Pacific Rim National Reserve.

Hanson was also one of the principle speakers at the recent Wildlife Coexistence Gathering on Cortes Island.  He explained that prior to receiving Sabina’s invitation, his attention was primarily focused on the Pacific Rim community.

"I was approached by another champion, Sabina, because she'd heard about the Wild Coast Project." 

"So now we're  taking a step away from the West Coast. We were really laser focused. I was hesitant, and the management team was really hesitant, like - 'you want to leave the park and  go over to the other side of the island?'  They did agree, and the only stipulation they made  was that the CO service had to be here as well."

"It turned out our other champion, Ben York, was the CO. We'd worked together on Bear Aware in our area and he'd taken a new posting. By this time Ben had married Crystal.” (Laughter) 

(In the first article of this series, Hansen described Crystal McMillan as a force of nature in the Ucluelet area. Her Bear Aware group was so effective that she received a Premier’s Award. She insisted that all of her partners and collaborators also be recognized. So Premier Gordon Campbell presented the award to a group of people that included Crystal, Bob Hansen and Ben York.)  

"So Ben and Crystal came to our first Cortes get-together in 2009.  That was a huge learning experience, and out of that came the Wolf Primer. You were working on the whole idea of identifying and getting to know individual wolves  and understanding which wolves were behaving in which ways."

Some of the wolves were drawn by the sheep carcasses at the back of Blue Jay Lake Farm. During his slideshow presentation, Hanson praised the farmer for his innovative solution.  

Ben Hansen: "Under that blue tarp is a giant hill of moldering hay, and  he started disposing of his carcasses with that. It's super hot, they break down really quickly, no more issues with the wolves patrolling  for dead sheep."   

"That led to the more in depth workshop in two years, where Grace SoftDeer, ourselves and Ben York came, along with some of the researchers from the Wild Coast Project.  We stayed at Christine Robinson's place. That was the storytelling workshop, another really rich experience."

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - In the first of a series of articles from Cortes Islands recent Wildlife Coexistence Gathering, Cortes Currents looked at Vancouver Island’s first wildlife coexistence program in the Pacific Rim National Park. The problem at that time was human/bear conflicts. By the time Sabina Leader Mense reached out from Cortes Island, about 2010, WildSafeBC had been dealing with wolves and cougars for more than a decade. 

Bob Hansen, Pacific Rim Coordinator for WildSafeBC, described the wolves' sudden appearance. 

“Up until this point in time, it was bears and nothing but bears.  In 1998/99, the wolves showed up after being missing from our area for  decades.  Their presence was very dramatically felt.  I remember getting a phone call from the local paper in January of 1999,  ‘have you been getting wolf reports?’ I checked our database, and we'd had  six wolf reports since 1972.  I said, 'nope.' Within two weeks it started, the wolves were back.” 

Cortes Currents: Hansen suspects that modern forestry methods may be at least partially responsible for the influx of wolves and cougars into his area. 

Bob Hansen: "Behind the West Coast Trail, and definitely behind Long Beach, there's very extensive areas of large scale clear cuts. Major portions of watersheds were completely cut during the heyday of clear cut logging.  What we learned  through the research project was that the newly cut areas are exceptional deer habitat and support predators for 10 to 15 years, but when that second growth plantation grows up  to a certain age, the canopy closes in. So it goes from being an exceptional deer habitat to the opposite end of the scale.  It's been referred to in the literature as 'ungulate barrens.' We looked at satellite imagery of Vancouver Island with GIS. We colour coded the second growth plantations that were in that state. We had the cut dates and could see really large areas of Vancouver Island are now locked up in that 'ungulate barrens' condition. That condition persists till the stand is about 80 to a hundred years old."

Cortes Currents: Aren’t some of the forest plantations now being cut after 40 to 50 years?  

Bob Hansen: "They have a calculation about where the best cost benefit point is on a plantation. It used to be 80 to a hundred years, but the math has changed. Right now those plantation lands are being cut around 60 years or even as early as 45 years. So there's just no potential for them to become 'old growth' again."

"The predators had to adapt to that reality and were coming into the national park, coming out to the shoreline.  There's old growth there. It supports a low, but consistent, density of deer. It has all of these other prey animals at that interface between the ocean and the forest: deer, raccoon, river otter and seal pups." 

"It's food that they find at that interface between the ocean and the forest.  That was the big missing piece. Something had happened on the larger landscape, and it's still happening." 

"If you apply a different forestry technique to those plantations,  you don't have to let it close off. Wait until they get 80 to 100 years old. You can actually keep sunlight filtering through the canopy as that plantation is growing, by doing commercial thinning and other things.  Also,  there's other silviculture prescriptions that you can use  to help  promote medicinal plants and other values that are important for First Nations."

"There's a lot that could be done with those second growth areas, but it will take investment and a different vision. It's not  just cubic meters of wood,  you have to manage it from a different perspective."

Cortes Currents: With the arrival of the wolves, Hansen and his colleagues were suddenly faced with a whole new set of problems.

Manda Aufochs Gillespie/ Folk U - On April 5th, Max Thaysen, Sara Stewart, and Filipe Figueira joined host Manda Aufochs Gillespie for a FolkU Friday group discussion on food security and food systems. They chat about successes and challenges in food systems, both locally and globally, from the perspective of farmers, food thinkers, and one of the main coordinators of the Cortes Food Bank.

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

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Around 40 people turned out for the Wildlife Coexistence Gathering on Cortes Island. This was an opportunity for Cortesians to meet some of the extended community of advisors to the local program and learn more about our three top predators: grey wolf, black bear and cougar. The gathering was organized and hosted by Sabina Leader Mense and Georgina Silby from the Cortes Community Wolf Project. It began with a welcoming ceremony in the Klahoose All Purpose Building on Friday, April 5. There was an all day teaching series in the Linnaea Education Centre the following day. The gathering ended with a nature walk in Hank’s Beach Forest Conservation Park on Sunday, April 7.

Sabina Leader Mense emailed, “We celebrated our cultural relationships to our wild kin with the Klahoose First Nations singers & drummers and our guests Grace SoftDeer from the Chickasaw First Nation and Dennis Hetu from the Toquaht First Nation. We then explored our social and ecological relationships with our wild kin in formal and informal presentations by our invited guests, Bob Hansen, Pacific Rim Coordinator for WildSafeBC and Todd Windle, Coordinator for the Wild About Wolves Project.

Cortes Currents recorded most of the sessions at Linnaea and has arranged the material in a series of articles. This is an abridged version of the segment in which Bob Hansen talked about the origins of Vancouver Island’s first wildlife coexistence program. Years later it became the model for Cortes Island’s program and Hansen was one of Sabina Leader Mense’s mentors.

Bob Hansen: ”What I'm going to talk about in this presentation is through a personal lens and it's going to  focus on my personal learning journey in time from Tofino in 1997 to here today, and a lot of points in between. The basic theme is a story of going from one person, feeling like they're working on things by themselves, to today, we are part of many communities that are working towards the same objectives."

In 1997, the Pacific Rim National Park hired Hanson for a new program. His title is Human Wildlife Conflict Specialist and he was expected to find a solution to the park's ongoing bear problem. 

Bob Hansen: "Our track record at that time was, we tended to be killing one to three bears every year.  At times we would have trails closed and occasionally even the Green Point Campground closed during bear season due to conflicts." 

"How can we break this cycle of responding to bear calls and putting down bears?"

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - How should we live on a planet where the rate of extreme weather events seem to be increasing, and humanity is the cause? 

“We're not doing well in terms of global temperatures at all. We're on a dangerous trajectory. We are not going to keep below the 1.5°C on average limit, that seems really clear.  We're actually over 1.5°C in terms of individual years already, but the target was stated in terms of multi-year averages. It's clear, with the inertia and the climate system, that we're going to exceed that. It also seems quite clear that we're going to exceed the 2.0°C limit the way things are going. We just don't have the kind of policy action that we need internationally,” explained Dr Kai Chan, a professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at University of British Columbia, Lead Editor of the new British Ecological Society journal 'People and Nature' and co-founder of CoSphere for a community of small planet heroes. 


“That all said, I personally am concerned more broadly than just with climate. I'm an ecological scientist, and we think about a wide range of different stressors to the natural world, including to the benefits that we receive from that natural world.”

“In that context, we’re also doing poorly. We're not taking the kind of action that we need on the land use change that undermines ecosystems, threatened species, as well as crucial processes like water purification and flood mitigation, drought control. Unfortunately, these are hard times to be on the planet Earth.”

 

Some suggest we need to curtail our personal carbon footprints. 


According to Statistica, the average Canadian emitted 15.22 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2022. That’s more than three times the global average.

A number of people on Cortes Island, and some other rural communities, have carbon footprints that are closer to those of the developing world. We have few electronic devices, do not use our cars often and our principal heating source is a heat pump. 


Lacking any other data, I (the author) used the carbon calculator at climate hero.org and calculated my personal carbon footprint. The answer was 3.4 metric tons. There are most likely people in rural areas like Cortes whose footprint is less than half of this.** 

Yet I am also going on a trip abroad this year. This will add another 7.25 metric tons* to my tally, which I am going to divide by 10 as I have not flown since 2015 and do not expect to take another flight in the near future. That would bring my personal carbon footprint to a bit more than 4.12 metric tons, which is still less than the global average of 4.66 metric tones and far below that of most of my fellow Canadians.

Kai Chan: “It’s an amazing effort and what you're doing is showing how far we can go as individuals. It also reveals that we can't go all the way to a sustainable society through those individual level efforts. I live in Vancouver because I am employed at the University of British Columbia, it's not feasible for me to do all of the things that you're doing, and I'm not the only one.” 

“What we try to do is to pivot the conversation so that those folks who can't emulate that at this point in their lives can still feel like they're contributing meaningfully towards making this planet a more sustainable place.”

He also pointed out that we really can't measure our carbon footprint without taking into account the contribution of the society around us.

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - After close to a decade as the Member of Parliament for North Island-Powell River, Rachel Blaney announced that she will not run in the next Federal Election.


“It was a very hard decision to make but, sadly, I have family issues that have come to the forefront. I recognize that time is precious and this is a long commute back and forth, so I'm happy to be able to continue until 2025 and stay till the next election . Going past that would have meant missing precious time with someone I love greatly, so I had to make a very hard and bittersweet decision,” she explained.


“I'm not gone yet. I know that I've had to make this announcement, but I'm still here and I'm going to still keep working as hard as I can. I stepped down as the whip in Ottawa, because I really wanted to make sure that for the remaining time that I have in parliament, I have more time for my loved ones. I also need to make sure I finish some of the things I really want to get done, both in my critic roles and in the riding.”

“If you need help, I'm still the office to call and I'm so grateful. People come to our office all the time for help, and we're able to help most of the time. That has been an amazing feeling for me, to hear people give us such positive feedback about helping them navigate the federal systems that are sometimes very difficult to navigate.”

Cortes Currents: I don't know who's going to be the next NDP candidate but they're not going to be as popular as you are right now. Do you have any thoughts on that?  

Rachel Blaney: “Well, thank-you for saying that I'm popular and I want to thank the constituency. Everywhere I go, people are so positive. What I prided myself on being able to do is be clear on the partisan issues that I believe in, but try to be practical about how those things roll out in our communities.” 

“Understand that we do have a unique riding, and it's been my pleasure to make sure that that voice is heard.  I will see what happens during the next election. I believe that a lot of people, and I hear this a lot, are feeling connected to the NDP in a new way. They see that we actually were able to deliver on the things we campaigned on. People have talked to me about how amazing it feels to finally be able to get dental care. I knew it would have a big impact, but it had more of an impact than I thought. I've just had a lot of people stopping me in every place that you can imagine, talking about how good it feels to see the beginning of a national pharmacare program, and that their diabetes medication and devices are being covered.”

“I hope that constituents understand that I worked very hard to make those things a reality and I'll continue to work hard until 2025, because I believe in our region. I hope that they put trust in the NDP as a brand and the amazing person that I know will come from this riding to step forward in the NDP position for the next campaign.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - More than 2,600 people went to the North Island Outdoor Adventure Show last year. 

“Most of them were from Courtney and Campbell River. A good portion from Parksville, Nanaimo and then it got pretty slim, but Quadra, Gold River, Victoria, Qualicum. There was one that really  blew my mind: Dartmouth, Nova Scotia,” explained Joel Wheeldon, Program Coordinator with the Strathcona Regional District. 

Google ‘what is the #1 outdoor recreation show in North Vancouver Island,” and the first result will most likely be the North Island Outdoor Adventure Show.

It is held in the Strathcona Gardens Recreation Complex, in Campbell River, a function of the Strathcona Regional District.

This year it will be held on the weekend of April 20 & 21. Admission is FREE! The show is open 9:30 am – 5 pm on Saturday  and 10 am – 4 pm, Sunday.

The sponsors are Homalco Wildlife & Cultural Tours, Qaya Way West Transportation, All-in One-Party Shop, and 97.3 FM the Eagle.

Cortes Currents: What are you trying to accomplish through this event? 

Joel Wheeldon: “The vision is to provide a community event that showcases all the great  outdoor activities that North Vancouver Island has to offer, also  giving a chance for the outdoor adventure companies an opportunity to promote and sell all their great products all in one place. There's a lot of stuff that some locals and even tourists probably don't know that we offer here.”

Cortes Currents: What kind of things are you showcasing that people don't already know about?  

Joel Wheeldon: “We’re trying to showcase anything from boating, fishing, hunting, camping, recreational vehicles, paddle sports, mountain biking, adventure tours.   We've got a couple of vendors that are doing outdoor and marine education courses, some photography stuff, survival gear. I'm probably missing a few, but that's the gist of it.”

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - The Vancouver Island Regional Library increased its operating budget for 2024 to $38 million. That is 15% more money than last year. Executive Director Brent Hyman explained that this increase is necessary because the library’s  previous management did not budget properly and more money is needed for wages, benefits and leases. He has been giving presentations to the library’s funding partners. He has already spoken in Victoria, Nanaimo, and some of the other regional districts. Six of the library’s 39 branches are in the Strathcona Regional District (SRD) and he gave a presentation at the SRD Board’s March 27th meeting. 


“For the SRD,  the total levy breaks down to about $67 per capita.  Much like the school act, that doesn't necessarily mean everybody's using the service. Unlike schools in the region, that serve about 5 % of the population, we're serving about 33% for significantly less funding than schools,” he explained.  


Cortes Currents: True, but there is also a significant difference in usage between a student attending school for more than 9 months of the year and someone who drops-in to the library a few times.


Hyman pointed out, “We do benchmarking, in preparation for this type of presentation and we look at comparator populations.”


He said there is a library in Campbell River, which is contributing about $700,000 below the average funding amount. It also serves Electoral Area D, which is paying $30,000 less than norm. The library on Quadra Island serves Area C, which also provides about $30,000 less. There are libraries in Gold River, Sayward, Tahsis and Cortes Island, all of which pay about $16,000 below the average amount. Heyman claims Electoral Area A and the village of Zeballos, which do not have library branches, should also be providing another $16,000.


The Regional District’s rural inhabitants use the library more than their urban counterparts. Close to ¾ of the SRD’s population lives in Campbell River, but only 54% of the circulation goes through that library. Less than 6% of the SRD’s population is in Area C, but 22% of the region's circulation is through the Quadra Island branch. Another 6% goes through the Cortes Island branch. Similar statistics are reported from the Sayward, Gold River and Tahsis branches.


However one of the biggest funding shortfalls comes from the federal and provincial governments. 


Brent Hyman: “Local government levies are about 94% of our budget. That's been true since the 1980s. The province is down to 4%, but has a lot to say about what it thinks it should get out for 4%.”


“Why is it in Canada that the level of funding from both the provinces and the feds lag below the G8 averages? And so there are a number of recommendations in the report, primarily to federal and provincial governments about seeing critical infrastructure and treating it as such and funding it as such.”

Image credit Open book - Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - At the March 27th meeting of the Strathcona Regional District Board, a couple of items affecting Cortes were on the agenda. Decisions were taken with regard to funding for our community halls, and equipment for our volunteer fire department.

De Clarke/ Cortes Currents - Part 5 of 5 of 25 Years of Good Libations