VANCOUVER -- John Doyle, the Auditor-General of British Columbia, is going to examine a controversial decision by the provincial government that allowed a forestry company to sell timber lands on Vancouver Island for real-estate development.
Mr. Doyle announced yesterday that "in the public interest" his office will review the decision to delete from three Tree Farm Licences about 28,000 hectares of private land held by Duncan-based Western Forest Products.
The decision to allow Western to pull the land out of the TFLs and sell it to developers has met with a public outcry because the richly forested land includes popular recreational areas such as the Sooke River potholes, and world-famous surfing beaches at Jordan River, west of Victoria.
"It's really about the future of Victoria's wild coast," said Calvin Sandborn, a spokesman for the Environmental Law Centre, which last month wrote to Mr. Doyle, urging him to examine the TFL decision.
Mr. Sandborn, whose request was backed by a coalition that includes surfers, environmentalists and forestry unions, said that when Western applied to remove the land, the government had an opportunity to protect key areas by demanding park land in compensation for approval.
"The government failed to take the public interest into account," said Mr. Sandborn, who fears the coastline west of Victoria could be lost to urban sprawl if the decision stands.
Ken Wu, a spokesman for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, said he is encouraged by the Auditor-General's review.
"Basically, it's our belief the public interest hasn't been served," he said. "The public deserves to be compensated in money or in land when TFLs are removed like this."
Mr. Wu said he hopes the review "will shed some light on what happened behind the scenes on this deal." The development comes amid growing concern over such land sales in B.C., including a recent move by Pope and Talbot, a financially strapped Oregon company, to put some Kootenay properties on the block even while some of the land still falls under a provincial TFL.
In a letter to the Auditor-General last month, the Victoria-based Environmental Law Clinic said the provincial Forest Minister's January decision to allow Western Forest Products to remove land from TFLs shortchanges public interests, creates "an apparent windfall" for the company and gives a green light to unchecked urban sprawl along one of the most scenic stretches of coastline in the country.
"It's a huge betrayal of public trust," Vicky Husband, a long-time environmental campaigner and spokeswoman for the Greater Victoria Greenbelt Society, said of the TFL sale.
"The companies agreed in the 1950s that in return for getting access to huge amounts of prime Crown land, they would put their small amount of private land into tree farm licences. It was always part of the deal that those lands were expected to be forest lands in perpetuity," Ms. Husband said.
The provincial Forests Ministry, however, says there is no provision in the Forest Act that requires compensation for "returning private land to private management."
And the province's decision to allow Western to remove some of its land from TFLs is consistent with policy changes aimed at giving companies "more flexibility to compete in the marketplace" and removing "barriers to market forces," a ministry spokesman said.
Tree farm licences are part of a forest management system set up by the province in the 1940s and 1950s. In exchange for putting private lands into TFLs, where the sites would be subject to provincial regulation, forest companies typically gained logging rights to tracts of Crown land.
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