In Action
Columbia Basin Trust
Written By Marco Procaccini
Among the key elements of sustainability are the traditions of cooperation, community values and democracy. With these in mind, there is no better practical example of sustainability in action than the Columbia Basin Trust.
With a $500 million dollar grant from the B.C. NDP government in 1992, the Trust was set up as an incorporated regional cooperative-jointly owned by the provincial government and the residents of the five Southeastern B.C. regions.
The money was then used to convert the area's Duncan, Keenleyside and Mica Dams, which were built as reservoirs for other power-generating dams for the United States as part of the 1961 Columbia River Treaty, into power producing dams in themselves. The revenues created by these dams have since provided the trust with funds to invest in a wide variety of social services and progressive local business development.
"It was a huge exercise in democracy and due process," says Antoinette Halberstadt, one of the Trust founding members currently active with the NDP's Standing Committee on the Environment and Economy. "It started with groups of people across the region holding a series of community meetings on how to get some of the benefits from these dams, since our communities had to deal with so much of the impact from building them."
The 1961 power treaty, signed between the provincial and federal governments and the U.S. government, spawned an unprecedented wave of hydro-electric dam construction and related development across B.C., including across the basin.
While the treaty was hailed as an economic miracle for the province, the impact on the regions of the basin was devastating.
"The treaty (development) dammed our rivers and damaged the ecology," Halberstadt said. "They flooded (thousands of hectares of) our farmlands and forests and flooded entire communities." She adds it was classic example of large poorly planned mega-project developments that sacrifice the interests of the local regions affected.
After the 1991 provincial election, local regional districts, the Ktunaxa Kinbasket tribal council and the newly-elected NDP government jointly created the Columbia River Treaty Committee,. Its responsibilities were to oversee the investment of the first $295 million of the government allocation--$250 million to finance power project construction, and $45 million for community projects, as directed by Basin residents.
With the exception of this support from the provincial government involvement, most of the CBT's initiatives and decision-making rested in the hands of the communities-a successful example of local economic democracy.
However, that changed to a large degree after the 2001 election, when the BC Liberals made serious legislative changes, including reducing the size of the board and converting many elected positions to appointed ones.
Norm MacDonald, the MLA for the Columbia River Revelstoke constituency, one the five regions in the basin, says that move drastically reduced the trust's ability to respond to the democratic will and needs of its resident shareholders.
"The trust is still dong a lot of great work and investing in good projects," he said. "But it???s clear the board has lost touch with a lot of the realities people are facing."
"It's clearly this is much like a corporate board," he said. "It's lost touch with reality. "We need to restore the decentralized democratic structure and give more power back to the grassroots. The more decision-making power you put into the hands of the community, the more success you will have."
Cowichan Lake Community Forest
Written By Marco Procaccini
B.C. is home to all sorts of democratic and sustainable business ventures and developments.
This includes community-based forestry operation and tree farms licenses. Probably the most successful and best known of these is the Cowichan Lake Community Forest on Vancouver Island.
It is a locally owned and managed business cooperative which creates and maintains jobs through it's commitment to the principles of forest sustainability, and community economic development. CLCFC was incorporated under the then newly revamped and modernized 'The Cooperative Association Act of British Columbia,' August 2, 1995.
The Cowichan venture is the result of local labour, small business, environmental and First Nations activists coming to together during the recession-stricken 1980s and early 1990s that had seen sky-rocketing unemployment, personal bankruptcy and general poverty in coastal forest communities.
"Local employment in the forest industry declined as sawmills closed, harvesting levels were cut back, and more and more of the forest resource was trucked out of the local trading area for processing" according the co-op's web site, adding that the forest industry, the main form of economic activity in the area, is controlled mainly by large multi-national corporations and centrally regulated from Victoria and Ottawa, leaving workers and the community shut out of the decision-making process.
On June 24, 1994, as part of the provincial governments Island Job Strategy, Premier Mike Harcourt encouraged the Cowichan Lake area to establish a Community Forest, and apply for a Forest Licence for the 3,000 hectare Bolduc Block near the Gordon River.
The CLCFC received financial assistance from both the Cooperative Development Branch and Forest Renewal BC. These funds were to cover the initial development costs including the incorporation, as well as the preparation of the Forest licence bid, and other management costs until such a time as the Cooperative began making a profit
Since then, the successful co-op has used the revenues from harvesting to expand its operations to fund social and community services, as well as business ventures in new economic sectors-especially in what it calls "value-added" manufacturing, which takes locally harvested wood and turns it into a wide variety of user-end products, instead of shipping it off shore as either raw logs or primary lumber..
The co-op's leadership is proud of the success-which was largely dismissed by many corporate sources when it was started.
