Police prepare to break Perry Ridge protest camp
By Nelson Daily Editor
By Timothy Schafer, The Nelson Daily
Logging on Perry Ridge begins this week but there could be trouble brewing as RCMP prepare to remove what was deemed to be an “illegal” protest in BC Supreme Court on Friday.
An injunction order was upheld in BC Supreme Court in Nelson on Friday, March 4 that anyone “attending at or near the Perry Ridge Forest Service Road and/or Little Slocan Forest Service Road … be restrained, enjoined and prohibited until trial or other disposition of this action” if they interfere with the logging operations.
However, a “protection camp” has formed on the logging road — located at kilometre seven of Little Slocan Forest Service Road — to protest the logging that is expected to take place.
“The intention is to stand united, witness and show support for the preservation of the ridge without arrest,” an email from the Protection Camp organizers read on Tuesday morning.
It was billed as a peaceful camp, beginning Wednesday, but the RCMP have informed the protestors they will be enforcing the injunction from Sunshine Logging Co. which they won in Nelson last week.
Tom Prior, Robert Watt, Joseph Williams-Freeman, Eloise Charet, and “persons unknown” were named as defendants in the order on Friday. However, they had the proviso, on two days notice to Sunshine Logging, to apply to the Court to set aside the injunction, which they did not.
Court decision
The Sinixt Nation’s judicial review application was dismissed in BC Supreme Court in Vancouver Feb. 25.
The application — made by way of petition against the Province’s issuance of a timber sale licence on Perry Ridge — was dismissed “by way of oral reasons” by Judge J. Willcock on the basis the Sinixt “are not a group capable of sufficiently precise definition with respect to their group membership,” said Sinixt lawyer David Aaron in a statement after the judgement.
Aaron pointed to the establishment of an international boundary through Sinixt territory, subsequent restriction against free passage across that boundary, and the Crown’s failure to provide adequate reserve land to protect traditional village sites and burial grounds as factors that lead to the “historical disenfranchisement of the Sinixt from statutory rights in Canada.”
That disenfranchisement lost the Sinixt the right to enter and remain in Canada, the right to viable reserve land, the right to membership in an Indian Act band, and the opportunity for representation through a band council.
At issue
The Sinixt were contending the Crown failed to do its duty to consult them in the course of issuing Timber Sale Licence A80073 to Kaslo’s Sunshine Logging for the forest on Perry Ridge.
On Nov. 4, 2010, Justice Willcock conditionally upheld the Sinixt’s action of interest to protect Perry Ridge by staying Sunshine Logging’s injunction to remove a November blockade by the Sinixt on a Forest Service access road.
Perry Ridge is the source of drinking water for many residents in the lower Slocan River valley, some 30 kilometres northwest of Nelson.
The duty to consult First Nations on a timber sale licence arises when the Crown has knowledge of a potential Aboriginal claim or right on the land.
The Sinixt have contended that industrial development on Perry Ridge could jeopardize Sinixt archaeological sites, exacerbate geological instability with the risk of slope failure, disrupt water quality and quantity, and threaten endangered species over which the Sinixt exercise “aboriginal rights.”
