EDITORIAL PAGE — It ain’t over till it’s over

Well, well, well. Like Lazarus, Windy Craggy may yet rise from the dead. It seems British Columbia Premier Mike Harcourt and his gang committed a political faux pas in seeking a World Heritage Site designation for the Tatshenshini Wilderness. In rushing to designate the site, they fell all over themselves embracing the likes of a Kennedy family environmental lawyer from New York, U.S. Vice-President Al Gore and other environmental luminaries from away.

So busy were they, pandering to outside interests, that they hadn’t considered that Tatshenshini locals might have their own view on wilderness designation.

In their haste to score brownie points with the green movement, they simply ignored that one essential, local stakeholder. The Champagne Aishihik band learned from press reports that their wilderness home would soon become a wilderness playground — er, preserve — for the rest of the world. Even Kim Campbell, the then-leader of the land, who should have known better — it was her government that has yet to nail down a land-claims settlement — trampled all over native rights. Soon after the Harcourt government decision, she wrote a letter to the premier committing Ottawa to sponsoring the province’s wilderness designation. Problem was, she had no right to do that. Her mines minister at the time set the record, and her boss, straight. In an Oct. 8 letter to Campbell, Bobbie Sparrow made the following points: “To date, we have no indication that they (the Tatshenshini natives) have been informed what a World Heritage Site means in terms of regional land use decision-making, including decisions which they might want to make in the future. The B.C. government cannot presume that natives will or will not want economic development . . .”

She went on to say the federal government could not offer to sponsor designation until the native land claims had been settled. In fact, to settle the claims issue first was the government’s “fiduciary responsibility.” (Can’t you just feel, in that phrase, the shattering reverberations of the Lac-Corona lawsuit over Hemlo?) Campbell hastily retreated, deferring the issue, pending a federal review.

Now that a new federal government is installed, it too must settle the outstanding land claim first. Thus, wilderness designation is still years away.

And so Windy Craggy may yet rise from the grave. This

“Night-of-the-Living-Dead” scenario surely must haunt the premier. For all his troubles, he has nothing but pain: a significant proportion of the electorate distressed at the cavalier way he dismisses a mining project worth billions of dollars and hundreds of jobs, a native band dismayed at the arrogance with which the whole matter has been handled, a mining industry feeling disenfranchised and betrayed, and environmentalists who still do not have what they want.