The February 12th, 2024 public Q&A session where the public was invited to ask questions of a panel of several Vancouver Park Board commissioners was held in the gymnasium at the Hillcrest Community Centre in Vancouver, BC. The purpose of the event seemed to be to garner public opposition to Vancouver mayor Ken Sim's campaign to dissolve the Board so the City Council can administer the city’s parks directly.

Several members of our Save Stanley Park group asked questions related to the logging of Stanley Park. For example, we asked these questions while holding up photographic evidence supporting our claims:

• There appear to be healthy trees cut down and chopped up. I thought the project was to remove dead trees that posed a hazard. Why is your logging contractor cutting down healthy trees?
• This area near Prospect Point looks like it was bombed out. Why was it necessary to cause this amount of destruction to the forest?

The commissioners appeared to be taken off-guard by the topic raised. At first they reflexively gave the stock answers for public consumption, such as that there was no choice but to remove dead trees because they pose a fire hazard and/or may fall on people. When challenged with evidence that living trees were being cut—and far from roads or paths—the commissioners finally asked us to cease asking off-topic questions.

In our view, scrutinizing how the Board is managing the forest is relevant to the debate as to whether the Board should be dissolved.

Finally,  as a strategy to salvage the remainder of the meeting for its intended purpose and/or a bona fide effort at hearing our views, one of the few relatively progressive commissioners, Tom Digby, asked us to meet with him in the hallway, which we did. I’m not sure it was the right decision; perhaps we should have stubbornly refused to leave the meeting and allow the logging issue to give way to the Board’s self-interested survival plea.

We garnered much new information, however, by meeting with Digby. He took copious notes while interviewing us about our views on Stanley Park logging. He seemed to understand our position and has since expressed a continuing interest in considering the evidence we have that living trees which do not seem to pose a threat are being cut down.

Unfortunately, Digby normally finds himself in the minority on a right wing Board controlled by the ABC Vancouver political party.

More developments in updates to come . . .