(ANNews) – Canada’s special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian Residential Schools has released the final report of her mandate, providing recommendations on how the government can honour the memory of the thousands of children who were killed at forced assimilation institutions.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is “very confident” the federal government will get back the $34 billion in public funds spent on the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. But her statement produced widespread skepticism from opposition MPs.
“If you look at market analysis right now, the consensus view is this is a project that is worth a lot of money,” Freeland said at the natural resources committee meeting Monday.
There are more Chum swimming up Basil Creek than we’ve seen for years. According to Matthew Clarke of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), Cortes Island isn’t the only place where the Chum run is good this year.
“As a general rule this year things are looking much better for Chum than they have looked, albeit with a couple of places that are not quite as strong as we would have hoped to see,” he explained.
Now that TMX is complete, the question of who should bear the brunt of the project’s cost overruns is making the rounds on Parliament Hill.
A federal committee delved into this issue on Wednesday night, with some witnesses and MPs insisting the oil and gas sector should shoulder the burden because they are the ones profiting, while others argued the pipeline benefits all Canadians.
Oil industry executives called to testify at the Oct. 9 committee meeting on Trans Mountain’s massively over-budget pipeline expansion were met with a combative NDP leader.
In the foreword, Briony Penn wrote, “If you’ve picked up this book, chances are that you’ve fallen in love with the islands in the Salish Sea. You might have wondered how the heck they’ve retained their natural beauty against the hostile tsunami of contemporary clear-cuts, cookie cutter suburbs, and mindless malls that are encroaching elsewhere.”
Briony talks about the collective efforts of thousands of people over generations that have actually been working to maintain the beauty of the islands.
Sheila’s book documents the last 30 years of people (voices in the islands) who have been working at conservation. She includes a chapter on Cortes, so we’re in there with the best of them! I encourage everybody to pick her book up and have a read to see what the island community of conservationists have been doing.
Map of the Children’s Forest
The most exciting conservation story on Cortes today is definitely the Children’s Forest! This is the 624 acres of forest lands that stretch all the way from the Carrington Bay Road trailhead, east across Carrington Lagoon to Goat Mountain, just on the northern shore of Blue Jay Lake. These are lands owned by Island Timberlands. It’s part of their privately managed forest land base on Cortes Island.
