Friends:

I appreciate your web service, which allows us to be in touch with groups and organizations we might otherwise not hear about.

I was concerned about your item today about the Walbran. Since you appear to support unions, not just green extreme groups, I would caution you to think before you help start up another "valley-by-valley" conflict.

It is unfortunate but true that many of the green groups are extremely anti-worker and have never displayed the slightest concern about workers, jobs or communities, other than perhaps giving them pious lip-service. Their actions, sad to say, speak louder than these fine-sounding words.

Most forest environmental groups have never turned a hand to or given a thought to the needs and concerns of working people who risk their lives daily and sweat to provide the bulk of our province's export
earnings. It is unfortunate, as well, that WCWC is among them. Indeed, WCWC has proven over the past decade to be perhaps the most consistently anti-worker green group in BC.

Thus I would advise that before you simply pick sides in another forestry confrontation that you at least talk to IWA Canada"s representatives and members who might be impacted -- impacted not only through loss of timber and therefore loss of jobs and job security but impacted as a result of the day-to-day horror of being under attack by hostile and often fiercely anti-worker and anti-union, middle-class antagonists.

In Clayoquot Sound and the Elaho, for instance, IWA members were subjected to savage verbal abuse by protesters; people threw excrement on them; they sabotaged logging equipment, endangering the workers' lives; they ran through falling zones blowing whistles, further endangering them and they spiked trees. I hope you will agree that these are completely unacceptable tactics. I know that were you to ask WCWC whether they engaged in any of these activities, they will deny it.

Protesters often say "no crimes in defense of the environment". I beg to differ. Terrorism against working people in their workplaces is terrorism, pure and simple. I truly hope that the "left" in this province is ready to realize this and to take a second look at the assumptions they make about what is reasonable and fair, both with respect to environmental protection and workers' rights and well-being.

Thank you. Please feel free to contact me should your require additional information. For the Walbran, you might want to contact Bill Routley, president of IWA Canada Local 1-80 in Duncan.

Regards, Kim Pollock, National Director

Public Policy and Environment, IWA Canada

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