The ability to tailor research, policy, planning and practice must be delegated to a central authority on a more local scale so as to grant more flexibility in the responses to issues like climate change and to place responsibility for the social, economic and environmental outcomes in the hands of those that are most knowledgeable about their situation and will be most impacted by the decisions. As is indicated in the article above – instead of structuring research, policy, planning and practice to underwrite such flexible responses, the Government has decided in its own wisdom to stretch the very bonds of these 4 corner stones of effective land management coordination even more than was the case under the old regime. Frustrations with lack of control will increase on the local scale, and the Government will have to respond by way of triage of the treatment of those frustrations through a highly centralized form of government due to the lack of empowered decision makers lower in the hierarchy. Important issues will be missed and unintended consequences will continue to perpetuate themselves throughout this centralized system, as in the past, for example through “sudden” outbreaks of large scale social unrest about the way forests are being managed, catastrophic fires, and bark beetles, all of which could be, and in fact were, anticipated and yet not responded to because the voices were too few and not loud enough until after the events occurred.

Not only some ministries are rafe with rogue agents who decide for themselves what values should be imposed on the rest of society, but to make matters worse, none of this set of diverse agents have any background or inclination to consider tax income and revenue generation in evaluating an application on hand. Therefore it is quite common that some recent college graduate in cultural theory in order to save \minnows\ ends up rejecting a sustainable project that could bring millions in revenue to multiple levels of government and First Nations.

The ideological impoverishment of the province continues with the bureaucracy in total control and also in many ways subservient to the extremely highly paid public unions. This charade has to end. If there is a better way to do that – I am all ears. However, the current system of layers and layers of bureacracy with very little accountibility and rampant ideological activism and diverse specialty fiefdoms within government must change.

I would also note that “land use planning” has not been a significant program for several years now. It has been essentially been replaced by negotiated land and resource use agreements between the Crown and First Nations. I also note that many of these plans are very dated (having been developed 10 or more years ago for much of the interior of the province) and given the prescriptive nature of many of these plans I would be interested to learn how much they actually influence operational level management and decision making today.

One challenge with linking sector revenues to the amount that is spent on “administering” that sector is that this approach does not take into account the amount of work involved in actually processing authorizations for the activities of that sector. In some instances perhaps the Crown could price tenures to more accurately reflect the amount of effort involved in processing the application in question.

I would also argue that in some instances the Crown undervalues the revenue that could have been generated from its land and resource assets. For example, what if rather than allowing a “gold rush” for “staking” of potential run of river IPP sites the Crown had instead only made a small number of sites available at a time and used some sort of competitive bid process to see who got the rights to a site? I would speculate that the Crown may have gotten a better return in the long run. I would point to the agreements that First Nations are able to negotiate with IPP developers as evidence of what the Crown may have been able to achieve. But this is a whole other topic for discussion.