The B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union (BCGEU) has focused the blame on Victoria following news this week that forestry workers were living in squalid conditions at a bush camp near Golden.
The BCGEU said in a release Thursday that ongoing staff layoffs at the ministry of forests and range have hindered the union’s ability to monitor and enforce ministry contracts with private operators.
“It goes to the issue of self regulation,” Chris Bradshaw, a BCGEU spokesman, told BIV. “This government has come out and put in place policies that allow contractors and the private sector in public forest lands … to regulate themselves.
“If you have rules in place you need to have someone monitoring them and enforcing them, and if you keep cutting staff whose job it is to do that we shouldn’t be surprised when these types of abuses take place.”
The alleged abuses were revealed in local media earlier this week and led to a brush-clearing contract held by Khaira Enterprises Ltd. to be suspended after 25 workers were found without appropriate housing and living standards.
The BCGEU said the government reorganized the ministry in 2003 and closed offices in communities such as Golden. These days that part of the province is administered from an office in Vernon.
Bradshaw said, “Our workers on the ground are pretty thin and they have a large area to cover.”
The BCGEU said the provincial Liberal government has cut 1,100 jobs from the ministry of forests and range since 2001.