Sinixt in court this week over Perry Ridge
By Nelson Daily Editor
By Timothy Schafer, The Nelson Daily
Several storylines will intertwine this week as the Sinixt Nation appears in Vancouver’s Supreme Court to argue its inherent right to protect the forests and drinking water quality along Perry Ridge.
The Sinixt are contending the Crown failed to do its duty to consult the Sinixt in the course of issuing Timber Sale Licence A80073 to Sunshine Logging, said their lawyer, David Aaron.
On Nov. 4, 2010, Justice Wilcox conditionally upheld the Sinixt’s action of interest to protect Perry Ridge by staying Sunshine Logging’s injunction to remove a November blockade by the Sinixt on a Forest Service access road.
The decision was the first overturn or stay of a similar non-treaty injunction since the mid-1980’s (the protection of Meares Island on southwestern Vancouver Island from logging).
Perry Ridge is the source of drinking water for many residents in the lower Slocan River valley, some 30 kilometres northwest of Nelson.
Over the last 20 years the Sinixt declared its intention to protect public drinking watershed sources within its traditional lands, a legislative policy formerly maintained by the BC government.
The duty to consult First Nations on a timber sale licence arises when the Crown has knowledge of a potential Aboriginal claim or right on the land, said Aaron.
Although the Sinixt case for rights and claims is still before the court to have their “extinct” status lifted with the federal government, the issue on Perry Ridge is not about extinct status but on the duty to consult aboriginal people, Aaron had said earlier.
Aaron said the Province’s decision to issue Timber Sale Licence A80073 has adverse impacts on the Sinixt’s pending Aboriginal claims and rights.
According to Aaron, the Sinixt have been demanding consultation regarding development plans on Perry Ridge since at least 1997. A letter of Oct. 7, 2008 from Aaron asking for the Crown to consult with the Sinixt on Perry Ridge received no reply from BC Timber Sales.
The Sinixt have contended that industrial development on Perry Ridge could jeopardize Sinixt archaeological sites, exacerbate geological instability with the risk of slope failure, disrupt water quality and quantity, and threaten endangered species over which the Sinixt exercise “aboriginal rights.”
Alongside B.C.’s Attorney General and Sunshine Logging to counter the Sinixt’s action, the Okanagan Nation Alliance and the Colville Business Council are participating as Intervenors.
Background
One of the many associations formed in the 1970s to protect drinking water was the Perry Ridge Water Committee in 1977, which in 1982 became the Perry Ridge Water Users.
For more than 30 years, as found in both the Perry Ridge Water Users and government correspondence files, resident water users have fought the government, through the Ministry of Forests (now, B.C. Timber Sales), to protect Perry Ridge.
