The Municipal Logging Hoax

by a co-conspirator

In Summer 1989 the Provincial Gov’t (Liberal Party) decided to open up the Temagami region of northern Ontario to clear-cut logging. The indigenous people of the region (at that time known as the Teme-Augama Anishnabai, T-AA) had never ceded this land and opposed the logging. They were in the midst of a land claim at the time and had had a ban against all development since 1973.

The gov’t got a court to ok logging as the trees would grow back, but this is in fact some of the last old growth red and white pine on the continent.

The T-AA started a blockade of the logging road that was being built into the region that summer. A court injunction brought this to an end by the fall and environmentalists organized by a group called the Temagami Wilderness Society continued the blockade, which saw almost 300 (including the soon to be NDP premier of the province) arrested.

In Kingston we started local civil disobedience tactics aimed at our member of provincial parliament (also a Liberal). By the following February we had had almost 30 local arrests at his office, some after a weekend long occupation.

February 22^nd 1990 we placed the attached notices in peoples mailboxes and tagged pretty much every sizable tree on boulevards and in parks. The media coverage had such excellent quotes as: “People were irate. They certainly got a response. It raised the consciousness of people” and “now I know how those people in Temagami feel.” Some had begun to organize neighbourhood committees to fight the cutting. The phone number was, of course, for the local MPP. We staged a sit-in in his office while the phones rang off the hook.

The provincial campaign was responsible for booting the Liberals out and getting the social democratic New Democratic Party in at the next election. This was stated by media pundits and the Liberal leader himself! It also won a cessation of the logging and serious negotiations on the land claim.

Unfortunately, the most recent election put a reactionary Progressive Conservative gov’t in power provincially and they have opened up the region again. This time to mining as well. We did a similar posting (the one shown below) in Sept. 1996, but this time it was done province-wide all on the same day. The number was that of the Minister in charge of Natural Resources — they hired on extra staff til the media had finally dispelled the “rumour.”

We followed it up with a pretty militant occupation of the Ministry of Natural resources HQ. A few folks were pepper sprayed and arrested. The campaign and the logging seems both to have stalled since then.