Writer unhappy with Nisga'a deal

Page 7

Dear Editor:

Over the past few months I have listened to the government rhetoric in

the media until I, along with most of B.C., am sick of hearing about how

good the Nisga'a's deal is for the people of the northwest.

To hear Mr. John Cashore, Mr. (Ron) Irwin and Mr. (Joe) Gosnell tell it

"we will prosper to no end." All of us who live here know who is

prospering from this sham and it sure isn't the workers of this area.

As a resident of Stewart, B.C. and a member of the Third Party Advisory

Committee, I sat in on countless meetings and wasted hundreds of hours

of my time, along with your tax dollars, all for nothing. I was not

alone. I sat in a room with many other men and women from the

northwest, explaining to the negotiators why their strategies on fish,

wildlife and so on will not work. Their concept of self-government,

which creates a nation within a nation, is unworkable. Anyone with

enough sense to tie their own shoelaces knows it will cause anarchy if

you divide B.C. into 55 or 60 "nations" each with their own government,

their own laws, taxation and police forces. With most of these

"nations" bordering on each other and with most of them not getting

along with each other, I leave it to you to figure out what will come

next. Does this not sound like Somalia or perhaps Bosnia? You tell me.

When you look at a map of B.C., the 1,930 sq km of land given the

Nisga'a in the Agreement in Principle may not seem that big because it

is way up here in the northwest corner of the map. Everybody south of

Prince George believes this is just wilderness. Well, perhaps you

should pay a visit to Stewart this summer. Many hundreds of people

live, work and raise their families in the so-called 'desolate

wilderness'.

One way to get a better idea of the size of the proposed Nisga'a lands

would be to cut out a paper outline of the 1,930 sq km and move it to

the centre of your area, whether that is Prince George, Dawson Creek,

the Okanagan Valley, Fraser Valley, Vancouver or Vancouver Island. Now

multiply this by the number of claims in your areas. Do this for the

entire province (some 60 claims) There is a very good chance that

wherever you live, the places you like to go to for recreation, the

places you work, and so on, will fall into a newly formed "nation",

where persons other than the small group who own and govern this new

county will not be welcome or will be subject to user fees and

regulations at the whim of this new bureaucracy.

Both federal and provincial governments are spending hundreds of

thousands of your tax dollars and sending people around this province to

convince you that this Nisga'a deal is good. If this is such a good

deal, why the expensive sales pitch? The government has inundated the

TV, radio and newspapers, trying to sell you their brand of apartheid.

As more people read the Nisga'a AIP, it is becoming a real hard sell. A

car salesman once told me that a good car sells itself; it's the garbage

you have to work hard to sell.

Outside of the main Nisga'a lands, there are 30 additional "fee simple"

areas being turned over to the Nisga'a. All the old reserve, about

1,250 hectares, will be owned by the Nisga'a. The negotiators also

decided to sweeten the pot with a further 15 areas throughout the

northwest, some of them hundreds of kilometers from the core Nisga'a

lands (Nass Valley). These are some of the best parcels of land in the

region: they are so valuable that almost any person in this county would

give up everything they now own to possess any one of them. Among them,

the government wants to give away Ford's Cove on the Portland Canal and

Winter Inlet on the Pearse Canal, two of the very safe anchorages in the

area.

We of the northwest have no problem with treaty negotiations as long as

everyone is at the table, not just a chosen few. It is totally

unacceptable, however, to us in the northwest (and should be for the

rest of B.C.) for one small, unaccountable group of people to be given

sole control ver a huge area, such as is the case in the Nisga'a deal.

Our governments tell us treaties have to be negotiated to help our

economy. I am here to tell you that over the last three years I have

watched the Stewart economy go from thriving to stone dead. If this is

how our leaders envision helping our economy, God help B.C.

I want to let the people of B.C. know that the negotiators did not

listen to one thing we told them in our advisory capacity on the Nisga's

AIP If this is how all the other claims will be handled. B.C. is in

major trouble in more ways than anyone can imagine at this point.

Mike Clarke,

Member, Nisga'a Third Party

Advisory Committee

Director, Stewart Land Claims Committee

Director, Stewart/Hyder Chamber of Commerce