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On a daily basis, professionals working in natural resource industries across B.C. make all kinds of decisions. When things function properly, those decisions are effectively scrutinized by professional associations and by registered professionals working for the government, both there to protect the public interest.

The Mount Polley disaster underscored that such oversight was not happening. In fact, as the government relied increasingly on outside professionals, it gutted the ranks of public servants whose primary jobs were to ensure that outside professionals properly discharged their duties.

I saw this gutting of the public service firsthand, especially in my latter years with B.C.’s Forest Service. But something else also happened during those years that concerned me equally as much. And that is how the agency I worked for fired whistleblowers and effectively drummed a contractor out of business — an expert who saw that the government itself had mismanaged and corrupted the information it needed to properly manage publicly-owned forests.

Because the government lacked credible information, it had no real ability to assess whether professionals inside or outside government were properly discharging their duties.

That contractor was Martin Watts. Watts ran a consulting company that specialized in modeling forest growth and carbon. When he told the government that the models it relied on were deeply flawed, he soon found himself excluded from government business opportunities. Government simply did not want to hear that the fundamentally important decisions it was making — such as the rate at which our forests were logged and its purchase of forest carbon offsets — were based on faulty data.