So much for the 'historic' agreement between the forest industry and the ENGOs.
My take on the situation: This is the same kind of behaviour we see among many other advocacy groups on many diverse arenas of struggle in Canada. The advocacy groups receive money from large foundations and private donors who want to see 'tangible results' for giving them money. Subsequently these organizations enter into these kinds of public charades to give an illusion that they are being effective with the financial contributions. Claims of ‘effectiveness’ are then presented as justifications for why they should continue to receive more money because of their 'results.’ Also these groups become ‘infested’ with people who are right wing social democrats and liberals thereby creating an environment where more progressive minded individuals experience hostility to their more radical approach.
This is obvious to most people anyway but just thought to post a reminder to consider for the next time someone thinks about where to make a financial contribution.

The full agreement is now accessible through the Wilderness Committee's website (not sure if it's a leaked copy or not.)

http://wildernesscommittee.org/sites/all/files/cbfa-text-may-14-2010-final.pdf

Great writing Dawn, thank you very much.

Here's my take:

“developing jointly supported action plans that are based on leading, independent science and that provide input into relevant government processes”

That belief will not protect nature! It creates thousands of miles of clear cut barren wastelands for “environment friendly” export 2×4’s, for the next three years while the NGOs sit in an office protecting “caribou” on maps and diagrams with circles and arrows and paragraphs that explain the necessary amount of light for moss production to keep x number of caribou from landing on the red list for extinction.

http://www.priscillajudd.ca/thexpress/?p=453

Nice article Dawn, glad to see there's some other skeptics out there. I've linked to your article and posted some thoughts on my weblog: www.salmonguy.org

Will be posting some more thoughts on the agreement as i wade through it.
dl

your article is garbage. You have still not interviewed anyone who is part of the agreement directly. That's not very good journalism and this reads like an opinion piece though you are described as "Dawn Paley is a Vancouver-based journalist and a member of the Vancouver Media Co-op."

If an organization chooses to stop criticizing or protesting a company that's their chose. If you are a financial supporter of that organization you have the right to stop donating. Maybe Greenpeace should be saying that dawn, salmon guy, ivan, etc. are not doing anything and thus are sell-outs to companies. They don't because it does not really matter - you're all independent. If you chose to protest - that's your right - if you chose not to, that's your right as well. Public infighting in the movement doesn't really help anyone. Take your blogging energy and set up a markets campaign, or organize a protest, or at least write a letter to some decisionmaker. Or just sit at your computer and continue to not do anything.

I interviewed Steve Kallick who was part of the agreement directly. You can see that interview included in another story I did, which is linked to in this piece.

Set up a market protest or write a letter? BWA HAHAHA. Good one anonymous keyboard warrior. Hilarious.

This article is absolutely awful; it’s grossly misleading, and contains several false and/or confused statements about the contents of the CBFA. Some of the statements are so obviously false to anyone who’s actually read the deal that I find it hard to escape the conclusion that either the author didn’t read the whole deal, or she decided to suppress those parts which she found inconvenient. The most charitable interpretation I have been able to come up with is that the author got over-excited about having a juicy scoop when she obtained her leaked copy of the agreement, and, overzealous in her desire to write a hard-hitting expose trashing the deal, simply didn't read the agreement carefully, or even fully, and interpreted what she did read through the lens of the story she wanted to tell, and so saw primarily what she wanted to see.

The most glaringly false statements in the article are the claims that the CBFA basically consisted of the following trade between environmental groups (ENGOs) and logging companies (FPAC members): FPAC members agreed to defer logging in 72205 hectares of caribou habitat until March 31, 2012, and in exchange the ENGOs help market FPAC members as 'green'. Paley makes this claim when she writes that "this agreement aims to silence all criticism of logging practices in the boreal forest in return for less than two years of diverting harvesting and road building from 72,205 hectares of woodland caribou habitat into other areas of the boreal forest." And then again: "In return for swapping 72,205 hectares of harvesting out of the boreal forest and maintaining ‘voluntary deferrals’ for another two years, the CBFA transforms the nine ENGOs involved into a promotional service, protection racket and intelligence gathering service for twenty one companies that are actively logging woodland caribou habitat within the boreal forest."

For those who haven't read the agreement, here’s my ultra-quick three-sentence rough summary:
The CBFA sets up a framework and a foundation for signatories to collaborate in the management of logging and other forest sector activities within the boreal tenures of the companies who've sign it. It outlines six 'Goals' (a better term for them would be commitments) and sketches out how signatories will achieve them and on what time frame. The Goals are: 1) companies implement Ecosystem Based Management (EBM) in the areas they log; 2) implement and advocate for a network of protected areas within the boreal; 3) develop and implement recovery plans for species at risk, especially caribou (this is where the deferrals come in); 4) position forest products within the larger effort to tackle climate change; 5) some general priorities for prosperity in the forest sector; 6) environmental groups work to help brand companies as 'green'.

Obviously this summary glosses over and leaves out a lot, but it gives the basic gist of the deal. If anyone wants to read the goals in detail they're described in Schedule A. But the basic point is that if the CBFA consists of a trade then it consists of ENGOs giving Goal 6 and FPAC members giving Goals 1, 2, and 3 (goals 4 and 5 don't seem to clearly be a 'concession' for either side). However, this article would have you believing that Goals 1 and 2 don't exist, despite the fact that they have 6 pages (18-23) devoted to them, and that Goal 3 (pages 24-28) consists entirely of the deferrals, which it does not. Did Paley simply not read pages 18-28? Perhaps she thought Goals 1 and 2 and most of 3 were so meaningless that they might as well not be in the agreement; but if so then she must provide some sort of explanation or argument for why this is the case (e.g. explain why EBM, protected areas and recovery plans are worthless, or why there's no reason to think EBM, protected areas and recovery plans would actually be implemented), rather than simply suppressing the fact of their existence.

Paley also confuses the expiry date of the deferrals with the expiry date of the agreement, incorrectly claiming that the agreement expires when the deferrals do (though, admittedly, this is an understandable error for somebody who apparently thinks the agreement consists solely of the deferrals and Goal 6). She refers to "the spring of 2012, when the current agreement expires," and then later on she refers to the CBFA as a "‘three year’ deal" (the deferrals expire in the spring of 2012). From these statements I can only conclude that Paley either didn't read or simply forgot about Section 44 of the agreement, which states that the CBFA "will continue in effect until full implementation of all elements of Schedule ‘A’... unless terminated sooner by mutual written agreement of the parties." That is, the CBFA doesn't expire until it's been fully implemented, unless the signatories all agree to end it sooner. Thus the agreement expires not when a particular date arrives, but rather when certain conditions are met.

Overall, the deal described in this article bears only a superficial resemblance to the actual CBFA.

I apologize if I’ve been overly harsh in my comments, but I really don’t appreciate being mislead, and that’s exactly how I felt when I actually went and read the CBFA after reading this article.

But how could you possibly think that the way “to distinguish the spin… from what the agreement actually says” was to lie about what the agreement actually says!?

The mistake about when the CBFA expires I can understand; Section 44 is three little lines in a long, dense document. You should have caught it, but it’s understandable that you didn’t. But I really have trouble grasping how you could have read the agreement and completely missed the 11 pages (18-28) that describe Goals 1, 2 and 3; or, if you knew about them, how you could have possibly failed to realize that some of the claims you were making in the article were false! I’m really having trouble wrapping my head around this, so please, help me to understand. I’m still not clear from your response whether or not you knew your article contained false statements. Did you?

If you knew, then it must be made clear that such lying isn’t OK; honesty is a sine qua non of decent journalism. Your intention may have been to counter the ‘spin’, but the appropriate way to respond to spin is with truth, not with lies and more spin.

If you didn’t know, then I would suggest that, in the future, you focus more of your energies towards honestly and critically reporting on events, and less on trying to create in your audience the perceptions you wish them to have. I think good reporting often does foster dissent, but it does this almost as a side effect, by showing audiences important truths which are hidden from them. You do not decide what you want people to dissent to, and then try to come up with a narrative that will induce them to dissent to it. If you ask me, the manufacture of dissent is as reprehensible as the manufacture of consent, for largely the same reasons.

As for your questions, they’re irrelevant to our discussion. I’m not here to defend or express an opinion about EBM, Greenpeace, or even the CBFA. I posted my comment here on the advice of The Dominion editors as a way to address the false statements contained in your article; my intention is to correct those errors, and to try to engage in a process that will help ensure that the material The Dominion publishes in the future is both accurate and honest. Not only do I think this is important for ethical reasons, but I also happen to like The Dominion quite a bit (been a member for over a year), and so I don’t like to see its credibility damaged.

However, if you’d like to get to know me better and you’re ever in Toronto (or I'm ever in Vancouver), I’d happily take you out for a beer.

ASR your tone is disrespectful and your accusations against me are baseless.

I interpret the CBFA as essentially about the amount of forest to be protected, as opposed to an agreement that is about how to save the caribou through things like EBM, green marketing, and supposedly combating climate change.

Because my interpretation of the agreement is different from yours it does not mean that I am a liar or that I am making false statements.

I don't have the time right now to go back through the agreement and rebut your arguments, as you will note that this piece was written months ago (just days after the agreement came out).

As I stated before I am glad you read the agreement, and if you think it's a great deal, then that's fantastic for you. I'm more skeptical. I don't expect you to agree with me (not for one moment) but I do expect respectful dialogue. Until that happens, I consider this discussion closed.