It is incumbent upon the B.C. government to stop the arithmetic trickery and to bring intellectual honesty and scientific thinking to a resolution of the old-growth issue on Vancouver Island.

"Their profit margins are bigger than oil and gas. Most people don’t know this,” explains Alyssa Arbuckle, Associate Director of a digital humanities lab at the University of Victoria.

Scientist David Suzuki asks "how do we ensure the price of fossil fuels includes the costs of pollution, environmental degradation and climate disruption?" The simplest and proven way, he writes, is to put a price on carbon emissions.

Environmentalists have accused the B.C. government of lying about the amount of majestic, centuries-old trees left standing in the province. The National Observer reported last month that the B.C. government, through B.C. Timber Sales, had approved permits for logging that saw some of the world’s biggest red cedar and Douglas fir trees cut down in the Nahmint Valley on Vancouver Island.