VANCOUVER - Workers at a B.C. tree planting camp are alleging severe mistreatment including no toilet, food shortages and bounced pay cheques after the operation was shut down by Forestry staff investigating illegal burning.

Upwards of 30 workers were removed from the Khaira Enterprises work camp, 40 kilometres west of Golden in southeastern B.C., after ministry staff discovered the squalid conditions on July 21.

RCMP, WorkSafe BC and other provincial bodies are now investigating, while the ministry has barred the contractor from government work for at least one year.

The B.C. Federation of Labour says most of the workers are landed immigrants from Burundi and the Republic of Congo who travelled from Winnipeg, Ottawa and Montreal to earn money to pay rent and go back to school.

President Jim Sinclair says they are owed tens of thousands of dollars and initially tried striking and reaching out to authorities for help, but were only rescued when Forestry got a complaint for burning rubbish.

Khaira Enterprises director K.M. Bajwa refused to comment when reached by phone, but the company's website says employees can expect "a safe work environment."

Original Article

Hello Friends of Forest Facts:

Thank you for signing the petition to save our forests. Now it’s time to take it to the next step and we hope you can help us.

Take a look at the attached photo -- this is what we see in the forests every day.   If the general public knew what was out there, they would be horrified.

The media and the government is aware of this petition.  We have caught the government’s attention with an 8-minute debate in the BC Legislature -- now we need to catch the public’s attention!

We need more signatures and we need your help.

We are asking you to please get 10 more signatures. Please:

1. Print this out.
2. Get 10 signatures.
3. Fax or email it back: Email PDF to admin@WSCA.com or fax to 604 738-4080.

Forward this link off to your friends: www.forestfacts.ca. Have them sign up on line. Let them see what we see every day.

Thank you,

Sincerely,

Tim Tchida
WSCA Director, Communications Committee

From the people that brought you Hi and Ho, We Plant Trees comes Faces and Hands, a new web series from Millefiore Clarkes.  It follows the lives of a cast of Summit planters through a typical BC season of silviculture.  Ten episodes in total, watch out for a new one every Sunday...

http://www.peppermillrecords.com/faces_and_hands

UPDATE: We're 3 episodes in and love it! Way to go PK!

A broad social networking campaign including a website, a petition, and creative contests dedicated to directing a groundswell of public support for planting more trees and restoring forests in Canada has been launched by silviculture workers and contractors. They hope increased public and political support will sustain Canadian forests as well as their jobs. Forestfacts' tactical goals include gathering ten thousands signatures of support and writing letters to federal and provincial politicians. read more…

Nearly 900,000 hectares of Canada's forests are harvested on an annual basis, 379,000 of which are manually re-planted by tree-planters with an estimated 509 million seedlings. These tree-planters consistently carry loads exceeding 16 kg while repetitively bending over 200 times/hour.

Although injury rates in most industrial sectors have decreased in Canada over the past decade, injury rates in the forestry sector continue to rise. The ultimate goal of this research project is to reduce injuries to reforestation workers.

Worker posture has been assessed in a field setting by tracking the 3D kinematics of the upper extremities and trunk during the planting task.

Planting strategies, such tree-unloading methods will be evaluated in the field to determine effect on posture during the planting task. These same strategies will be evaluated in a lab-setting for their effect on both posture and joint loading. These data will provide a basis for design of more ergonomically sound equipment which improves posture to reduce injury to workers.

Biomechanics and Ergonomics Lab at Queen's University, Canada  - LINK

Community Forests International (CFI) is a planter initiated organization that helps rural communities in Tanzania plant trees for food, timber and the environment. Supported by the Canadian tree planting community, the organization has planted over 215,000 trees in 14 rural communities and has over 1800 members in Pemba, Tanzania.

My name is Dominic Lachance and I've tree-planted for five seasons in BC and worked two more in Nicaragua. Over the years, I’ve always kept a journal and recently finished writing a novel called: THE UNDERCOVER TREE-PLANTER. It is about murders that are happening in a tree-planting camp and an undercover agent is sent to investigate from the inside. The detective story is entertaining, but it really is just an excuse to show what tree-planters really go through every summer.

“The Undercover Tree-Planter” is, for now, only available on line. Use the direct link below or simply go to www.lulu.com and type the word “undercover”, you will easily find it. I wrote this book for my own pleasure, but mostly because rookie tree-planters always arrive unprepared for the job. As a foreman, I've always wished there was a way they could know beforehand what they were getting into. Well, now they can!

Dominic (an undercover tree-planter now living an everyday life)

DIRECT LINK

Hey Tree-planter.com,

Thanks for posting the We Will All Be Trees cover and blurb on your website! It's great publicity. We just had a great Prince George launch on Friday.

If you are interested in posting some follow-up info, here are two interviews where I talk about planting culture and my book.

The Western Silvicultural Contractors' Association's BC SAFE Silviculture Project is looking for candidates interested in becoming contract instructors for training courses intended to reduce injuries and fatalities in the BC silviculture sector. The areas of instruction include light truck resource road driving, power saw operation for silviculture, all terrain vehicle operation, crew supervision and project management. Instructors may teach one or more of the courses depending on skills and experience.

A few years back Camelbak gave Tree-planter.com a bunch of hydration packs to give away. What I found especially cool was that they sent us products from their military line-up. Talk about rugged!

Anyways, we were doing a bit of clean-up today and we found one that is brand new, tags and all.