I Terry Smith recognized with United Way honour Terry Smith, Secretary-Treasurer of IWA - CANADA, has been awarded the 1991 Joe Morris Labour Commu- nity Service Award, created by the United Way of the Lower Mainland to recognize outstanding effort by a local trade union member towards improv- ing community services. ‘Terry, nominated by IWA - CANADA Local 1-357, was honoured for his many years of extensive voluntary involvement in community activities, and for being the driving force behind many programs designed to help peo- le. B Born in Vancouver, he graduated from Burnaby South High School and now lives in New Westminster. His union activity began when he started work with Canadian Forest Products, Pacific Veneer Division, in 1964. He was elected First Vice Presi- dent of IWA Local 1-357 in 1973, President in 1982, and in 1988, Secre- tary-Treasurer of IWA - CANADA. He attended the Labour College of Can- ada in Ottawa in 1977. The community activities for which Brother Smith was nominated cover a wide range of his concerns. He was a founding director of Pacif- ica (a drug and alcohol treatment centre), and of the Lower Mainland Assessment and Referral Service. He was a board member of the Legal Services Society, and also served on New Westminster's Advisory Plan- ning Commission and the municipali- ty’s Athletic Commission. He remains an active board member of the IWA and Community Credit Union, and serves on many other BC. Federation of Labour, IWA and community com- mittees. From 1986 until December, 1990, he chaired of the Campaign Labour Committee of United Way of the Low- er Mainland, a position which placed him on United Way’s volunteer Cam- paign Cabinet for a record five consec- utive years. His active participation at this level is credited with growing support for the United Way among union members. The award ceremony was held May 8, 1991 during the joint Canadian Labour Congress/United Way Union Counselling Conference held at the Sheraton Plaza 500 Hotel, Vancouver. It was opened by David Rice, Re- gional Director of the CLC Pacific Region. “It is appropriate that we tie together this conference and presen- tation of the Joe Morris Labour Com- munity Service Award,” he said, “since the purpose of the conference is to discuss labour’s participation in the community, and the intent of the award is to recognize the very same on an individual level.” Bob Wiens, President of United Way of the Lower Mainland, Presi- dent of FACS Record Centre Inc., and Lynne Fanthorpe, Chair of the Lab- our Committee of the Board, UWLM, and a member of the B.C.G.E.U. were co-presenters of the award, an origi- nal Killer Whale carving in white alabaster by Noreen M. Fairweather. The award is named after Joe Mor- ris, an active B.C. trade unionist since the 1930’s involved at provincial, na- tional and international levels. Among many positions he served as Presi- dent of the Canadian Labour Con- gress, Regional President of the [WA, was a member of the International Labour Organization, and of the Duke of Edinburgh’s 1980 Commonwealth Study Conference. He is now retired on Vancouver Island. Recipient of the 1990 Joe Morris Labour Community Service Award was Joy Langan, NDP Member of Parliament for Mission-Coquitlam. — United Way e He ENVIRONMENT © GETTING THE IWA's WORD OUT — Local 1-217 President Gary Kobayashi (I.) and First Vice-president Gordie McRae were on hand to give out Union information at a set of public hearings held in May on watershed logging in the greater Van- couver region. Story coming up in a future issue of the Lumberworker. © Front — Joy Langan, MP, Mission-Coquitlam, Terry Smith, Financial rT IWA-CANADA, Joe LeClair, IWA-CANADA Local 1-357 and President, New Westmin- Secretary, ster & District Labour Council. Left to right: Back — John Shields, President, B.C. Government Employees Union, Lynne Fanthorpe, BCBEU member and Chair of the Labour Committee of the Board of United Way, Jack Munro, President, [WA-CANADA, David Rice, Regional Director, Canadian Labour Congress, member of the Campaign Labour Committee, Bob Wiens, President, FACS Records, member of Board of United Way and immediate Past President. © The report pointed out that not enough professionals are available to evaluate and inspect roadbuilding. A-G’s report Continued from page three cited inconsistent inspections as a problem. For ministry staff the inspec- tion problem was driven by an uncer- tainty as to whether the objective of their inspections was to assess overall performance of a licensee or police areas that they believed were defi- cient. In responding to the Auditor Gen- eral, the ministry points out that some of the monitoring problems de- tailed in the report are offset by the extensive planning effort that the min- istry goes through prior to the appro- val of road construction and harvest activity. The ministry requires a licen- see to submit road, logging and silvi- culture plans for the areas that it wants to log. These plans are reviewed extensively by the Ministry of For- ests and other government depart- ments (eg. Fish and Wildlife) before approval is granted. None of these planning activities were evaluated in the Auditor General's report. It is interesting to note that there was one point on which both the ministry and the Auditor General did agree; restraints and layoffs within the ranks of the proving govern- ment’s workforce have severely lim- ited the effectiveness of the Ministry of Forests. Since the early 1980’s, the number of people employed by the Ministry has dropped by 38.2%. Over that same time period the level of harvest activ- ity in BC. has increased from an average of 65 million cubic meters per year in the 1980 - 1983 period to just under 80 million cubic meters per year in the 1988 - 1991 period. It is easy to see that trying to do more with less rarely produces good results. But the Socred restraint poli- cies of the mid-80’s also made it harder for the ministry to attract or hold on to the skills that it needed to do many of the tasks it was mandated to do. The report gives an example in the area of road building where proper inspection means hiring road special- ists. In more than one third of the forest districts, those road specialists had to be professional engineers in order to properly inspect and evaluate the complexities of roads in the area. However, the ministry was unable to recruit professional engineers to fill any of those positions. 16/LUMBERWORKER/AUGUST, 1991 Photo by Noreen M. Fairweather s s & 3 s al s = 3B & 3S &