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The modern day parable about how Canada has lost its way is no more clearly written than in the great B.C. deer cull. It speaks to how this country went from a once proud and self-reliant nation to one in which over-weaning civil servants have turned us into a blubbering heap of helplessness.
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The National Post recently reported on a proposal to employ foreign sharpshooters to cull deer on a coastal B.C. island. According to figures obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation through a freedom of information request, Parks Canada has budgeted $12 million for its “Fur to Forest” program, which will employ imported helicopter-mounted sharpshooters to kill off an invasive herd of European fallow deer from Sidney Island.
The CTF questions why the government isn’t using local hunters, as they’ve done for years.
“It’s appalling for Parks Canada to be blowing $12 million on a project that local hunters have been doing for a decade for free,” CTF’s Carson Binda told reporters recently.
Scott Carpenter, President of the Canadian Coalition for Firearm Rights, likened it to the ArriveCan scandal.
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“It’s an epic failure – it’s like the micro-to-the-macro of the ArriveCan debacle,” he told the Post.
The costs included $137,407 for “firearms registration for international workers.” Hunters brought in to perform the cull are from the U.S. and New Zealand. Another $35,000 was budgeted for work permits. Yet we have thousands of home-grown hunters willing and able to do the job.
Other costs include $67,680 for helicopters and $329,760 for scent-tracking dogs. Another $800,000 is set aside for indigenous participation in the program, with payments to three area First Nations, as well as $108,800 for meat harvesting and $15,250 each for cultural and spiritual workers to train crews. All this is in a country that was built on the fur trade and hunting.
We used to teach the world how to hunt. Now our government contracts it out to other countries.
Carpenter said the government could have used the cull to generate local income for Canadian hunters.
That would have required another great historic Canadian commodity – common sense. That’s in short supply in the federal government these days. You might say they shoot from the lip, not the hip.
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