From: Huguette Allen <huguette.allen@gmail.com>
Subject: Government Report Card from BeeS.A.F.E.
Date: December 17, 2025 at 3:53:50 PM PST
To: MLA of Kootenay Monashee <Steve.Morissette.MLA@leg.bc.ca>, harwinder.sandhu.mla@leg.bc.ca, Jim Johnson <jim.johnson@rdno.ca>, Rick Fairbairn <rick.fairbairn@rdno.ca>
Cc: carla vierke <carlaonsugar@hotmail.com>

As the holidays begin, convention suggests we should begin with pleasantries. Experience tells us not to bother. As the twentieth year of our activism comes to a close, it is clear that polite language has outlived its usefulness.

For more than twenty years, we have worked to protect our watershed—doing the work that elected officials and government agencies are paid to do, yet consistently refuse to carry out. Instead of support, we have encountered delay, deflection, and excuses. The message has been unmistakable: this government prioritizes an economy built on the destruction of the biosphere, not the protection of people, water, or long-term livelihoods.

Early on, our independent research demonstrated that the proposed Sugar Lake Resort sewage effluent system would pollute the watershed. When government failed to do its due diligence, we did it ourselves—and only then was the project approval rescinded. We later founded Bee S.A.F.E. (Secure Agriculture and Food Economy) to prevent agricultural contamination and promote a sustainable local food system. Through extensive public education, community organizing, and outreach to farmers, over 95% of voters supported becoming a GMO-free community, a commitment now embedded in the Official Community Plan, a vote WE organized on our own since the Regional District refused to do it.

Despite this clear public mandate, a wealthy landowner was later allowed to operate a cattle and GMO corn operation in prohibited areas of the watershed, resulting in untreated manure flowing directly into the Middle Shuswap River. After relentless pressure, the Ministry of Environment conducted an investigation that took more than a year to complete. Its findings were alarming, yet no meaningful enforcement or corrective action followed. The same landowner is now being permitted to revive a 48-year-old water licence, threatening creek flows, increasing water temperatures, and further degrading water quality.

We have been forced, again and again, to act in place of a government that will not enforce its own rules or protect public resources from private interests. After decades of research, advocacy, and good-faith engagement—with no accountability and no enforcement—public trust has been exhausted. When government fails this completely, it does not prevent conflict; it creates it. Meaningful protection of our watershed now rests not with institutions that have abdicated their responsibility, but with direct, organized community action.

Huguette Allen & Carla Vierke

For Bee S.A.F.E.