Special by Richard McGuire
Environment Minister Mary Polak is defending MLA Linda Larson’s choosing of a ‘focus group’ to look at recent input on a potential national park reserve. Photo by Richard McGuire
Environment Minister Mary Polak says a focus group chosen by MLA Linda Larson to review public submissions about South Okanagan protected areas has no formal role.
“This input doesn’t carry more or less weight than anybody else’s input in this process,” Polak said in an interview with the Osoyoos Times on Tuesday. “It’s important we hear from a lot of people.”
Larson said last week that a five-person focus group she picked is reviewing hundreds of submissions from the public in response to the provincial government’s Intentions Paper: Protected Area’s Framework for British Columbia’s South Okanagan.
She refused to name the members of this group saying that doing so would open them to harassment.
Some advocates for a national park reserve in the South Okanagan have criticized Larson for a lack of transparency and said they suspect she has loaded the group with national park opponents. Larson is a staunch opponent of a national park.
Larson said they are “upstanding citizens” who are broadly reflective of the different interests.
In last week’s interview, Larson described the focus group as strictly summarizing the submissions without making recommendations. The summaries, she said, would be provided to Environment Ministry staff, who will review them and look for common threads.
Polak, however, insists her ministry is doing its own review of the submissions.
“They do the final review of the submissions,” she said. “This (the focus group’s summary) will be one more piece of input that they will look at. And then together we will develop what we think is an appropriate response to the input that we received on the intentions paper.”
In Larson’s interview last week, she said she picked the panel members and the ministry “vetted” them.
A ministry spokesman, however, said Monday: “…It is not the ministry’s practice to vet individuals who are simply providing input.”
In a testy CBC Radio interview Monday morning on the program Daybreak South, Larson said: “What I did for the minister was give her a list of a lot of the organizations and people who have been involved with the consultations, and it was more than just five people on the list. It was quite an extensive list. And the minister herself also had a list of people that had taken part in her focus group a year ago. And out of that group she chose five individuals to take a look at the consultations that had come in.”
Larson later in the CBC interview described the members as “a random selected group of people.”
Polak, however, says she and Larson talked about potential members together.
“We just talked about who would probably work best together in terms of providing a variety of different viewpoints,” the minister said.
Polak describes the role of the focus group as one of providing input to Larson.
“Linda chose them,” said Polak. “And I felt she had a decent distribution of different people, but this is exactly what MLAs do. They seek input from their ridings.”
Polak said Larson has worked hard to take the discussion out of the “really divisive place it was in the community in terms of pro-park, anti-park and instead try to have fulsome conversations around what are the values we are trying to protect here.”
Polak defended Larson’s decision not to release the names of focus group members.
“This isn’t some kind of formalized ministry committee,” she said. “And so it’s up to the individuals if they wish to have their names public, but it’s actually the obligation of an MLA to protect the identity of people who speak to her in her constituency office unless they are willing to have their names divulged.”
Polak added that the focus group won’t see any identifying information on the public submissions that they review.
