The Vancouver park board began removing thousands of trees in late 2023, saying they are dying because of a hemlock looper moth infestation.
The city of Vancouver and the park board are facing another legal challenge over the controversial removal of thousands of trees in Stanley Park.
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The Stanley Park Preservation Society filed a petition this week in B.C. Supreme Court seeking a judicial review and calling for an injunction to stop logging in the park, except for the trees that have been inspected and designated as posing an immediate danger to the public.
A court date has not yet been set to hear the petition.
Four individuals filed a civil lawsuit last year against the city, park board and the consulting firm B.A. Blackwell and Associates alleging negligence because the city went ahead with the plan without approval from the elected members. It also claims staff made no attempt to obtain corroborating opinions for the removal other than Blackwell’s. No date for trial has been set in that case.
The latest suit seeks to halt removal of trees that have not been properly documented to be hazardous, which the society alleges involves most of the trees being removed.
The petition alleges that the city circumvented park board authority and ignored explicit conditions of the procurement policy governing contracts in Vancouver parks by twice contracting with Blackwell without park board approval.
Although Mayor Ken Sim is seeking to end the park board, until that happens it still has authority over Vancouver parks, including Stanley Park, said Michael Robert Caditz, a director for the Stanley Park Preservation Society.
Caditz said the dying trees — also called snags — are valuable because they provide wildlife habitat and regenerate the soil as they decompose. He said in a strong wind storm usually the live foliated trees are the ones that fall over, not the snags because they don’t have much surface area to catch the wind.
“So we believe, and we have a lot of scientific evidence that’s been filed as affidavits, that the snags are not dangerous and there’s no reason they should be targeted. There’s just no scientific basis for this entire logging operation,” he said.
“When they come in with heavy equipment they’re disrupting the root systems of the remaining trees, and that weakens the remaining trees, so they’re not actually mitigating danger — they are creating it. By opening the canopy, they create wind tunnels, which is more likely to blow down trees. So the whole operation is a huge mistake.”
Park board chair Laura Christensen said she would not comment on legal matters, as did a spokesperson for Vancouver.
Commissioner Brennan Bastyovanszky, and former park board chair, previously said the board felt that the decisions were the right ones because of the risk of forest fire, and that the plan was to make Stanley Park a more robust forest.
He said the plan includes replanting tree seedlings of native species — including Douglas fir, western red cedar, grand fir, big leaf maple and red alder — in the newly cleared areas.
Looper larvae feed voraciously on the needles of hemlock. They also target other conifers such as Douglas fir and western red cedar. Defoliation of new and old growth by looper larvae can kill a hemlock tree in a year.
In December, a third-party assessment found there was an accelerated deterioration of the trees, particularly along Stanley Park Drive and North Lagoon Drive.
The society argues that it was unreasonable for park commissioners to approve the acceleration of logging on Dec. 9 without fully reviewing the assessment, and that the park board failed to consider independent scientific opinions presented.
The society alleges the park board commissioners should not have approved accelerated logging when the city did not provide the assessors with critical information.
One of the assessments recommended that more tree inspections and analysis be done before accelerating the removal.
“We maintain it was unreasonable for the commissioners to approve the acceleration and the continuation of the logging considering that the reports hadn’t been evaluated,” said Caditz.
None of the allegations has been proven in court.
With files from Nathan Griffiths and Sarah Grochowski