If you found yourself on Main Street over this past weekend you no doubt noticed the hundreds of paper flyers that could be seen blowing around the sidewalks and the middle of the street thanks to the Save Old Growth protest group.
The group conducted a campaign which saw volunteers handing out flyers as well as stapling them to telephone poles, using thumbtacks to apply them to other poles, and sticky gum to apply them to bus shelters.
There's no way you could have missed the flyers as some poles had four applied to them, and the sheets of paper were blowing in the wind as if someone stepped into the street at Main and 12th Ave and simply threw a stack of them in the air.
The group's stated mission is to get the B.C. government to "pass legislation to immediately end all old growth logging" in this province, in order to fight climate change.
Meanwhile they are literally littering the streets with an excess of waste made out of trees, and the irony is so thick you can slice through it with a chainsaw.
However, the group isn't seeing that irony, or even admitting any fault.
We reached out to them via email with some questions regarding how their leaflets found their way onto the streets, and if they may be worried about the public's perception of a group whose actions appear to be in direct conflict with the actions they're trying to get the government to take.
Suffice it to say they are not concerned.
They wouldn't answer our direct question of how many sheets of paper were printed and distributed. Instead they tell us to focus on what the government is doing about old growth logging "before thinking about if the odd flyer that blows off a lamppost or is discarded by the public is an important issue."
This is classic whataboutism that we're used to seeing politicians we're writing about use - the deflection away from an issue by pointing at something else.
In response to our question about exactly how the flyers ended up blowing around the streets, they blamed the general public for it.
They tell us: "When we passed them out directly to people, we saw some people throw their leaflets on the ground."
It's unclear why they didn't pick them up when they saw people throwing them on the ground, but they tell us "it is the responsibility of the media to tell the scientific truth to the public about issues which greatly affect every single person in society, instead of focusing on negligible issues such as a bit of litter."
Okay. I will pass that on to the full-time climate change reporter we employ here, as well as my opinion that the ends seem to justify the boneheaded means for this group.
Lastly, answering a question we didn't ask, Save Old Growth express their support for the forestry sector in B.C., and apparently the paper and pulp industries by proxy. They tell us they are "specifically calling to an end to old growth logging in BC, not all logging. Sustainable well-practiced forestry has an incredibly important part to play in our future."
On that we can agree.
