21 January 2009

Greens' Stuart Mackinnon splits with park board on Hollow Tree

By Matthew Burrows, Georgia Straight
Publish Date: January 21, 2009

By voting Monday (January 19) to lay Stanley Park’s hollow tree to rest, Green park board commissioner Stuart Mackinnon split from his COPE/Vision “caucus” on the new board’s first vote.

The remaining six commissioners—Vision’s Constance Barnes, Aaron Jasper, Sarah Blyth, and chair Raj Hundal, COPE’s Loretta Woodcock, and the NPA’s Ian Robertson—approved a plan by a conservation group to stabilize and preserve Stanley Park’s senior cedar.

The Stanley Park Hollow Tree Conservation Society, chaired by UBC professor Lorne Whitehead, provided a seven-page engineering report detailing how the tree could be preserved.

“Just because we can do something, it doesn’t mean that we should,” Mackinnon said at the meeting by way of preface, before adding: “As we love anyone or anything, we all know that everything has a time and a season. When that time and season comes to an end, we should let them go with dignity. Propping a dead stump up is not doing so with dignity.”

In another 6-1 vote, this time with Mackinnon in favour but Robertson opposed, the board deferred voting on a proposal that would ask for an amendment to the Vancouver Charter relaxing rules about signs and advertising in parks during the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

Source URL: http://www.straight.com/article-197414/green%3F%3Fs-stuart-mackinnon-splits-park-board-hollow-tree

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