Ravi’s MoF just bought a report to justify killing Rady Creek. We removed the redactions and we found it says it plainly: “leave the road prism intact.”

For five years the Selkirk Natural Resource District told people a professional had assessed the Rady Creek road and found it had to come out. It gave three different credentials for that professional — an engineer, a geotechnical engineer, a geoscientist — and never once produced the report. Asked directly in November 2021, District Manager Tara DeCourcy, RPF admitted why: “I believe the recommendations were made on site and there was no subsequent report.”⁰¹

This month they finally hired one for real. Michael Ferguson, RFT, of the Selkirk district commissioned SNT Geotechnical Ltd. of Nelson; Ryan Williams, P.Geo. walked the road on 18 August 2026; and the report came back dated 8 September. Not before the tender, though — during it. Bidders were already pricing the job off a thirteen-page in-house prescription written by Jordan Pyette, RFT, the district’s senior engineering technologist, who remains the professional of record on the file even now that his prescription has been thrown out.

And the brief Williams was working to was not a question. It was an answer. His report records that the Ministry of Forests “has indicated that the road is intended to be deactivated to a permanent standard, and that post-deactivation vehicular access is not required.” They bought the assessment and told him how it ended.

But unfortunately for Michael Ferguson, they did not write it that way at all. On six of the road’s seven sections Ryan Williams’s prescription is a single instruction, repeated: leave the road prism intact. On the seventh — 115 metres of 3,980 — he writes that a narrow ATV trail can be cut straight across the recontoured surface. They paid a professional to condemn four kilometres of road and he handed back a plan to keep it, with the ATV access left open.

Which is presumably why, when they published him, they painted his name out. Fourteen names in all: Williams, Ferguson, Pyette, the firm, and its Nelson address. No exemption cited. No severing note. No freedom-of-information process within a mile of it. Just white rectangles drawn over the words — on top of them, not instead of them. A rectangle is a shape on a page; the text stays underneath. We opened their own published file on a laptop and had all fourteen back in about thirty seconds.

Three days before that report went up, District Manager Charlene Strelaeff told the BC Snowmobile Federation the Ministry of Forests “will not consider transferring the road to another entity due to significant safety concerns… and will complete our deactivation work to relieve ourselves of liability.”⁰⁶ That was three days before her own district published the report it commissioned to justify the work — the document now standing behind invitation to tender EN27DSE008, the one a contractor prices the job from. It rates the residual likelihood of a road-related landslide low to very low once the cross ditches are in, declines to carry out a partial risk assessment at all because the hazard is too low to warrant one, and prescribes leaving the road prism intact on six of seven sections. The safety case she gave the Federation is contradicted by the safety case her district is selling the contract on.

So there are two ways to read an office that behaves like this, and on this evidence it is hard to see a third.

We would take the second. It is the better outcome for the road and for everyone who uses it. But the district will not be allowed to act this way on our watch — not after five years of telling people a report existed, not after buying one mid-tender, and not while the contract to destroy the road is still open. If this is a retreat, it gets said out loud, in writing, by the office that spent five years saying the opposite.

Section 01Five years, no engineering

The question of who prescribed the destruction of the Trout Lake–Rady Creek forest service road, and on what basis, has been live since 2021. The Ministry of Forests has answered it three different ways — a professional engineer, a geotechnical engineer, a professional geoscientist — and has never produced the document. Asked directly in November 2021, the District Manager said there wasn’t one: the recommendations “were made on site and there was no subsequent report.”⁰¹

When the contract went to tender, the prescription in the bid package was not an engineer’s report either. It was thirteen pages, written in-house, dated 8 June 2026.⁰²

Its scope is worth holding in mind, because everything that follows is measured against it: 754 metres of fill pullback, 238 metres of recontouring, 61 cross ditches, across the full 4,376 metres. And among its four stated objectives, third on the list: “Reduce vehicle access due to safety concerns.”

Section 02The document that appeared on 18 September

On 17 September 2026 the tender was flagged in procurement tracking as having addenda available. The following day, at 18:50 GMT on 18 September, a new file appeared on the Selkirk district’s public road page: Trout Lake Rady-Creek FSR Deactivation Prescription and Map, 6.5 MB.⁰³

It is not a revision of the June document. Set the two side by side and they share almost nothing; a line-by-line comparison puts them at 0.1 per cent similar. The thirteen-page in-house prescription has been replaced by a forty-two-page geotechnical report from an outside firm.

The report says plainly why it exists. The Engineering Manual requires that a qualified registered professional “prepare, sign, and seal a prescription for road deactivation works and provide the results of the assessment in a letter or report that accompanies the deactivation prescription.” And then: “This report is intended to meet this requirement for the Rady FSR.”⁰⁴

Read that as the admission it is. In September 2026, with a contract already on the street, the requirement had not yet been met.

Section 03The instruction that came before the assessment

Before the geoscientist walked the Rady Creek road, he was told what the answer was.

He did not find it.

Section 04They paid for a second opinion. They got one.

Here is what happens when you finally let a qualified professional look at a road instead of asserting things about it for five years. He divides it into seven sections, walks each one, and writes down what each needs. Six of the seven come back with the same instruction.

“Leave the road prism intact.”

Not remove. Not recontour. Not rehabilitate to a permanent standard. Leave it. Put in cross ditches so water gets off it, pull back the over-steepened top metre or two of fillslope where it is loose, and leave the road where the road is. That is the prescription, for 3,865 of 3,980 metres.

2.9 per cent. That is how much of this road the Ministry’s own geoscientist prescribed destroying — one switchback at ∆17, where cutslope failures on the order of fifty cubic metres are present and the fill is up to fifteen metres long. The other 97.1 per cent he told them to leave where it is.

Set that drawing next to five years of public statements about an unsafe road that has to come out. The ministry did not need an independent professional to tell it the road was safe. It needed one to tell it the road was dangerous, and that is not what it got.

The trail they said was impossible

On the one switchback that does get recontoured, the report is blunt about the cost: “These works will result in loss of vehicle access along the alignment, including All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) access.” And then, in the very next sentence, it offers the thing the district has spent five years telling people cannot be done:

“It may be possible to cut a narrow ATV trail across the recontoured road surface at the time of deactivation works, however, the excess material generated from constructing the trail will need to be transported to a suitable waste site. This will result in an increased cost for the works above that of the prescribed recontouring.”

Read the objection. It is not that a trail would be unsafe. It is not that a trail would be unstable, or unlawful, or environmentally unacceptable, or technically impossible. It is that hauling the spoil away costs more money. That is the entire stated barrier to keeping public access across the 115 metres in dispute.

And the danger?

Once the prescribed works are done, the report rates residual landslide likelihood very low across most of the road, low at the switchback, and very low to low over the final 1,615 metres. It then declines to carry out a partial risk assessment at all, and says exactly why:

“this report does not include a partial risk assessment for the stated elements at risk due to a resultant low to very low residual hazard of a road related landslide once the deactivation recommendations in this report are implemented.”

The hazard is too low to be worth assessing. This is the document the district commissioned to prove the road is too dangerous to keep.

Section 05The regulation never required this either

The report reproduces the law it is working under. Section 82(1) of the Forest Planning and Practices Regulation sets out what a person deactivating a road must do — and the first item contains a carve-out the ministry has never mentioned in five years of correspondence.

There are no bridges to pull on this road and no culverts to remove — the ministry’s own quantities table says zero of each. Strip out the parts of section 82 that do not apply and what the law asks for here is a barricade that lets ATVs through, and stabilization where stabilization is necessary. Which is, almost exactly, what the geoscientist prescribed.

Section 06Who is answerable

Four names carry this file. Three of them the district tried to hide; we will come to that in a moment. Here is who they are and what each one has to answer for.

Section 07They tried to redact it. The redaction did not hold.

So how hard was it? This is all it took.

The district did not send this to an FOI office. There is no cited exemption anywhere on the file and no severing note. Someone drew white rectangles over the names in a word processor, printed the result to PDF, and uploaded it to a government web server.

That is not redaction. That is taping over the words on a photocopy and handing you the original. A rectangle is a shape drawn on top of a page. It does not remove the text underneath. The words are still in the file — in order, selectable, exactly where they always were — and any program that reads a PDF hands them straight back to you.

We ran it across all forty-two pages. Fourteen instances are covered, and all fourteen came back.⁰⁵

Painted out	Pages	Times
SNT Geotechnical Ltd. — the firm that wrote it	1, 3	2
SNTG — the same firm, short form	2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 19	11
Baker Street, Nelson — the firm’s address	1	1
Michael Ferguson, RFT — commissioned it	3	1
Jordan Pyette, RFT — professional of record	5	1
Ryan Williams, P.Geo. — walked the road	9	1

And they did not stop at the visible text. The file’s own document properties volunteer the rest:

Title

Deactivation Prescription.pdf

Author

Thomas Chalmers

Created

Microsoft® Word for Microsoft 365

Converted

Acrobat Distiller 26.0 (Windows) · 9 September 2026

Thomas Chalmers appears nowhere in the report. They covered the names in the body and left one in the metadata.

How we got this, start to finish. Download the file from the Ministry of Forests’ own public website. Run one command that ships with every Linux distribution. Read the names. About thirty seconds. No source, no leak, no freedom-of-information request, no tool anybody had to write:

pdftotext -layout prescription.pdf -

Child’s play. These guys make leaking their own internal records easier and easier every day.

So why redact it at all?

This is the part the district should be made to answer, because none of the available answers are good.

The entire point of the rule this report exists to satisfy is that a named professional stands behind it. The Engineering Manual does not ask for an assessment. It asks that a qualified registered professional “prepare, sign, and seal” one. A seal is a person putting their licence on the line. Publish the sealed document with the sealer’s name covered and you have deleted the only thing the requirement was created to produce — while still getting to say you published it.

So: who decided to blank the names of the professionals on a public safety document, and under what authority? No exemption is cited. There is no severing note. There is no FOI process in sight. And the blanking does not work — which means whoever did it either did not know that, or did not need it to. They needed the page to look redacted.

A district confident in its own file does not hide the name of the firm it hired, the address of that firm, the official who commissioned the work, or its own professional of record. It puts them on the cover, because they are the evidence the work was done properly. This district covered all four — in a report that tells it to leave 97 per cent of the road alone.

Section 08This is not a competent tender any more. It was changed mid-bid.

A tender is a promise about a job. Contractors read the scope, count the metres, price the plant and the crew, and sign. So read what this package actually promises. It tells bidders the works include “approximately 295m lineal meters of road fill pullback, 115m lineal meters of full pullback/recontouring and construction of at least 69 cross ditches”, and adds, flatly, “there are no culverts or bridges on this FSR.”⁰⁷

Now compare that with the June prescription the package was issued with, the one the district spent five years standing behind: 754 metres of pullback, 238 metres of recontouring, 61 cross ditches.⁰² The package is not describing that job. Its pullback is well under half. Its recontouring figure — 115 metres — is the number that turns up in the September report’s own table, the report that did not exist in public until 18 September. The quantities the ministry put out to bid were never the June quantities.

And the package does not name a prescription. It tells bidders to “see ‘Schedule A – Services’, and the deactivation prescription for all works, personnel requirements and work location.” Which document that phrase points to changed on 18 September — six days before tenders closed at 1:00 pm on 24 September. No addendum was issued. So the governing engineering for a live contract was replaced inside the bidding window, and the document it was replaced with tells the reader to leave the road prism intact on six of seven sections.

The date question is worth settling, because the two documents do not agree. The June prescription says “deactivation works must be completed prior to October 2, 2026”.⁰² The contract a bidder actually signs says something else: “100% of the deactivation work must be completed by November 1st, 2026, or prior to snowfall accumulations of 10cm or more”, with a one-year option to renew if the job slips.⁰⁸ November 1 is the operative deadline. But this road runs from 1500 to 2250 metres, and at that elevation 10 centimetres of snow is not a November event — it is a September one. The real deadline is not a date at all. It is the first storm.

Consider what a bidder is being asked to sign. The scope in the package does not match the prescription published with it. The prescription that now governs was swapped in mid-bid without notice. The engineering the contract rests on says to leave six of seven sections of the road exactly where they are. And the district published that engineering with the authors’ names covered — so a bidder could not have called them to ask what any of it meant even if he had thought to try.

The package is candid about one thing, at least. It states that the project “is contentious and well known to the public” and that the Ministry will provide “24/7 onsite security services for the entire duration of deactivation operations.” They budgeted round-the-clock guards to carry out a job their own consultant had just told them, on six of seven sections, not to do.

That is not a procurement process. That is a tender whose facts were changed underneath the people bidding on it. If a contractor did this to the Ministry — priced one scope, swapped the specification mid-bid and hid who wrote the drawings — the Ministry would disqualify him, and it would be right to.

Section 09There are two ways to read this, both point back at the Selkirk District’s conduct.

So: for five years this district could not produce the professional basis for destroying a public road. Then, with the contract advertised and bidders working, it obtained one. Either Mike Ferguson and the crew at the Selkirk district have finally done, in 2026, what they should have done in 2021 — or they have built a paper record around a decision they made years ago. They know which one it is. We are entitled to ask.

What is not in doubt is what the document says. Mike Ferguson asked for it — the report opens “At the request of Michael Ferguson, RFT” — and the brief his ministry handed the geoscientist said in advance that access was not required. What came back was a prescription that leaves the road prism intact over 97 per cent of its length, rates the residual hazard low to very low, and notes that even the one section requiring recontouring could carry an ATV trail for an additional cost.

That is not a justification for this contract. It is an argument against it, written by the ministry’s own consultant, published by the ministry itself, and filed under the heading of the very project it undermines.

Which rather suggests nobody read it before they failed to even properly redact it and uploaded it.

Pause EN27DSE008. Reconcile the contract with the prescription they paid for. And if they intend to dig past the 115 metres their own geoscientist prescribed, put it in writing and name the professional signing off on it.

The district had five years to get this right, and it spent them asserting instead of assessing. When the assertion finally had to meet a professional, the district replaced the document while the tender was open, and the replacement does not support the story it had already told — nor, on the record, did it read what it had bought.

Whatever the reason, the people responsible should have to explain it.