Didn't we just go through this a couple of years ago? Mostly the big fear then was that BC wasn't doing enough to reduce the timber pressure...but then they came through setting aside huge square miles of forest to be left alone for the Gos and some other critters that were tied to the coastal rain forest habitat.
Apparently our guys are still bending over under the pressure to list this species and it's all about trees in this particular case. You would think that getting trees off those islands wouldn't be all the inexpensive to begin with.
Do I think this subspecies deserves protection? Probably not. It is a horrifically difficult area to survey for nests and I doubt they have hardly even touched what the real numbers could be in such an area. And while their numbers may in fact be generally low in the scheme of things, this has more to do with their specialization for that habitat than anything else. So rather than listing the bird as threatened...list the habitat as threatened. But noooo, we wouldn't want to do that cause there isn't any money for programs to study the rare species there if you just set aside the habitat permanently!