A Vancouver Island First Nation is asking the courts to halt a deal that would give a private forestry company control over land it says has been used by its people for millennia.

The British Columbia government agreed last year to allow Western Forest Products to remove more than 28,000 hectares of private lands from three tree farm licences, two in the north and one in the southern region of Vancouver Island.

The tree farm licence offers the private land some of the same protections as Crown land.

The agreement means the company can now sell the land — located on some of the most prime property of the southwest coast — to developers and eventually even sell raw logs out of the province without penalty.

In the north, the Kwakiutl First Nation is concerned that the company won't have to consult the community or government when cutting trees or even building a logging road over a sacred aboriginal site.

"Western Forest Products has stated very clearly that, in this case, they're not in it for logging, they're in it for real estate," said Ray Zimmerman, a spokesman for the environmental group Sea-To-Sea Greenbelt Society.

Along with the current First Nations court petition against the company and the federal and provincial governments, the decision has already prompted an investigation by the B.C. auditor general.

In the southern portion of Vancouver Island, the Capital Regional District changed its rules this week to try and stop the development but it was too late.

Only signed off this week

When the company applied to subdivide the southern lands, politicians at the Capital Regional District moved to rezone forestry and resource lands so that parcels could be a minimum of 120 hectares.

But the provincial minister responsible only signed off on the plan this week.

Western Forest Products made its application last week, meaning the new rule won't apply in its application for 319 subdivisions for parcels ranging in sizes less than five hectares.

Environmentalist Vicky Husband said the lack of consultation, without anything to regulate the process, has promoted "public outrage."

"It was a gold mine," Husband said of the tree farm licence agreements that forest companies made decades ago to cut Crown timber.

"So now that they've cut most of the Crown forest, suddenly they want to take their private lands out."

Selling was reasonable: COO

But Duncan Kerr, the chief operating officer of Western Forest Products, said the company has consulted with First Nations over the issue and was getting pressure from southern Vancouver Island residents not to log the land.

The reasonable option was to sell it, Kerr said.

"What some of these folks really want is they would like us to either hold the land, pay taxes and insurance on it, but basically do nothing with it … other than for them to use it as a de facto park."

Kerr said many of the people who are complaining about the sale of the land are the same ones who have purchased land sold by forest companies.

Under a tree farm licence agreement, a company gets the right to harvest in the area by paying a stumpage fee to the province for the timber it harvests on Crown land.

In an average year, Kerr said Western Forest Products pays about $140 million in stumpage fees.