B.C.’s new forests minister has vowed to put the lumber industry first.
Will anyone tell him that’s what the problem is?
Our “lumber industry” doesn’t mean the small sawmills and loggers. It doesn’t mean the forestry-dependent communities. It means the multinational corporations, head offices and the metropolitan investor class and the big labour unions that it feeds.
And prioritizing those interests has gotten us into this mess.
At 30 years old, with a history as a professional politician and political operative serving those interests, we can’t expect Ravi Parmar to know otherwise.
Nor will the ministerial bureaucratic leadership tell him.
So, that leaves me.
As a northerner who was raised in the bush and who has worked in the forestry industry on and off for three decades, from silviculture to sawmills to logging and now small-scale value-added woodworking, here’s my unsolicited advice to the new minister:
The Ministry of Forests goes corporate
First, some context.
Beginning in 1978, with the appointment of Mike Apsey, a corporate lobbyist from the Council of Forest Industries, to deputy minister, corporate interests have thoroughly infiltrated the Ministry of Forests.
Massive changes in 1987 privatized silviculture and reforestation. Then, in the early 2000’s, corporate lobbyist lawyers literally wrote the Forest and Range Practices Act and regulations, the Small Business Forest Enterprise Program was terminated, appurtenancy was eliminated, and we lost ministerial approval of tenure transfers.
End result: Ravi Parmar isn’t in charge of a public service. He is in charge of a corporate agency that actually controls him and what he is allowed to do and say.
The BC NDP’s David Zirnhelt was the last good forest minister we had in this province. If Parmar wants to give Zirnhelt a run for his money in the history books, he has a big job ahead of him.
Number one, clean house
When the NDP took power in B.C. in 2017, they never put their stamp on the ministry. From the deputy ministers down to the communications staff, they remained almost all BC Liberal appointees.
The failure to change personnel suggests the BC NDP never had a vision for forestry, let alone a roster of potential administrators to realize that vision.
An urban political apparatus detached from rural economies and ecologies, the BC NDP were apparently happy with the policies and personnel of their political predecessors despite the BC Liberals’ failure to sustainably manage our forests and prioritize public good over industry. And they must not have minded the many bureaucrats who over the years have slipped into lucrative industry jobs following their time helping develop forestry policy.
But these were all categorical errors that need not be repeated.
Next, bring back appurtenancy
Appurtenancy was the requirement to mill local logs in local mills. With a one-sentence change in the Forest Revitalization Amendment Act of 2003, appurtenancy was all thrown out the window.
There is overwhelming support for bringing a policy like this back in places like Prince George, Fraser Lake, Mackenzie and Houston, communities particularly hard hit by sawmill closures and the downturn in industry.
Appurtenancy can easily be phased back in. If a corporation wants to hang on to cutting rights in a timber supply area, they could be required to process the wood locally within a given time period. If not, timber harvesting rights could revert to the Crown.
For some reason we were led to believe this is an unfair concept, but it’s how cattle ranchers are treated when they don’t have cattle on their grazing tenure: they lose it. And they lose it with no compensation.
Stop the war on deciduous species
For decades, forestry companies have been encouraged by government and supported by legislation, to treat important deciduous hardwood species- primarily aspen, cottonwood, birch, and red
alder – like weeds.
After a forest is clearcut and conifers are planted in its place, the industry concern has been that the hardwood deciduous species would out-compete the planted species, reducing the amount of trees that can be logged in the future. As with a garden, chemical herbicides – mainly glyphosate – have been used for decades on public forests to get rid of the so-called weeds.
This has been an ongoing disaster for our forests and wildlife.
After four decades of this practice, we have simplified our regenerating stands to the point many of them are densely planted monocultures, dominated by a single tree species, most often, lodgepole pine. The replanted forests hold little wildlife value and are one of the most fire-prone.
The forestry industry has lost tens of thousands of jobs in the past 20 years. It’s obvious
this practice has done nothing to save forestry employment, and has likely made it worse.
Ban glyphosate
Senior representatives of industry and government complain bitterly about wildfires and pine beetles wiping out the timber supply, yet in the same breath dismiss the fact that deciduous species like aspen, birch and cottonwoods can help lessen both of these problems.
The fact is aspen tree are fire-resistant and highly productive. These forests can reduce fires and provide valuable habitat. They can help diminish forest health problems while boosting cattle ranching, tourism, guide outfitting, hunting, trapping, and have been used structurally in construction for decades.
Government could change this policy except for resistance from bureaucrats who rely on problematic reports instead of proven science in their advice to the Office of the Chief Forester, the Forests minister, and the public.
It’s time to heed science, ban glyphosate, and look to nature for a new way forward. We need to let our forests grow the way they have for millions of years. And industry needs to adapt to it, not the other way around.
Thin out monoculture forests
Four decades of glyphosate-drenched tree farming has achieved vast interior landscapes of dense, low-biodiversity, tree plantations dominated by lodgepole pine.
But all is not lost.
The original plan was to wait 60 to 80 years before clear-cutting the forests again. Instead, we could go into these crowded monoculture plantations and thin them out.
This would create space for deciduous to grow, while selectively retrieving fibre for the pulp and sawmills, allowing us to move away from clear-cut forestry. It would also reduce wildfire risk and enable biodiversity and forest function to rebound.
Europe and Scandinavia have been thinning juvenile stands for centuries, but Ministry of Forests policies seems based on the concept that thinning will reduce the annual allowable cut. The reality is replanted tree plantations that don’t burn or get hit by disease are showing better than expected growth, so thinning should have no impact on future yield projections.
If anything, thinning will help protect our future assets.
Give small businesses access to timber
One of the great things David Zirnhelt did back in the 1990’s was prioritize small business with programs like Small Business 2000, which built on programs like the Small Business Forest Enterprise Program (SBFEP).
Before the BC Liberals ended it, this program helped 2,300 logging firms and 500 sawmilling firms with no tenure to access 9.5 million cubic metres of timber every year. Besides scrapping most of these efforts when they took power in the early 2000’s, the government of the day consolidated control over the land base in the hands of large operators and corporations.
To the NDP’s great shame they have made very little effort to shift course since 2017.
I’d suggest Ravi dig through the old press releases and policy initiatives Zirnhelt fought for in the late 1990’s and take another crack at them.
For the past 25 years we’ve been putting the interests of the lumber industry first. Meanwhile, we’ve lost half of our forestry workers, countless sawmills, and watched as billions in profits were sucked out of our province only to be re-invested in the American south.
We need a Forests minister who prioritizes our forestry workers, our communities, and our forests.
Because prioritizing the lumber industry has gotten us nowhere.