Spreading beetle outbreak calls for federal leadership

No sooner was Gary Lunn named federal Minister of Natural Resources than media outlets speculated about the role the Saanich-Gulf Islands MP would play in lifting Canada’s longstanding moratorium on oil drilling off of British Columbia’s coast.

The focus on the moratorium was understandable. Lunn’s boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has longstanding ties to Alberta’s energy patch, while Harper’s new Environment Minister, fellow Albertan Rona Ambrose, is no fan of Kyoto.

But there is something of equal significance to consider when looking at what lies ahead for Lunn. And that is the role he will play in shaping his Ministry’s policies and approaches to another natural resource that, unlike oil, is renewable and of longer term benefit to Canadians – our forests.

Despite the current doom and gloom about Canada’s forest industry, with seemingly weekly mill closures in B.C., Ontario and Quebec, forestry remains vital to the social and economic fabric of the country ($30-billion-plus to Canada’s GDP), and disproportionately so in rural communities.

Yet that wealth rests on forest health. And there is plenty to indicate that our forests are unhealthy and getting more so each day. Nowhere is this truer than B.C. where a beetle outbreak of biblical proportions has killed millions of pine trees and threatens to spill over into Canada’s cross-country boreal forest. If that occurs, we may face the largest scale disturbance in North America’s forests since the great ice sheets retreated northward after the last ice age 13,000 years ago. And much of it will have to do with that monster that Harper and Ambrose dare not name – global warming.

In a rapidly warming world, the difficulties foresters face are immense. Take the seemingly simple choice about what trees to plant where. Evidence is mounting that in B.C. decisions to plant logged areas with vigorously growing pine seedlings of similar genetic stock was precisely the wrong thing to do. So wrong, in fact, that armies of beetles now kill not only the 80-plus-year-old trees they historically favored, but nursery-raised trees as young as 15 years old.

At the University of British Columbia, forest geneticist Andreas Hamann warns that our current understanding of what grows best where is in for a shakedown. In the time it takes a planted tree to reach an optimal harvesting age a lot more warming could occur, meaning the zones where certain trees were once favored to grow will shift, becoming more suitable to other trees. Now imagine choosing what trees to plant today. Something must go in the ground that may be only marginally suited to today’s climate, yet perfect for the world we think awaits us. A daunting thought to say the least – and one we need forestry professionals to confront with great speed, especially in light of the liquidation logging now underway in response to those marauding beetles.

Which brings us back to Lunn. Many Canadians may not know it but the federal government plays a pivotal role when it comes to forests. While jurisdiction over Crown forestlands remains a provincial responsibility, the federal Canadian Forest Service (part of Lunn’s ministry) has been particularly strong in research and fieldwork, including an ongoing, multi-faceted, $40-million effort to fully understand what is happening with the mother of all beetle infestations.

Under the federal Liberals, unfortunately, CFS programs were slashed in the 1990s. While the CFS budget has grown recently, it remains 28 per cent below 1994-1995 levels. Ironically, among the jettisoned programs was an annual survey of insect and disease outbreaks in forests nation wide. In B.C. and the Yukon alone, that program once supported 16 different field offices each with two CFS staff doing ground and aerial surveys. The national program ended in 1996. Following its demise, it took B.C. three years to get a provincial survey program up and running, during which time the worst insect outbreak in the country’s history got underway.

With challenges facing forests across Canada, challenges made more complex by climate change, a strong national presence is essential, especially when successive provincial governments like B.C.’s have ill advisedly cut their own forest research and reforestation staff by 40 and 80 per cent respectively in the last decade alone.

The plus side of Mr. Lunn’s appointment is that he has direct experience in the forest sector, having worked for Crestbrook Forest Industries. He is also widely regarded as hard working and a quick study. Let’s hope his studies take him to the CFS’s Western Canadian headquarters on the edge of Saanich sometime soon. He had best be armed with the right information when it comes to countering his Cabinet colleagues’ arguments that global warming is nothing to worry about. That forestry is, after all, a provincial responsibility. And that further cuts to the Ministry of Natural Resources can pay for all those goodies Canadians have been promised.

Read the news release here.

Ben Parfitt is resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ BC Office and author of Battling the Beetle: Taking Action to Restore British Columbia’s Forests.