Anyone
who has paid attention knows that things are wrong, horribly wrong,
with what was once the dominant industry on Vancouver Island and indeed
coastal BC.
Forest companies are shutting down mills left and
right. Log exports are at or near record levels. Wood waste is so
rampant that two or more large sawmills could run flat out on just the
usable logs left to rot or burn at coastal logging sites. Meanwhile,
little if any of the nearly $1 billion turned back to BC forest
companies following resolution of the softwood lumber dispute has been
invested in new or upgraded mills here in the province. And don’t
expect any future financial windfall – like the tens of millions of
dollars soon to be pocketed by Western Forest Products after it sells
some of the most productive forestland in the province to real estate
developers – to be spent here either.
Which brings us to the
so-called “coastal forest action plan” just released by Forests
Minister Rich Coleman. Inaction is more like it. Riddled with gross
distortions, the lean, text-light, 12-page report is an affront to
forest conservationists and workers alike.
Take the following statement:
“Whether
harvesting is conducted in old-growth or second growth [forest] stands,
it will continue to be done in a sustainable manner and in compliance
with BC’s world-renowned forest practices.”
Try telling that to
Vicky Husband, an Order-of-Canada recipient and leading forest
conservation here on Vancouver Island. Husband recently noted how
state-of-the-art forest practices could yet emerge on the periphery of
the distant Great Bear Rainforest. But elsewhere, logging of remnant
old-growth forests on steep, unstable slopes like those at Nootka
Island continues apace. And in the mess left behind, fully one tenth of
the usable wood is left to rot near where the ancient cedar, hemlock
and fir were felled. Meanwhile, the company responsible for the carnage
is closing mills, not opening them.
Or take the action plan’s
astonishing language on log exports. Exports, we’re told, “play an
important role in the coastal economy by providing jobs in the logging
and transportation sectors.” Excuse me? Surely the issue is that raw,
unprocessed logs from BC play an increasingly important role in
thousands of sawmilling jobs outside of the province. In 2006, nearly 5
million telephone poles worth of logs were exported from coastal BC.
Had they stayed here, the local economy would have benefited to the
tune of another 3,700 milling jobs.
The “action” proposed to
counter this? Only on the south coast and only on public land will BC
logs destined for export be subject to taxes equivalent to the export
charges on US-bound softwood lumber. Yet most logs exported from the
south come from private lands where the tax won’t apply. Meanwhile,
government is giving the green light to increased log exports from
public lands further to the north spelling added disaster for coastal
communities.
One area where the plan does get things right is
that the future of the coastal forest industry lies in the expanding
base of second-growth forest. But even here, it misses the central
point. One plank of the plan, for example, calls for fertilizing
second-growth trees. The move would “produce an additional 600,000
cubic metres of wood”. In a nod to the government’s newfound religion
on climate change, it is suggested that this would result in the trees
sequestering an additional 160,000 tonnes of carbon. All of this may be
true, but what completely escapes mention is that unless those quickly
growing trees, which will be logged, are turned into lumber and other
higher-value solid wood products, none of that carbon will truly be
locked up. A “second-growth strategy” that doesn’t include a blueprint
for how we get new mills built in this province and people working in
stable, high paying jobs making wood products is a sham.
The
crux of the problem is this: our atrophying coastal forest industry is
dominated by a handful of companies that have made virtually no
investments in new and refurbished mills and show no inclination to do
so. Meanwhile, government watches from the sidelines as if it is
powerless to do anything about it, when in fact it has enormous powers
as landlord of our public forestlands.
It is long overdue to
call the government’s performance on the forestry file what it is – a
failure. It’s time for an independent inquiry or royal commission to
draw up a badly needed roadmap for a new way forward.
Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the BC office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of Wood Waste and Log Exports on the BC Coast.
