by ANTHONY
BRITNEFF
With the recent announcement that two
sawmills in the communities of Quesnel and Houston will close at the loss of
more than 430 jobs, the time has come to face an unpleasant but necessary
truth.
Our forests are so depleted as a result of
the unprecedented mountain pine beetle outbreak and more than a decade-long
logging frenzy in response to it, that we cannot possibly sustain the
sawmilling industry that we currently have.
The provincial government has known for
years that this would happen, yet did nothing of consequence to prepare for it.
Worse, it now appears to be using the unfolding crisis to set the stage for the
virtual privatization of British Columbia’s public forests - a move that it
knows full well most members of the public oppose.
To achieve that goal, Premier Christy Clark
and her forests minister, Steve Thomson, are deliberately perverting the work,
report and recommendations of a bipartisan committee of the provincial
legislature on which both BC Liberal and NDP MLAs served.
The government is misconstruing the work of
that committee to suggest that after touring the province and canvasing public
opinion committee members recommended a course of action that would result in
the door being thrown wide open to a handful of forest companies gaining de facto control over most of our public
forestlands. Nothing of the kind happened.
Yet, in June of this year, Premier Christy
Clark instructed her forests minister, Steve Thomson, in a formal letter to
proceed with enabling legislation that would allow the granting of private
tenures on Crown land known as Tree Farm Licences (TFLs).
The biggest winners in such a move would be
just five companies two of which, Canfor and West Fraser, are behind the recent
sawmill closure announcements. Premier
Clark’s instructions are a complete reversal of her government’s pre-election
decision in March to pull such a plan from the order papers where it was within
a hair’s breadth of becoming law.
Since then, the BC Liberals have promised that
there would be full public consultation of draft legislation to enable the
conversion of public forest tenures. The details on what that promised
consultation will look like, however, are as yet anyone’s guess. Yet the
promised consultation process could begin later this fall.
In the meantime, BC Liberal MLAs and
forests ministry officials have allegedly been meeting secretly with municipal
mayors and selected First Nations’ groups to convince them that the
establishment of private forest tenure monopolies is in their best interests.
Meanwhile, 434 mill workers at Canfor and
West Fraser sawmills are contemplating the pending demise of their jobs, and
rumours abound that up to 10 more sawmills are vulnerable to closure at a
further loss of thousands of jobs due to a growing lack of timber.
In the face of known, unprecedented
uncertainty for numerous interior communities and First Nations dependent upon
forestry for their livelihood, this is most decidedly not the time to be making
fundamental changes to who controls what by way of our publicly owned
forestlands. Instead, government needs to show long absent leadership.
That leadership begins with a solid
commitment to reassess available timber supplies everywhere in the province, to
plant trees, and to lower approved logging rates to levels in keeping with what
trees remain available to log. Anything less, will result in even deeper pain
for workers and communities in the months ahead.
In tandem with that, the government should
also put a halt to the flagrant jockeying for position now in evidence by
Canfor and West Fraser. Both companies not only simultaneously announced that
they would be closing sawmills – in and of itself a highly unusual event – but
both of them also concurrently announced that they intended to swap logging
rights one with the other.
It looks very much like those swaps are
intended to give Canfor uncontested, monopolistic control over the forests in
the Houston area and to give West Fraser a virtual lock on forests in the
Quesnel region. Further mill closures would almost certainly lead to more
horse-trading, all in anticipation of the government then handing the companies
the keys to the treasure chest by allowing them to convert their newly
amalgamated holdings into TFLs.
Our forests are, indeed, a public treasure.
But the treasure chest has been looted badly. And now is not the time to let
what remains be signed away forever under lucrative TFL agreements that reward
a handful of companies at the expense of the many.
Now is the time for government to do what
it is supposed to do and lead the way to a healthier,
more sustainable future for our forests and rural communities.
Anthony
Britneff recently retired from a 40-year career with the B.C. Forest Service
where he held senior professional positions in inventory, silviculture and
forest health.