Archive for year: 2014

British Columbia is in the midst of an unprecedented and unsustainable salvage operation in its interior forests because of the attack of the mountain pine beetle.

And yet, when two of the province’s biggest forestry companies were caught going into those woods and cutting truckloads of healthy green timber meant for future harvests, Forests Minister Steve Thomson’s reaction was as mild as a milk-sated kitten.

After forestry-ministry staff raised alarms, Mr. Thomson signed an order that could have led to hefty penalties for Canfor and West Fraser for taking greenwood in an area where they were supposed to be targeting the dead and dying pine.

In defiance of the chief forester’s order, set down in February, 2008, the two companies overcut 928,000 cubic metres worth of healthy trees in the Morice Timber Supply Area, around the community of Houston, in B.C.’s northwest.

But the minister’s order was rescinded after the companies – both heavy contributors to the governing B.C. Liberal party – agreed to behave. The past is forgiven, no need for consequences.

“I had concerns about the trend we were starting to notice. We looked at the potential for the order. We got the commitments from the companies to operate within harvest management plans,” Mr. Thomson said in an interview.

“The plans are being closely monitored.”

It is because of the dwindling supply of timber that West Fraser is shutting down its Houston sawmill. Just weeks ago, Canfor permanently closed its Quesnel mill for the same reason.

Between the pine beetle and over-harvesting, the chief forester is expected to dramatically reduce the annual allowable cut in the region.

The provincial government has swept in and helped communities in the pine beetle zone, notably Mackenzie and Burns Lake, by securing exclusive timber supply in recent years. But it can’t do that everywhere – there simply won’t be enough trees to sustain even the region’s current, already curtailed, level of industry.

The alarm was raised last week in a special report from the Forest Practices Board, which has found that companies have shifted from harvesting dead pine trees to live non-pine trees that had been earmarked for the future.

“British Columbia is in the midst of a large-scale salvage program, the likes of which has never been seen,” the report says.

“There is nothing sustainable about this harvest; this is a one-time activity initiated by the province to recover value from the trees killed by the mountain pine beetle (MPB) epidemic and to speed regeneration of affected areas … The issue, simply put, is that the more live trees that are harvested now, the lower the sustainable harvest level will be after the salvage program is finished.”

In the same report, the board, B.C.’s independent watchdog for forest practices, also warns the government really doesn’t know how much timber is left to salvage. “There is a growing disparity between government’s estimate of the amount of salvageable timber and the actual economically viable timber available on the ground.”

And it is, clearly, just an estimate. The B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union says the forest ministry’s compliance and enforcement program conducts a third of the number of inspections of forest operations compared with a decade ago. And a recent report from the Professional Employees Association also warns that the number of licensed science officers, including foresters, has dropped by 15 per cent in the past five years.

NDP forestry critic Norm Macdonald said those cuts make it hard to detect overcutting, and signal to industry that there is little intent to uphold the rules. “The government has to accept responsibility – they have consciously chosen not to collect proper data, which [are] essential to properly manage the public lands,” he said in an interview. “And it means a much bigger problem in the future for communities’ stability.”

The future may not be far off. The chief forester is required only to set the annual allowable cut once every decade for each timber supply area. In this case, however, Mr. Thomson says he wants an update by the end of this year in the Morice Timber Supply Area. “I expect the review is going to show there will need to be adjustments, downward adjustments, in the annual allowable cut in those regions.”

Canfor and West Fraser will have little grounds to complain.

Read more: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/timber-companies-cant-see-the-consequences-for-the-trees/article17732435/

It is an outrageous amount. According to a document from the Ministry of Forests that was recently brought to light in the provincial legislature (1), for the five years between 2008 – 2013, the forest company giants, Canfor and West Fraser, overcut 928,000 cubic metres of non-pine wood in the Morice Timber Supply Area (TSA), a region in north-western British Columbia. This overharvesting was done in direct violation of the Allowable Annual Cut (AAC), and is equivalent to about 23,000 logging truck loads of timber.

What is particularly galling is that, while this flagrant overcutting has been taking place, communities in the BC Interior have been facing dozens of mill closures and thousands of job losses in the wake of the pine beetle devastation of the forests and looming drop in the AAC. Having an adequate mid-term supply of non-pine wood is crucial to see the communities through this rough period, but it is precisely this mid-term supply that, in defiance of forestry regulation, Canfor and West Fraser targeted for severe overharvesting. Indeed, as part of a controversial timber swap with Canfor, West Fraser has since announced it would be closing its Houston mill in the Morice TSA by the summer of 2014.

The Morice TSA case raises the question: How much overharvesting has been going on in other Timber Supply Areas of the Interior? But to catch overharvesting and other violations of the Forest Act, oversight is needed from forestry inspectors and scientists. Unfortunately, the number of government forestry personnel has been dramatically slashed over the last decade in British Columbia.

In 2010, forestry analyst Ben Parfitt noted that the BC Forest Service had lost 1,006 positions or about a quarter of its workforce. Between 2001 and 2005 alone, field inspections fell by 46 per cent “opening the door to a range of potential abuses, including illegal logging and log theft, unmarked logs and therefore unpaid provincial stumpage fees, and environmentally destructive logging operations.” He further pointed out that, in Northeast BC, each forest service employee oversees an average of 232,240 hectares of land, compared to just 2,666 hectares of land for a US forest service employee (2).

The provincial government’s own Auditor General issued a devastating report in 2012 that sharply criticized the Ministry of Forests for its forest management, inspection and monitoring practices. The report noted that there had been a steady decline of forest practice inspections from over 31,000 in 2000/01 to about 15,000 in 2008/09. It concluded that “the ministry has not demonstrated whether its existing compliance and enforcement inspections are sufficiently robust to ensure industry compliance” (3).

In July of 2013, the Forest Practices Board weighed in with a Special Investigation of its own. It found that, since 2008/09, the number of inspections further plummeted from about 15,000 to less than 5,000 with only 2,800 of those focusing on harvesting and roads. It expressed concern that, with the “steep drop” in inspections and cuts to forest service staff, “licensees’ activities may not be inspected enough, particularly harvesting and road activities that pose a high risk of harm to resource values” (4).

The board also found that government figures regarding violations of the Forest Act and other statutory requirements were not accurate because they only took into account cases where actual enforcement actions had been taken, and did not include instances where warning tickets or non-compliance notices were issued.

Most recently, in March 2014, the Professional Employees Association released a report noting that the number of Licensed Science Officers working for the provincial government dropped by 15 percent between 2009 and 2014. For forestry science officers, the drop was even more dramatic – 27 percent.

The Association states that many technical reports used to make regulatory decisions are now being prepared by external consultants paid for by the companies. It argues that a significant number of these reports “included conclusions that were inappropriate due to incorrect or biased analyses,” and that, if left uncorrected, “would have resulted in regulatory decisions that favoured the regulated party [i.e. companies] and adversely impacted the environment.” Furthermore, as a result of staff cutbacks, much of the data regarding timber resource management and the health of the forests is no longer being collected.

The Association report concludes that professionally trained Licensed Science Officers “are the first-line stewards of B.C.’s natural resources and primary protectors of the safety of public infrastructure facilities.” Yet there are not enough of these experts to “adequately look after the interests of British Columbians” (5).

None of these reports inspire much confidence in the state of forestry oversight in the province of British Columbia. Especially with severe shortages of timber supply looming in some regions.

Oh, and what did happen to Canfor and West Fraser as a result of the 23,000 truckloads of timber they overharvested from 2008 to 2013? Were they prosecuted? Did they receive severe penalties of some kind?

Not quite. The Ministry did issue a penalty of triple stumpage for volume of timber illegally harvested. But there was a catch. It only applies to timber that may be illegally harvested in the future, i.e. it did not apply to the 2008-2013 period. In other words, the companies got away virtually scot-free. Even the Houston mill closure was not criticized or disputed.

There was one very feeble slap on the wrist. And that was a requirement that Canfor and West Fraser work with the Ministry on a plan that promises how, in the future, their harvesting will only “target the highest priority [timber] stands and protect the mid-term timber supply.”

So how much overharvesting has taken place in other Timber Supply Areas of the province? Can the Minister of Forests honestly say that he really knows, given the dramatic cutbacks in forest service staff and oversight? This is not a minor question given the increased pain that Interior communities will be feeling in the wake of dramatic AAC reductions.

We live in an era dominated by globalized corporations that continually lobby governments to reduce regulation and oversight. But what are the consequences? Without proper oversight, do British Columbia and its vast forests risk being reduced to the status of a squeezed lemon – to be thrown away once all the juice is extracted?