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Old-growth forest near Cathedral Grove to be logged, groups fear

Nov 6 2013/in News Coverage

A new logging road through a formerly protected old-growth forest near Cathedral Grove has conservation groups, and one area MLA, worried that the area’s habitat is under immediate threat.

“I was in the area last [month] and saw they started logging a road,” said Jane Morden of the Port Alberni Watershed-Forest Alliance. “Once it’s in, they can basically log it any time they want.”

Island Timberlands, the company that owns the land, also has closed south-ridge access to the Mount Horne trail — a popular hiking and mushroom-picking area.

The area of concern is a marked 40-hectare cutblock, 300 metres from MacMillan Provincial Park and directly upstream from Cathedral Grove, an international tourist destination known for its ancient Douglas fir trees.

“This will fragment a forest cover and could damage wildlife habitat,” said Ken Wu of the Ancient Forest Alliance. The organization joined others last month in a demonstration against the logging expansion. They’ve also started a campaign to pressure lumber producers to stop buying old-growth wood.

The area is part of 88,000 hectares of privately held land the provincial government allowed to be removed from a tree farm licence in 2004 — with the agreement that critical winter habitats be protected.

Scott Fraser, NDP MLA for Alberni-Pacific Rim, said that when the land went to Island Timberlands, the agreement was cast aside.

“These areas were supposed to be left,” said Fraser, who has been working since 2006 to protect the land, including the Port Alberni watershed. “I have so many outraged constituents, including retired loggers who have never seen this kind of forest activity.”

Fraser said he has met with Steve Thomson, minister of forests, lands and natural resource operations, but has not seen any progress.

“At the speed they’re doing this, it will be gone in two years,” Fraser said. “All we’re asking is to slow down so we can try to protect this area.”

Thomson said he has responded to concerns about logging in the area. “I’ve explained to them that the land in question is privately owned by Island Timberlands, and that the company entitled to log its private forest land,” he said in an email.

He added that the company must comply with provincial acts protecting land, water, fisheries and species at risk while complying with heritage-conservation laws.

Thomson said that while he has had extensive discussions with Island Timberlands about continuing to protect winter ranges for hoofed animals, “this was not a mandatory requirement and, unfortunately, the parties were unable to reach an agreement.”

He said the province would have preferred to have a formal agreement with Island Timberlands to manage wildlife, but the company has indicated that it has its own plan in place.

Island Timberlands did not respond to requests for comment.

Read more, including a map of the estimated cutblock boundary: https://www.timescolonist.com/old-growth-forest-near-cathedral-grove-to-be-logged-groups-fear-1.686058

Video: MLA claims wrongful logging

Nov 5 2013/in News Coverage

MLA Scott Fraser for Port Alberni-Pacific speaks up on Cathedral Grove and how the BC government’s own biologists opposed deregulation of the old-growth areas intended to be reserved for wildlife – many of which are now being logged by Island Timberlands.

CLICK this link to watch the news video: https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1037319&binId=1.1180928&playlistPageNum=1

Anthony Britneff: The Liberals’ forest plans are not sustainable

Nov 3 2013/in News Coverage

With the recent announcement that two sawmills in the communities of Quesnel and Houston will close with 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 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, Clark instructed 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.

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 B.C. 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, 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.