Grow more trees and count the old ones better.
Those are the two main thrusts of how the NDP would manage B.C.'s woodlands should they be given the keys to forest.
Party leader Adrian Dix made those announcements, and three other key planks in their forestry platform, on Monday morning in Prince George.
One of those points - the one they called their top priority - is unrelated to the trees themselves. A lack of forestry workers is holding up the industry from achieving maximum success, said Dix. He promised major attention on skills training for forest-related professions.
"We are prepared to train the next generation of forestry workers," he said, scolding the current government for job losses in the sector over the past 10 years. He also criticized the B.C. Liberals for not doing enough to encourage young people to join the ranks of forestry workers, choosing other professions instead.
Should he be premier, though, the biggest amount of government cash would be spent on growing seedlings and getting them into the ground.
"Restoring the forest inventory - our capacity," would get five years of incremental investment, he said. "It is not something you can do all at once. It would be $30 million in the first year, then it would grow with the program - $40, to $60, to $100 million in the fifth year."
That money would be spent on detailed inventories of the forests across B.C., regional scientists in the forestry sector, land-use planning, wildfire protection, and an ambitious seedling program.
"We will more than double the number of trees planted in the province," Dix said. "We are at a rate of about 22 million now and five years from now we want it to be 50 million a year."
When asked how he would pay for such an expensive item, in a time of universal financial pinch, he said it was built into the party's financial framework released last week, without giving specifics.
The final point of the forestry plan was a commitment to aid the private sector in marketing wood products internationally. He praised the industry for taking the lead in breaking into new markets when the traditional American monopoly collapsed, and added praise for the current government's effectiveness at that aspect of the forest sector.
He still scolded the government for keeping poor records on what was out in the B.C. bush, especially at a time of inventory crisis due to the mountain pine beetle disaster.
"You can't manage what you can't measure," Dix said. "To provide certainty, we need to have more precise knowledge of what timber is available to harvest sustainably, and where it is."
One final proposal by Dix was his intention to hire a Jobs Protection Commissioner to act as a consultant for communities, to maximize economic diversity and ease pains caused by industry contractions.
