Burns Lake residents have the most to lose in B.C.'s timber supply calculations, since the forestry-dependent community might end up with no major sawmill when the counting of trees is finished.
A rally was held Tuesday and a petition collected signatures o give to the committee of MLAs working its way across the interior this summer, reviewing timber supply. That group, chaired by Nechako-Lakes MLA John Rustad, arrived in Burns Lake this week for public meetings.
The title at the top of the petition displayed the community's sentiment: "Lakes District Timber For Lakes District Mills."
It was something they were going to have to fight for even if the town's main employer, Babine Forest Products, hadn't been destroyed in a Jan. 20 explosion and fire. The mountain pine beetle ravaged the forests in the Lakes Timber Supply Area.
With Babine's destruction, the question about rebuilding the mill has been clouded by the timber supply issue. If everyone operating in Lakes District was going to lose trees to harvest, was there going to be enough left over to warrant the cost of a brand new mill?
"The timber supply topic is where I spend most of my time," said Steve Zika, the Oregon-based CEO of Hampton Affiliates, owners of Babine Forest Products. He had been coming to the Lakes District about every quarter prior to the fire, but since then it has been every couple of weeks to meet with forestry officials on up to Premier Christy Clark.
"We have come up with a couple of models to make sure Burns Lake doesn't get forgotten," Zika said. "It's a local solution. We don't think anything we do here will cause any additional hardship for neighbouring mills up and down the highway. If the neighbouring communities keep taking our logs at the same rate they are today, there won't be enough left for our own Lakes District mills."
There are few mills left in the Lakes District at all. With the closure less than two years ago of Carrier Lumber's Cheslatta mill on Ootsa Lake, there is only Decker Lake Forest Products, also owned by Hampton Affiliates, but it mills only specialty wood cuts, plus some small-scale operators.
For several years in a row, according to charts compiled by Zika, about half the trees cut in the Lakes District are trucked out of the bush to mills in neighbouring towns.
"We aren't trying to be greedy, we want a workable solution for everyone," Zika said. "We plan to rebuild a mill that would produce roughly two-thirds the amount the old mill did, going from about 300 million board-feet of lumber a year to 200 or 250 million board-feet. But if it is too small, the economies of scale don't work, it wouldn't be a worthwhile investment."
Zika observed that, due to the pine beetle's massacre of lodgepole pine trees, which comprised the majority of Lakes District forests, the amount of available timber has been shrinking annually. The harvest rate was more than 1.5 million cubic metres of trees before the infestation, but it was down to about a million cubic metres for this coming year.
It could get chopped in half, to 500,000 cubic metres per year, said MLA John Rustad, whether Babine had burned or not.
"If we do nothing, that is where it is going," he said. He agreed that a high number of Lakes District trees were not making it into Lakes District mills, but the numbers in the neighbouring timber supply areas was just as dire. The Morice Forest District to the west of Burns Lake was looking at reducing its annual cut from 2.15 million cubic metres to 1.5 million, while the Prince George-Vanderhoof-Fraser Lake regions were looking at reductions from 10 million cubic metres per year down to 6 million.
L&M Lumber, owned by the Sinclar Group, has a license to harvest 23,000 cubic metres per year from the Lakes District. Canfor has a license for 56,000 cubic metres, while. West Fraser's license allows them to take 343,000 cubic metres from the Lakes District. There is a small business program that allows smaller mills about 200,000 cubic metres or a bit more, Rustad estimated, while the two Hampton mills, Babine and Decker Lake, were allocated a combined total of 450,000.
"The challenge I've heard from meetings in Houston, Smithers, Fraser Lake, Vanderhoof, even Fort St. James is you shouldnt be taking wood from our districts, yet that is exactly what is happening in the Lakes District," Rustad said. "The people of the Lakes District have a valid point, but we are all integrated as communities across the region so it is easier said than done to just allocate only local wood to local mills."
Rustad's committee is not the group that decides TSA numbers, he said. That falls as always to the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. His group's job is to examine how many trees are out there and see if there are new ways to find more of it for the purpose of cutting lumber.
There are several science-tested ways of boosting each region's fibre supply, but it is still to be determined what combinations of those solutions would work best. For example, stands of semi-mature trees can be fertilized to grow faster; the constraints could be eased or discarded on cutting old-growth trees, preserving public views, and protecting the environment that all have strict prohibitions now or forestry could look at small stands of timber never considered for use before now in the old timber supply models.
"The biggest gains could be made if we started operating in what is termed 'low-volume stands' of timber," Rustad said. "The current cutoff for harvesting consideration is 140 cubic metres per hectare. Any stands of trees less dense than that have never been considered in the calculations before. If we dropped the cutoff mark to, say, 100 cubic metres per hectare, that would bump up the Lakes District's equation from 500,000 to 750,000 just with that one move. The same kind of thing could be done in all the forest districts."
The reason the cutoff has been 140 cubic metres per hectare is that was the profitability benchmark for private companies doing the harvesting, milling and reforestation. If the benchmark was reduced by government to 100, it wouldn't improve all the other business factors around the companies' other business costs.
The Special Committee on Timber Supply is touring two communities per day (Fort St. James and Vanderhoof today, Mackenzie and Prince George on Thursday) in 15 communities across the province. Prince George is the only community with two dates set, with the committee returning on July 6.
The committee will write a report with non-binding recommendations due by Aug. 15.
To make a presentation to the committee, register by phone (1 877 428-8337) or by email ([email protected]). British Columbians can also participate by sending the committee a written submission, or video or audio file.
For more information on the consultation, and to view the committee's discussion paper, visit the committee's website at: www.leg.bc.ca/timbercommittee.
