The B.C. Wilderness Tourism Association (WTA) is urging the provincial government to back away from proposals to compromise visual quality objectives to secure enough timber in the Burns Lake area and along the Highway 16 corridor to free up more timber for area sawmills.
Evan Loveless, executive director of the Cumberland based organization, said so little forested area in the region has been protected in the name of visual quality that allowing access will deliver only minimal benefit to the forest industry but "will have a major impact on our ability to attract tourists to these regions."
"The forest industry is facing difficult times and we all acknowledge that," said Loveless, who has sent a letter to Victoria outlining the WTA's position. "This situation is expected to only get worse.
"With these dire predictions, what we really need to be doing for our communities is not removing visual quality objectives, but rather strengthening all our land use objectives including visual quality objectives that support tourism and local diversified economies"
Nechako Lakes Liberal MLA John Rustad confirmed this week a task force is seriously considering letting loggers into areas set aside for visual quality and wildlife management reasons, saying up to three million cubic metres of timber could be freed up in the process.
The move is being mulled following the Jan. 20 explosion and fire that destroyed Babine Forest Products, the main employer in Burns Lake, 226 kilometres west of Prince George. Whether enough timber can be secured to make rebuilding the mill feasible should be known by the end of this month.
Cariboo North independent MLA Bob Simpson said the provincial government is only delaying the inevitable by resorting to such drastic measures.
"They just have to say to [Babine owners] Hampton, the log supply is just not there," Simpson said.
With the stock of beetle-killed pine starting to run out, experts are predicting a scramble for timber to keep existing Central Interior mills operating. But a falldown is inevitable, said Simpson.
"Everybody knows, and it is the worst kept secret in the industry and in the lunch rooms, is that at least two mills have to come down on Highway 16 and [now] you've got one down.
"So if you try to bring that mill back up again, three or four or five years from now, two mills will still have to come down if not more. The log supply simply is not there."
Simpson dismissed the work done by the region's beetle action coalitions as ineffective and maintained the provincial government needs to launch a more asserted effort to get a better assessment of the state of the area's forests.
Given the work that had gone into setting the annual allowable cuts prior to the disaster in Burns Lake, Mike Larock, Association of B.C. Forest Professionals director of profession practice and forest stewardship, said Rustad's comments are raising alarm bells.
"We're concerned that given all those tradeoffs, given that minimization [of impact on other values], we're now looking at it only from a microscope of how can we get more wood and that's a concern."
