It was the practice of many native peoples from here and into the U.S. to burn forests regularly, because old growth interior forests have nowhere near the amount of resources for a hunter/gatherer society as new growth. When Europeans came, they stopped that and started fighting forest fires and our forests got old. Old trees are very vulnerable to insects and disease.
Beetle infestations were popping up all over the province in increasing frequency and industry and government fought them, until the NDP refused to allow action against the infestation in Tweedsmuir Park and it got away. But it was bound to happen eventually anyway.
So in hindsight, was stopping the native burning practice and fighting fires bad forest policy?
Lack of diversity of species in reforestation practices and spraying of herbicides has had no effect on wildfires. They are starting in and burning through the old unlogged stands that still have all the deciduous trees.
The lack of diversity in products that are being produced from our trees is because they're excellently suited to those products and not much else. Forest companies have looked into expanded products and value added and found that it just isn't economical. Governments have tried to get forest companies to diversify but requiring them to partake in money-losing ventures would only hurt industry and workers.
People who say we should do what Sweden does don't know what Sweden does.
First of all, most of their timber land is small private holdings, easily accessible. Most of it was denuded in the 19th century and a government program resulted in it being reforested 130 years ago. Almost all their trees are second growth, and thus don't have our problems of rot, insects and disease. Official forest policy is to extract the most profit possible, even from private land. They have far less species diversity than we do. When trees are of harvestable size, they must be harvested or taxes on the land go up. They have between two and six cuts spread over a number of years, but the final cut must be clear cut. That's the law, even for private land. That's how they manage to get so much more production and value added than we do.
Without the current tenure system, large corporations wouldn't have an assured supply of wood and wouldn't have been able to make the huge investments required for modern forest industry. Without it, a lot more people would have been unemployed a long time ago.
We haven't given our trees away for a pittance. Tenure means the companies have a quota and they don't own the trees. They still have to pay stumpage and you may have noticed that one of the reasons for the current closures is the high cost of logs.
Those companies grew their mills to consume more and more logs by becoming the most technologically advanced mills in the world. One mill today can cut more than 10 mills did 40 years ago, and yes, with fewer and fewer jobs. But if they hadn't modernized, they wouldn't have been able to compete, especially with having to pay the punitive U.S. tariffs and thousands of jobs would have been lost.
Shame on us?
No, we should be proud of our forest industry.
Some of these companies are selling some of their tenure to other mills that aren't shutting down so those mills will be able to continue to run. Other companies are keeping their tenure and spreading it out to the remaining mills they own. They will continue to log as much as possible and run sawmills on the reduced supply. Government taking tenure away would only result in more mills shutting down.
Should they now just let their companies unavoidably shrink? They can't keep running the same sized operations here in B.C., so what's wrong with expanding outside the province? Most of these companies are publicly traded and most of their profits have gone to shareholders over the decades, so when they expand, they borrow. They use investor money. It would gain us nothing in B.C. if they didn't buy up mills in the U.S. and would only hurt the viability of the companies.
There is nothing that can be done to prevent the boom and bust cycle of the forest industry - that's a matter of the markets. And if uninformed people get to make forest policy for B.C., we'll see a permanent bust like we've never seen before.
Art Betke, Prince George
