Region Archives: Canada East

Mark Stevens & Brandon Brock

TEMAGAMI – The Temagami Forest Management Corporation (TFMC) recently awarded its first scholarship. Brandon Brock of Sturgeon Falls was the recipient of a $2,500 scholarship to support his studies in the Environmental Technology Diploma program at Canadore College in North Bay. Brock has worked for the past two summers with Daki Menan Lands and Resources in the Temagami forest, planting trees and thinning young forests, TFMC general manager Mark Stevens stated in a press release. The TFMC scholarship program was initiated in the fall of 2022 and will continue with applications being accepted in the spring of each year going forward, Stevens outlined.

After five years of research, planning and much debate, a new paradigm for managing Nova Scotia’s Crown land is in place. The last piece came Tuesday, when the Natural Resources and Renewables Department unveiled plans for selection and management of high-production forest lands. Ten per cent (185,000 hectares) of Nova Scotia’s Crown land will eventually be treated like a farmer’s field, where trees are grown as a crop on 30- to 50-year rotations to produce softwood for the roughly 10 larger commercial sawmills, with byproduct going to pulp and paper production. …Industry, government and environmental organizations all signed on in support of implementing the recommendations. “Everybody has to take a little water with their wine,” said Raymond Plourde, wilderness co-ordinator for the Ecology Action Centre… If we support the entire Lahey package, as we do, then we have to accept this.”

Prince Edward Island needs better information on where wood chips for heating, part of its plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, are coming from, says a forestry expert in the wake of the provincial auditor general’s report. Forest management was included in last week’s annual report from P.E.I. Auditor General Darren Noonan. Noonan wrote the province is not following its own forest management practices, and expressed concerned that the State of the Forest report, published once a decade, is late again. Noonan also said the province needs to do a better job tracking where biomass wood is being harvested. Gary Schneider, supervisor of the Macphail Ecological Forestry Project said, “if we’re going to say the wood is being harvested sustainably we need to know that.”. …Noonan wrote in particular about the province’s biomass heating program, which uses wood chips to provide heat to more than 30 public buildings, most of them schools. 

The Province has found a high production forest zone to complete it’s triad model of ecological forestry. The aim is to support the economy while making sure 90% of Crown land is managed with biodiversity. “We now have all three parts of the triad model of ecological forestry in place, as recommended in the Independent Review of Forest Practices,” said Tory Rushton, Minister of Natural Resources and Renewables. …The other 10%, about 185,000 hectares, will be the high production zone, where clear-cutting is allowed. …Once forestry has harvested an area in the zone, they will add nutrients to the soil then high quality, fast-growing seedlings will be planted, managing the crop for decades, producing trees in 25 to 40 years, instead of the 60 to 90 years through traditional approaches. …The conservation zone, about 35% of Crown land, includes old-growth forests, existing parks and protected areas. The mixed zone is currently 55% of Crown land.

BARRIE, ON – Forests Ontario’s Annual Conference in Alliston, Ontario on February 16 and 17, 2023, aims to inspire collective action via a diverse lineup of speakers headlined by rocket scientist, adventurer, and advocate for women in technology Natalie Panek. “This year, the conference theme is ‘Growing a healthy tomorrow: for communities, for earth, for life’,” Rob Keen, Registered Professional Forester and Forests Ontario Chief Executive Officer, says. “I know Natalie, and all our speakers, will encourage important and topical discussions, offer incredible networking opportunities, and most of all, inspire collective action to ensure a greener and healthier future for generations to come.” Ms. Panek will be joined by Ingo Ensminger, global change researcher; Christian Messier, Canada Research Chair in Forest Resilience to Global Changes; and Megan Baskerville, Environment and Climate Change Canada physical scientist, and many others.

Nova Scotia has revealed the initial locations where clear cutting may be allowed on Crown land. Maps released today include areas dotted throughout Guysborough, Antigonish, Colchester, Pictou, Lunenburg, Queens, Annapolis and Kings counties. These initial parcels of Crown land where the province may permit clear cutting total 9,395 hectares. Over time, the government aims to turn 10 per cent of Crown land — or 185,000 hectares — into what it calls high-production forestry. The pieces of land that were prioritized for clear cutting include those with existing planted forests as well as abandoned agricultural fields. Land that’s within 100 metres of conservation zones, locations where species at risk are known to exist, critical wildlife habitat areas and rare or sensitive ecosystems were excluded. …Herbicides will be permitted in high-production forest zones.

Nova Scotia release: High Production Forest Zone in Place

Caribou populations in Quebec, heavily disturbed by human activity, continue to decline, according to new figures to be published Monday by the ministry of the environment.  La Presse Canadienne looked at caribou population inventories carried out in 2021 and 2022 in the Gaspésie, Nord-du-Québec and Côte-Nord regions, and in all three regions, populations continue to decline, mainly because of the destruction of their habitat. Only the Caniapiscau caribou population is growing.  ….How much are these populations declining? It is difficult to determine this, according to the director general of the co-ordination of wildlife management at the ministry of the environment.  …The ministry, however, hypothesizes an “average decrease of 11 per cent of the population per year.”  According to inventory documents, the main disturbances to the habitat of the caribou population are logging roads, logging and burning (clearing by fire).

The provincial government is being asked to increase funding for forest access roads in the region. Erik Holmstrom is the manager for Ontario Timberlands for Weyerhaeuser and says the amount of money dedicated to forest access roads has actually decreased. “Initially the funding for public access infrastructure was $75 million,” Holmstrom told the Ontario Finance Committee during their hearings in Kenora this week. “The current government has reduced this funding to $54 million.  Inflationary pressure alone would require increasing the program  to $100 million.” Holmstrom says the forest access roads aren’t just for lumber companies, but different recreation activities.

CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. — The province’s auditor general has revealed the P.E.I. government is not following its own policies and regulations for management of forests on public lands. In a new report released on Jan. 11, auditor general Darren Noonan also found the Department of Environment, Energy and Climate Action (EECA), tasked with overseeing the 81,510 acres of forests located on publicly owned land, has not conducted audits to determine whether or not wood harvested for biomass is being harvested sustainably. P.E.I.’s most recent state of the forest report from 2013 found 617,500 acres of the province’s landmass is forest. This represents about 44 per cent of P.E.I.’s total landmass. The audit of forestry management examined the period between Dec. 1, 2018, and March 31, 2022. It did not take into account the impacts of post-tropical storm Fiona on the province’s forests.

ONTARIO — A new alliance of industry, scientific, non-profit and government partners is collaborating to increase the success of urban tree planting, as high mortality rates remain a challenge for the perennial plant that is key to tackling climate change. The goal of Greening the Landscape Research Consortium is to help seedlings survive to become giants, and its advantage is information-sharing along the “urban tree value chain” – from nursery staff tending seeds, to planting contractors, to municipal foresters nurturing the trees. The consortium was launched in Ontario’s Niagara region in 2021 by Vineland Research and Innovation Centre, or VRIC, a not-for-profit institution focused on improving the sustainability and competitiveness of Canadian horticulture. While millions of urban trees are planted every year, sustaining them is difficult. The City of Toronto alone plants 120,000, and Montreal hopes to reach half a million annually by 2030.

Sustainable forest management should be the main goal for every private woodlot owner in Ontario, a retired Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry official says. Al Stinson, who was a forest specialist for the ministry, participated in a pre-recorded session for the Ontario Agricultural Conference with Jenny Liu from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. Stinson said there are other objectives with woodlots, such as financial reasons, recreational aims or habitat for birds and mammals, but ensuring the forest is sustainable should be both a short-and long-term goal. “That has to be an underpinning principle of every management plan on private land and Crown land,” he said in the video recorded in a Crown land forest in Ottawa Valley. To achieve this objective, Stinson said woodlot owners within the Carolinian Zone should have an inventory of the trees on their lands. 

Action taken by the Province of Ontario back in 2019 could return to cripple Renfrew County’s forestry-related revenues. In that year (2019), Queen’s Park canceled funding for tree planting on privately owned lands. Rob Keen, Registered Professional Forester, and CEO of Forests Ontario notes that Valley’s 20 sawmills provide work to about 22 hundred people and generate over $85 million in taxes ($42 million federally, $32 million provincially and nearly $12 million municipally as of 2019). One reason for the area’s current prosperity is the past support for tree-planting efforts by the Province of Ontario.

The 400,000 acres of forestland surrounding Domtar’s Windsor Mill in Quebec are a hot spot for forestry and climate research, with several projects currently taking place in partnership with organizations and universities across Canada. The company reaps benefits from these projects, including data that supports the continued Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification of fiber harvested from the Domtar forest. Additionally, engaging with student-led research projects helps Domtar build relationships with young people who may consider joining Domtar in the future. Éric Lapointe is superintendent of forest operations at the Windsor Mill and leads Domtar’s involvement in onsite forestry and climate research. “Several of the projects and collaborations — and those that will follow — contribute to strengthening and developing the reputation and performance of the Windsor Mill and our forestry practices,” he says.

For the first time in more than four decades, swaths of tree canopies across southern Quebec were wiped out when spongy moth populations exploded to near biblical proportions in June of 2021.  But the leaves grew back.   The gooey masses of abandoned cocoons, glued to tree bark in growth-like clumps, eventually faded into the forest’s embrace and the very hungry caterpillars, which were responsible for eating all those leaves, have yet to come back for seconds. In fact, they’re all gone.  Now scientists like Emma Despland want to better understand what happened.  She’s a professor of biology at Concordia University who researches plant-insect interactions, including outbreaks like that of the spongy month which affected southern Quebec as well as New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.  The research is exploring if parasitoids and the moth’s inability to survive low winter temperatures played roles in the insect’s abrupt disappearance.

In early December 2022, community members from Grassy Narrows (also known as Asubpeeschoseewagong) braved winter temperatures to gather around a sacred fire and feast in celebration. They were marking 20 years of that sacred fire burning — 20 years of a blockade to prevent clear-cut logging and mining from happening in their traditional territories. It’s a blockade that’s needed as urgently now as it was in the 2000s, say community members from the Ojibway First Nation in northwestern Ontario. …Land that the First Nation considers part of its Indigenous protected area could be reopened to logging as Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) prepares a new 10-year forest management plan in the Whiskey Jack Forest, according to a ministry spokesperson. …As the First Nation continues to prevent resource extraction from occurring, community members shared their memories of the early blockade days and how the significance of their work has changed.

Mark Pearson

The Canadian Institute of Forestry wants to make it easier for people to access and compare urban forestry data from across the country. The institute, which is based in Mattawa, recently received funding from Natural Resources Canada for its Open Urban Forests project. The project will gather open-source geospacial forest data from municipalities across Canada, and compile that data in a centralized hub on the institute’s website. The data will provide information on details like tree cover, number of trees planted, carbon storage, and long-term trends in urban forestry.  “By ensuring that urban forestry geospatial data is more accessible, we are making it easier for communities across Canada to expand urban forests,” said Jonathan Wilkinson, minister of natural resources. The institute’s executive director, Mark Pearson, said the institute aims to have the centralized data hub up and running by March 2024. 

Two Lake Superior First Nations, Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Michipicoten, say Ontario is ignoring their expertise by hunting for consultants to help endangered caribou instead of implementing plans they wrote already. Caribou living on the northern shore of Lake Superior have teetered on the verge of extinction for years, the result of a long decline fuelled by human development. Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Michipicoten First Nations have long been pushing the Ontario government to act before the gentle ungulates are lost forever. “I just don’t want them to disappear,” Biigtigong Nishnaabeg First Nation Chief Duncan Michano said in an interview. “We’re pretty frustrated.” …The two nations say it’s insulting for the government to seek outside help without consulting them first. They’ve already made caribou management plans, so that step is done, they said in a press release. The government just needs to work with them to implement it.

MIDLAND, ON – National parks and national historic sites are gateways to discovering, learning about, and connecting with nature and history. Parks Canada is a recognized leader in conservation and takes actions to protect national parks and national marine conservation areas and contributes to the recovery of species at risk. The management plan for Georgian Bay Islands National Park, including Beausoleil Island National Historic Site, was tabled in Parliament on December 14. Reviewed every 10 years, management plans are a requirement of the Canada National Parks Act and guide the management of national historic sites, national parks and national marine conservation areas. …The new management plan for Georgian Bay Islands National Park was based on input from Indigenous partners, the park’s Cultural Advisory Circle, regional residents, partners and stakeholders, as well as visitors past and present. 

OTTAWA, ON – Protecting the health of our forests from invasive species is a priority for our government. The spruce budworm is the most destructive pest for spruce–fir forests in Canada, and outbreaks can result in significant losses of important timber and non-timber resources, negatively affecting ecosystems, the economy and forestry-dependent communities. Natural Resources Canada announced the renewal of the Early Intervention Strategy for Spruce Budworm research program. This investment will continue the protection of forests in Atlantic Canada and improve the knowledge and tools needed to manage this destructive insect across Canada. …The renewed strategy also includes a small-scale research stream for eligible research institutions, with a Call for Proposals set to launch in winter 2022. This strategy, which is being applied in Atlantic Canada, is preventing outbreaks of the spruce budworm while flattening the population curve of the pest.