Region Archives: Canada West

PRINCE GEORGE – During a visit to the city yesterday, Jobs Minister Ravi Kahlon was asked about his message to forestry workers as a result of mill closure in light of the deferral of 2.6 million hectares of old growth forest. His response was unexpected. “We know, for example, that many First Nations within this region have said ‘We don’t want any deferrals. In fact, we have strong working relationships with forest companies, with communities and we’re happy the way the practices of harvesting are happening.’ And we respect that and we will acknowledge that in the decision-making,” says Minister Kahlon. …“The [government] talked to the First Nations down on the Coast. Williams Lake up, we’re forestry,” notes Chief Dolleen Logan of the Lheidli T’enneh. …“If you talk to the mayor of McBride and he says ‘You might as well roll up our streets.’ This doesn’t affect just First Nations, it affects everyone in BC. Especially from Williams Lake up.”

As the logging season returns this year, so does the fight. Protestors are gearing up to create another blockade at Fairy Creek over the logging of old-growth forests. Teal Jones is the company with the contract from the province and the Pachedaaht First Nation, to log in the area. All the aformentioned stakeholders have repeatedly asked the protestors to leave. “If they want to continue to protest, maybe head to the Legislature to the people who make the laws and regulations,” Conrad Browne, director of Indigenous partnerships told CHEK News. …B.C.’s Court of Appeal has extended an injunction restraining the conduct of protestors interfering in logging operations until Sept. 26, 2022, setting the stage for this war in the woods to continue.

The District of 100 Mile House is in the early stages of creating a resource guide for residents affected by economic changes stemming from mill closures and curtailments. The district hired consultant Barbara Perrey, who has spent the past several weeks interviewing families who have experienced forestry sector employment disruptions, as well as community service providers to help with support and recovery. …After a year of suspended operations, the Norbord OSB plant in 100 Mile House announced in November 2020 it would permanently close. That closure followed the shutdown of West Fraser’s Chasm mill in 2019 and reduced shifts at its 100 Mile mill. Temporary closures in 100 Mile have also taken place over the past few years, due to a number of factors including transportation logistics and pandemic impacts. The interviews will highlight how families have been able to navigate services in the community in light of employment changes and what improvements may be needed.

Ravi Kahlon

B.C.’s minister of jobs and economic recovery, Ravi Kahlon says Prince George is leading the way as B.C. continues its economic recovery through the pandemic. Kahlon stopped in Prince George Wednesday on a tour of the interior of B.C. where he gave an update about the StrongerBC Economic Plan and the economy in northern B.C. Khalon also addressed the challenges in forestry that Prince George and the region have been facing, including the recent closure of the PacificBio Energy pellet after nearly 30 years in business resulting in the loss of 50 jobs. Forestry sector industry groups have also raised concerns that jobs will be lost following the B.C. government’s announcement that it will place a moratorium on logging 2.6 million hectares of old growth or deemed at-risk forests. While the deferrals are said to be temporary they could become permanent, depending, in part, on the support the deferrals receive from First Nations involved in forestry.

Additional coverage in the Penticton Western News, by Michael Bramadat-Willcock: B.C. outlines recovery plan for northern communities

The Nuchatlaht rights and title case, claiming about 200 square kilometres of Nootka Island, off Vancouver Island, is the first to apply the precedent-setting 2014 Tsilhqot’in decision, in which the Supreme Court of Canada granted the Tsilhqot’in First Nation title to 1,750 square kilometres of territory. It is also the first title case to test the province’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, passed in 2019. …Industrial clearcut logging by Western Forest Products has removed 80 per cent of the old-growth timber on Nootka Island and destroyed salmon streams, according to Hereditary Chief Jordan Michael. But the provincial government, which manages forestry tenures and licences, has refused to recognize Nuchatlaht’s right to manage and protect their territory, Michael said. …The case is now advancing to the B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver. …The province argues the Nuchatlaht abandoned Nootka Island, that B.C. laws displaced their Indigenous title — meaning forestry tenures are lawful.

VICTORIA, BC – “Tree planting transforms us. These are our stories.” On March 19^th The 2022 virtual Tree Planting Film Festival entitled We Are the Landscape, provides an inside look into what it takes to be a tree planter, sharing stories of passion, purpose and perseverance. It features 26 short films and documentaries, each under 10 minutes in length, as well as an appearance by Paul Stamets, an American mycologist, and musical entertainment by Clayton Joseph Scott, The Boom Booms and Shred Kelly. This the third year for the virtual Film Festival, produced by tree Blue Green Planet Project Inc. (BGPP), a collaborative carbon solutions company. Event organizer Tim Tchida says 600 million trees are planted in Canada each year by approximately 8000 tree planters. …For many, it’s a calling as much as it is a job. …Tickets are free and available by visiting https://www.treeplantingfilmfestival.earth/ and https://bgpp.earth. Show starts at 6:30 pm.

Additional coverage by Western Forestry Contractors’ Association

Requests to the province for a moratorium on logging in a wildfire-ravaged area of the Shuswap were met with assurances that salvaging plans would proceed with consideration of community safety. In response to a referral from BC Timber Sales (BCTS) regarding proposed salvage logging in the Wiseman and Sicamous Creek watersheds, both the Columbia Shuswap Regional District and the District of Sicamous asked that a two-year moratorium due to the high geohazard risk created by the 2021 Two Mile Creek Fire. This was in reference to the findings of an engineering firm that… there is a high risk of a debris flood. The local governments were given reason to believe salvage logging would compound that risk. …Grace Chomitz, a planning forester with BCTS… explained site specific studies regarding terrain stability and hydrology will be used to “help make management decisions in the watersheds.”

James Steidle

Stop the Spray BC says the province should block the Canfor pending sale of timber harvesting rights to the McLeod Lake Indian Band. In addition, the group wants the province to strip Canfor of its tenure. The deal, worth an estimated $70 million, follows a similar deal made with Peak Renewables where Canfor made a $30 million deal selling its timber rights in the Fort Nelson Timber Supply Area. In both cases, Canfor had shut down the mills and had been providing no local manufacturing jobs, says James Steidle of Stop the Spray BC. “If a forestry company isn’t providing mill jobs with its tree farm licences or forestry licenses to cut, fair compensation for taking back those licences should be $0,” said Steidle in a news release. “They should not be a tradeable asset for these corporations already earning billion dollar profits.”

Larry Pynn

North Cowichan has a long history of logging and is home to the B.C. Forest Discovery Centre. But …local citizens are now expressing support for forest values that have little to do with chainsaws and logging trucks. …The newly released Lees & Associates public consultation report — commissioned by North Cowichan — yields some astonishing findings… Asked to identify their top considerations about the forest reserve in an online survey, citizens most strongly rated water quality, water supply protection, recreation and habitat/ecology. …Coun. Tek Manhas is the only councillor who voted to continue logging the forest reserve while the public consultation process is ongoing. …Interestingly, Manhas — as council’s liaison to the taxpayer-subsidized B.C. Forest Discovery Centre — is due to report to council soon on the centre’s response to concerns that its exhibits are biased, ignore the old-growth logging debate and don’t include historical Indigenous uses of the forests.

As the logging season returns this year, so does the fight. Protestors are gearing up to create another blockade at Fairy Creek over the logging of old-growth forests.   Teal Jones is the company with the contract from the province and the Pachedaaht First Nation, to log in the area. All the aformentioned stakeholders have repeatedly asked the protestors to leave.  “If they want to continue to protest, maybe head to the Legislature to the people who make the laws and regulations,” Conrad Browne, director of Indigenous partnerships told CHEK News.  The Fairy Creek protests are already the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history, with more than 1,100 arrests. …At stake, Teal Jones told a judge is $20 million dollars in wood products, the profits of which, to be shared with the Pachedaaht First Nation.

We are getting ready to welcome returners and newcomers up to camp. This is a CALL OUT for people to join the frontlines to serve as Land Defenders in arrestable and support positions. The first step towards coming to camp for a long-term stay is to download an app called ‘Signal’. …After your request to join is approved, we will create groups of 5-10 and invite you into a Zoom meeting which will run for 40min. We will go over the basics of life at camp and how to deal with enforcement. …This online intake process is brand new to the Fairy Creek Blockade and managed with a mixture of Land Defenders who are at camp and in the city.  …We are thankful for your interest in working with us. To be a part of this movement is to understand that our focus is around defending indigenous sovereignty and the ancestral lands and title of Pacheedaht nation. We are all here at Ada’itsx under the invitation of Elder Bill Jones and his niece Whaletail Jones.

If you found yourself on Main Street over this past weekend you no doubt noticed the hundreds of paper flyers that could be seen blowing around the sidewalks and the middle of the street thanks to the Save Old Growth protest group. …There’s no way you could have missed the flyers, [it was] as if someone simply threw a stack of them in the air. The group’s stated mission is to get the B.C. government to “immediately end all old growth logging”. Meanwhile they are literally littering the streets with an excess of waste made out of trees, and the irony is so thick you can slice through it with a chainsaw. However, the group isn’t seeing that irony. In response to our question they blamed the general public.

Teresa Milne

Teresa Milne has been fighting against gender norms from when she was a kid growing up with two brothers, to now as a firefighter. …Milne joined her first fire crew at 21 years old. She was the only woman surrounded by older, male firefighters. …It wasn’t until her fourth year that a new supervisor treated her as equal to everyone else. She was suddenly being encouraged to take on new roles within the crew. …Milne still has to uphold herself to a different standard because she is one of the very few women. “You have to be brave enough to have a voice when you are the only woman in a room of over 60 men.” …Milne is now the acting wildfire officer for the Columbia fire zone in the BC Wildfire Service. “Our changing fire climate needs the ideas that will come with increased diversity and more women in leadership roles,” Milne said.

In episode four of ForestWorks’ second season, Port McNeill Mayor Gaby Wickstrom and Vancouver City Councillor Lisa Dominato share their thoughts on where BC forestry is headed. This week on ForestWorks we speak with two local politicians elected to serve the interests of very different communities: Port McNeill and the City of Vancouver. Both, however, are forest towns with deep ties to the industry. And both our guests have concerns about where BC is headed. Brought to you by Resource Works, ForestWorks talks about all things forestry — the people, the stories and the places of British Columbia’s single largest industry.

In episode five of ForestWorks’ second season, former BC NDP premier Mike Harcourt and UBC’s John Innes join us for a conversation about forest policy and how BC’s approach stacks up in the global context. Listen in for a conversation about provincial forest policy, the science of sustainable forest management, and how BC’s approach stacks up in the global context. Brought to you by Resource Works, ForestWorks talks about all things forestry — the people, the stories and the places of British Columbia’s single largest industry.

SASKATCHEWAN — A conservation group says logging plans near Prince Albert are cutting too close. The Saskatchewan Forest Protection Network is concerned that an alternate logging plan could be unsustainable for the nearby Canwood, Nisbet, Fort à la Corne and Torch River Provincial Forests in a strategy that’s currently under review by the province. The alternate plan triggers if wood demand is high enough or provincial mills require a change. “They’re not basing it on the science and the other values that guided the rest of the plan,” said Cathy Holtslander, a Saskatoon resident. “They’re just saying, ‘If somebody wants to buy the wood, we’ll let them have it.’ ”…In planning documents, the province says it developed the strategy “using the best science and information currently available.”

A wildlife biologist says an enclosure designed to protect eight female caribou during calving season this spring is a last-chance attempt to save an endangered herd.  “These measures are extreme – we never want to be in this place,” says Aaron Reid. “It’s costly, it’s stressful – but without it, this herd would extirpate. Gone in 5-10 years.”  Reid was speaking at the end of February at the public opening of a maternity enclosure for the Southern Mountain Woodland caribou herd, located about 10 kilometres from Nakusp, near the community hot springs.  Reid told the two dozen guests the herd’s future relies on this enclosure working.  “Right now, we don’t have wild calf recruitment – it’s really low… and you really can’t grow a population without recruitment,” he said.

PACHEEDAHT NATION, Vancouver Island, B.C. — The nation is getting a first-of-its-kind 50-50 profit split on logging some forestlands under a partnership created in 2018. And the nation is processing logs in its own mill, opened in 2017. But a fight is underway over logging old growth forests, in the Fairy Creek drainage and beyond. Logging opponents and scientists are calling for these mature and old-growth forests to be set aside to help preserve biodiversity and combat the worst effects of climate change. The conflict has Indigenous nations in the middle. Publicity… the past two logging seasons is scaring off contractors the Pacheedaht would like to work with on new contracts that pay real money to the people, instead of the usual “beads and blankets” gestures, said Rod Bealing, forestry manager. …The Pacheedaht are hardly the first small Indigenous nation to find themselves in the middle of a media and activist storm. 

There was a time and not very long ago that trees like this cloaked the Northwest coast, from Southeast Alaska to B.C. to Washington, Oregon and Northern California. But since the time of European settlement, about 72% of the original old-growth conifer forest in the Pacific Northwest has been lost, largely through logging and other developments. Forest preservation, here and elsewhere in the Northwest, has a new urgency. Scientists and researchers are calling for preservation of old-growth forests, and to grow more by leaving alone mature trees in natural forests — a crucial defense against climate warming that poses catastrophic risks to humanity and all of biodiversity as we know it today. “The Pacific Coast produces these magnificent forests,” said Suzanne Simard, professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia.

Marcia Begin and Robin Fennell

Marcia Begin and Robin Fennell didn’t intend to write a book on the history of Clinton’s forest industry. But that’s what happened after their research into the old days of the logging industry became too big for a single exhibit at the Clinton Museum. Five years and dozens of interviews later, their work has been complied into Clinton Logging 1944-2019. Fennell, a former employee of the Ministry of Forests, said he’s always had a vested interest in the forestry industry. He’s watched it change from small independent sawmills to giant commercial mills and marked its decline over the last several years due to the wildfires and other factors. Using his contacts from both his time with the ministry and from decades living in Clinton, Fennell began reaching out to people for pictures and stories of the old days.

A year and a half after the province pledged to dramatically change how B.C.’s old-growth trees were logged, conservationists and First Nations say action on the issue is lagging and details about what is being done are obscure. …The Wilderness Committee, Sierra Club B.C. and the Ancient Forest Alliance, released a third “report card” grading how the government has acted on promises. The groups want immediate deferrals of logging in all at-risk old-growth forests, increased funding to support deferrals such as lost revenue for First Nations, legislation to protect biodiversity across B.C., and more regular updates. …The Ministry of Forests said in a statement that around 50,000 hectares of land with approved cutting permits overlap with the 2.6 million hectares of at-risk old-growth or 1.9 per cent of the total. It said that many forestry companies have told the province they will not proceed with harvesting while discussions with First Nations continue. 

See Sierra Club BC press release here.

One of the challenges ahead for Josie Osborne, minister of the B.C. government’s new Ministry of Land, Water and Resource Stewardship, will be overseeing the mandated phase-out of open-net salmon farms in B.C. in areas where First Nations support the industry and are invested in it. She and federal Fisheries and Oceans Minister Joyce Murray will have to wrestle with the question of whether First Nation consent includes the right to say yes. While some First Nations in B.C. have become increasingly hostile towards salmon farming, others are involved in the industry and now stand to lose investments and jobs, as Victoria and Ottawa move in tandem to “transition” open-net salmon farms to some yet-to-be-defined alternative. …In B.C., 79 federal licences for salmon farms expire on June 30. The salmon farming industry fears some may not be renewed.

Re: “Forest sector’s significance can’t be overstated, by Bob Brash,” comment, March 7.  …I wish to remind Bob Brash and the Truck Loggers’ Association of this province-wide failure and landscape scale disaster. Half the logging jobs in BC are gone, 220 mills have disappeared, logging-dependent communities are struggling and the industry complains of no trees. …B.C. needs deferrals, or industry will take every last stick of old growth, then move on to defective second growth, then skip town to avoid a bevy of lawsuits as in Grand Forks. …if over-clear-cut logging continues, “no trees, no forests, no mills, no jobs, no forest industry.”

Icel Dobell

Over the past year, I have read repeated letters to the editor that put out misinformation about the pause of logging for public consultation about the future good of our Six Mountains Community Forest (Tzouhalem, Prevost, Maple, Stoney Hill, Richards, Sicker). These letters attempt to discredit the extraordinary opportunity for carbon credits to protect our community forest for ecological values, and also to discredit the UBC consultants working with the municipality. I am not here to cheerlead for these forestry-faculty advisors, but I must say I am very impressed by the facts they have delivered about the potential for carbon credits. …For the record, the UBC consultants are highly respected professionals. …In an imperfect world, where we all pollute, carbon credits take from the profits of polluting industries to give back to nature, to protect ecosystems. It’s not perfect, as far as polluting, but until we evolve, carbon offsets serve profoundly.

Anacla, British Columbia – C̕awak ʔqin Forestry (Tsawak-qin Forestry Limited Partnership) and Huu-ay-aht First Nations announce April 28, 2022 as the new date for the Anacla Old-Growth Summit. Tayii Ḥaw̓ił ƛiišin (Derek Peters, Head Hereditary Chief, Huu-ay-aht First Nations) and Elected Chief Councillor Robert J. Dennis, Sr. will host the Summit which will take place in Anacla, B.C. C̕awak ʔqin Forestry and Huu-ay-aht Forestry Limited Partnership will participate as co-chairs. This Summit was originally planned for November 2021 but was deferred due to COVID-19 restrictions. The Summit will bring together 50 coastal Indigenous nations to share information on their stewardship and resource management planning and decision making processes. These Indigenous-led models not only cover all values such as old growth, fisheries, culture and climate change, but incorporate the research and advice of leading experts that Indigenous governments have retained in forestry, fisheries and ecosystem management.

The B.C. government has introduced legislation to ensure greater collaboration and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples in the management of wildlife in the province. “Wildlife is vitally important to Indigenous Peoples but for too long their voices were not being heard, and they had too little input into how this precious resource was being managed,” said Katrine Conroy, Minister of Forests. “For the first time, the changes we’re making will ensure Indigenous ancestral knowledge of wildlife is considered, and that will mean a stronger and more effective relationship for wildlife stewardship with Indigenous Peoples.” The foundational laws for managing wildlife in B.C. came into effect almost 200 years ago. Updates to laws over the years have reflected the changing nature of wildlife management in response to social values, common law and scientific advancement. For the first time, the legislation is being amended to integrate Indigenous perspectives.

Additional coverage in CTV News by Andrew Weichel: B.C. Wildlife Act amendments bring Indigenous perspectives into wildlife management