Region Archives: Canada West

We’re in Stage One water restrictions. If you’re not concerned yet, our watershed is about to be logged. If you think we’re having problems with drought, flooding, salmon runs and water sources now, logging the face of Elphinstone could knock everything we’ve seen so far right out of the park. Polar Geosciences Ltd. released a comprehensive assessment of the Mount Elphinstone Watershed, completed for BC Timber Sales (BCTS) on March 7. Our local Elphinstone Community Association (ECA), along with the Sunshine Coast Conservation Association (SCCA) published a response to this BCTS hydrology report last week that got me plenty concerned. …Maybe not surprising, the conclusions drawn from that information seem eager to justify BCTS’s mandate to profit off a pretty sensitive patch of forest. …I grew up in a RivTow family of the ‘80s; This isn’t an anti-logging industry narrative. There is a great deal of Crown land we could log. 

Public hearings about the N.W.T.’s proposed Forest Act have been postponed this week because of an out–of-control wildfire.  A territorial committee is still scheduled to… talk about Bill 74, which, if passed, would mean people with Aboriginal or treaty rights to harvest wood for personal use would no longer require a permit to exercise that right. The bill was presented to a committee in late April where Deh Cho MLA Ron Bonnetrouge hinted at the significance of changing that rule in particular. “Many of our members have been charged in the past,” he said, referring to people harvesting wood as heating fuel or to build cabins.  The bill also deals with wildfire management, sustainable forest management, and the roles played by government departments, renewable resource councils, and forest management committees when it comes to the N.W.T.’s forests.

EDMONTON, AB – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to stop in Edmonton this morning to meet with Canadian Armed Forces personnel who are assisting Alberta in fighting ongoing wildfires. About 300 members of the Canadian Armed Forces will be deployed across the province to help with the blazes that have forced thousands of Albertans to flee their homes and rural properties. Wildfires officials are warning that rising temperatures that have been a problem for crews battling wildfires in the province’s north are now also a concern in Alberta’s south. Josee St-Onge of Alberta Wildfire says conditions in the south aren’t as extreme at the moment, but the province may need to reposition resources so it can be ready to respond quickly to new fires in the area. …Colin Blair of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency urged people in areas that are threatened to prepare in advance to evacuate, including having an evacuation kit ready.

The images of the fallen enormous western red cedars in Quatsino Sound on the north end of the island were captured by conservationists with the Ancient Forest Alliance (AFA), which said the trees should have been protected under the old-growth forests deferral agreement. AFA said some of the old growth trees measured upwards of 3 metres wide in a 25-hectare cutblock, the area equivalent to over 50 football fields, located on public lands in Tree Farm Licence 6, which is held by logging company Western Forest Products. The group says the area was not deferred from logging due to a mapping error. …The group said “this particular grove was not included in the TAP’s original deferral recommendations due to the forest being incorrectly labelled as 210 years old in the province’s forest inventory database (40 years younger than the province’s 250-year-old threshold)”.

CALLING LAKE, Alberta – High school students at Calling Lake School had the unique opportunity to take part in a new partnership between the Northland School Division (NSD), Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries (Al-Pac) and Woodland Operations Learning Foundation (WOLF). …The course included time spent working on a simulator learning how to use a forklift, a feller/buncher, and a loader. …The week-long course counted towards the student’s high school diploma, and Dr. Spencer-Poitras said that there were talks underway to build it into a dual credit program with NAIT or MacEwan University. To complement the four hours of simulator training, a certified teacher from WOLF also took the students through some theory, including how forests and societies go hand in hand, how the industry uses data, and some of the data analysis methods used by the industry.

SPUZZUM, B.C. – Two northern spotted owls that had been released into a British Columbia forest last year have been found dead, potentially reducing the known wild population in the province to a single female. Spuzzum First Nation Chief James Hobart and Jasmine McCulligh for the Northern Spotted Owl Breeding Program… said the two male birds’ remains were found with their GPS trackers in early May. Minister Nathan Cullen says the cause of death is unknown. Hobart said efforts will be made to retrace the birds’ final days to work out what could have been done differently. McCulligh said her team would use the experience to help move the breeding and release program forward. …Protection of spotted owls has fuelled decades-long disputes between environmental groups and the forest industry as their future is often tied to saving old-growth forests where the birds live. 

Additional coverage by Spuzzum and the Government of British Columbia: Joint statement on death of two spotted owls released into the wild in 2022

Meghan DeGraff

Planting trees in places scorched by forest fire can help its ecosystems recover and restore its capacity to capture carbon. But when tree planters are called in to do the job, Meghan DeGraff, a supervisor for All Star Silviculture in Enderby, B.C. said they can sometimes be met by this deathly concoction of conditions. But emerging technology provides alternatives. Where a human might feel unsafe, tree-planting drones can fly safely above. In the past decade, British Columbia has experienced its three worst wildfire seasons. …Toronto-based reforestation company Flash Forest is branding itself as a solution for recovery. Using drones equipped with artificial intelligence and mapping capabilities, its technology is designed to fly above a planting site and shoot specially designed seed pods into the ground. These pods are designed to nurture tree seedlings in the first few stages of their lives. By 2028, the company aims to have planted one billion trees.

The Woodland Almanac is an informative quarterly newsletter which includes updates on woodlot licence business, government updates, articles related to forest management and human interest stories. The Spring 2023 edition is now available.

…drone aircraft are coming to help plant trees in 83,000 hectares devastated by the White Rock Lake Wildfire in 2021. This week, Flash Forest, an Ontario-based company co-founded by two Kelowna brothers, is starting to replant some of the burnt forest using drones firing seed pods into the soil from 15 to 40 metres above. …The big advantage to drone planting is not only how fast it can be done – a tree planter using a shovel can do only about 1,500 plantings a day – but also accessibility. “We try not to go into the site,” Cameron Jones, the company’s chief operating officer said. “We don’t want to put our planters at risk because we’re planting in high severity burns. It’s very dangerous territory. You have a lot of snags.” …The drones range up to two kilometres from their base and crews can position themselves in safe areas to replace batteries and reload with them with up to 8,000 seed pods for each drone.

Forest Professionals British Columbia (FPBC) offers a new webinar focusing on the development and implementation of winch-assist harvesting systems in BC. The webinar, Winch-Assist: Making Steep Slope Harvesting in BC Safer and Productive, also covers planning, development, and operational processes. After attending, participants will: understand winch-assist harvesting systems history; understand steep slope safe work regulations and processes; understand the planning, development, and operational steps to implement a winch-assist operation. Audience: Forest professionals working in harvest operations and OHS. Date: June 14. Time: 1:00-2:30 PM. Presenters: Ryan Potter, RPF, Tolko; John Ligtenberg, RPF, WorksafeBC; and Darcy Moshenko, RPF, WorksafeBC.

Stark images of an ancient tree cut down in western Canada expose flaws in the government’s plan to protect old-growth forests, activists have said, arguing that vulnerable ecosystems have been put at risk as logging companies race to harvest timber. As part of an effort to catalogue possible old growth forests, photographer TJ Watt and Ian Thomas of the environmental advocacy group Ancient Forest Alliance travelled to a grove of western red cedars on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. But when they arrived to the forest in Quatsino Sound, they found hundreds of trees that has recently been logged. …“Progress is being made, but clearly there are still loopholes. We need to make sure that the province is following through on all of their commitments to protect these endangered ecosystems, and not letting anything slip through the cracks,” said Watt.

…a debate has emerged about the Alberta provincial budget for fighting wildfires, and whether past political decisions play a role in Alberta’s current crisis. On Tuesday, former members of the disbanded Wildland Firefighter Rappel Program drew attention to the UCP government’s decision to shutter that unit in 2019, saying that they could have been “difference-makers” in the current crisis. …The rappel team was part of Alberta’s wildfire response strategy for decades. Created in 1983…when the UCP government under former premier Jason Kenney announced in 2019 that it was closing down the rappel program, the unit had 63 members… Then forestry minister, Devin Dreeshen justified the cut saying less than two per cent of firefighters rappelled into wildfires in Alberta, and the cuts would save $23 million. …[Later] documents showed that closing the program saved only about $1.4 million. 

Hosted by the UBC Faculty of Forestry, this webinar features forestry professors Younes Alila and Lori Daniels. Climate change has elevated the risk of extreme weather the world over. In British Columbia, a natural flood risk mitigator lies all around us in the water-absorbing power of trees. In fact, research has shown that even a modest loss of forest cover due to wildfire, logging and disease can cause surprisingly large increases in the frequency of extreme floods. Will dykes, dams and levees be enough to protect against property loss and devastation from floods in the future? How can nature-based solutions, such as forests, and the restoration of natural floodplains and wetlands contribute to flood mitigation? What considerations need to be taken as BC develops its flood risk management strategy? When: May 30, 2023, from 12 – 1 PM Where: Online via Zoom

EDMONTON — Alberta’s decision to cancel funding for an elite wildfire-fighting crew in 2019 came despite pleas to keep the Rapattack program from at least three municipalities, including one that has since been evacuated during this spring’s blazes. “Rapattack is a pivotal program in the fight against wildfire and without them communities will be losing a valuable resource,” wrote Jim Hailes, then mayor of Fox Creek, to Devin Dreeshen, then the United Conservative forestry minister. …Rapattack firefighters are rappelled from helicopters to douse wildfires while they still only covered a few hectares. …There were once 63 such firefighters stationed around the province before the government cancelled the program in 2019, saving $1.4 million. …On Monday, former Rapattack members, as well as current firefighters, said the program’s cancellation deprived Alberta of a powerful weapon it could have used against this spring’s fires.

ALBERTA and BRITISH COLUMBIA — A heat wave that’s expected to push daytime temperatures 10 to 15 degrees above seasonal norms is raising the wildfire risk in Alberta and BC, where crews are already battling early-season blazes. The hot, dry conditions will prime forest fuels for ignition, said UBC weather and wildfire researcher Chris Rodell, who’s concerned that lightning could spark fires. As the heat eases, Rodell said he expects instability in the atmosphere could lead to thunderstorms and strengthen winds Tuesday or Wednesday. …John Cragg, a meteorologist with the weather office, said the heat is coming from a “blocking pattern,” when the normal fluctuation of low and high pressures stops, and warm air flows into an area without relief from an influx of cooler northern air. The forecast shows temperatures are expected to hit 30 C and higher in parts of Alberta that are already grappling with early season wildfires.

A category 2 fire prohibition is planned for May 11th, beginning at 12:00pm across the Cariboo Fire Centre. Areas included are the Cariboo Chilcotin Forest District, the 100 Mile House Forest District, the Quesnel Forest District and the Tsilhqot’in (Xeni Gwet’in) Declared Title Area. The prohibition includes the use of fireworks, sky lanterns, burn barrels or burn cages of any size, binary exploding targets, and air curtain burners. The purpose of the prohibition is to reduce human caused wildfires and protect public safety.

VANCOUVER — An Indigenous-led report into a massive wildfire nearly six years ago that destroyed more than 100 homes and scorched a vast swath of British Columbia’s Interior says the blaze resulted in up to $1 billion per year in ongoing nature and ecosystem losses. The Elephant Hill wildfire burned more than 1,900 square kilometres of forests, grasslands and properties in the summer of 2017, directly affecting numerous First Nations and other communities. The report was released Wednesday by the Secwepemcul’ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society, based in Kamloops, B.C. The society was founded by eight Secwepemc communities directly affected by the Elephant Hill wildfire and has been working to pursue landscape recovery and restoration throughout their territories.

The future of forestry didn’t look much different, year to year, for decades on end. …as an industry, the evolution was slow. Now, the changes are evolutionary and revolutionary. It’s not just hardware that’s developing, it is the financing of forestry, the governance of forestry, the partnerships required to operate, and instead of just lumber and pulp, the product possibilities are reaching the realistic point of shocking. …Being the epicentre of the mountain pine beetle disaster, followed by mega-fires that decimated what forests were left, made Quesnel a natural place to ponder what this beleaguered but exciting industry now represented. Add to that all the different kinds of forestry production that goes on in Quesnel, most of it thanks to West Fraser’s diverse holdings in its original hometown, and it makes even more sense that this was the place where the Quesnel Future of Forests Think Tank was launched in 2018.

Additional coverage, by Frank Peebles in the Quesnel Cariboo Observer: Minister Bains in Quesnel with call for worker focus in forestry