Region Archives: Canada

The recent decision by the Supreme Court of Canada to deny a British Columbia First Nation de facto religious veto power over a ski-resort proposal… was positive insofar as the court finally circumscribed the heretofore ill-defined and thus endless duty to consult First Nations. However, the decision is but one bit of common-sense blue sky in an otherwise fog-bound anti-development environment in British Columbia. …It is now 27 years after a group of investors first went down this ski-development road. The Supreme Court of Canada decision is sensible and welcome. It might not be enough to remove the justifiable perception that special interests, the province’s Environment Ministry and some First Nations, activists and politicians in British Columbia are reflexively anti-investment.

Margo Wagner

The new chair of the Cariboo Regional District is wasting no time when it comes to taking on the challenge of helping the region rebuild from this summer’s wildfires. Margo Wagner, representative for Canim Lake-Forest Grove, was voted in as the new chair on Friday after former chair Al Richmond turned down the nomination. …Wagner plans on meeting with the Minister of Forest, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Doug Donaldson. She says she has heard from companies like Tolko and West Fraser Mills that they want to get back into the forests to start harvesting salvage timber because fire-damage wood needs to be logged within 18 months in order to still be usable. … “We can’t really get on with the recovery mentally until we get rid of the burnt logs,” Wagner said.

KAMLOOPS — Area directors in the Cariboo Regional District were given a briefing on the estimated timber losses industry is facing in light of this summer’s devastating wildfire season. Jeff Mycock, chief forester with West Fraser Mills and Tolko Industries manager Tom Hoffman estimated that the fires impacted close to one year of the provincial annual allowable cut (AAC) and up to 6-10 years of the AAC in Cariboo management units. Hoffman told CFJC Today about 24 per cent of the burned timber in the Cariboo is salvageable though. …”As you can appreciate some trees were burnt very badly, some trees were just scorched. So, depending on the severity of burn, we’re anywhere from two to a maximum of four years before the trees won’t be viable to produce lumber.”

Brooks Horne

One problem — among the many — with mountain pine beetles is they don’t respect borders. …In 2006, swarms of wind-borne beetles flew eastward into west-central Alberta. Since that initial invasion, Alberta’s government, along with forestry companies, have engaged in an aggressive counterattack. Alberta has become Canada’s beetle battleground as the province tries to do what B.C. failed to do and stop the beetles from marching into fresh territory. One estimate puts the cost of the fight from 2004 to 2016 in Alberta at $484 million. …There are assertions that Parks Canada failed to do enough to control the infestation when it appeared a few years ago. If so, letting the beetles turn the park into a ravaged beachhead for a renewed onslaught on Alberta is irresponsible and unforgivable. It is likely too late to close the barn door but Parks Canada must do much more to remediate the infestation, and quickly.

The wildfire that enveloped Fort McMurray in the spring of 2016 is a harbinger of things to come, Edmonton journalist Ed Struzik concludes in his new book, Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape our Future. Megafires like the one that burned out of control in the northern Alberta community for two months in Canada’s costliest natural disaster, could soon become commonplace across North America, Struzik said. These natural disasters are becoming the new normal, said the writer and photographer, who paints an apocalyptic picture of what will happen if we continue “business as usual.”

An estimated 5,000 kilometres of fireguard was built during the summer’s wildfires in the Cariboo region, including the Elephant Hill fire. “Rehabilitation work has started and has been focused on high priority features, such as stream crossings,” Ken Vanderburgh from the Ministry of Forests Lands and Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development told the Cariboo Regional District during a presentation Friday. …District forestry manager Mike Pederson responded there is more work than contractors right now. …Outgoing CRD Chair Al Richmond said there is a mass amount of timber stacked on the right of way that industry wants access to. “Not tomorrow, not two weeks from now,” Richmond said, adding companies could be there getting it on Monday. “The snow is coming. You know that and we know that, but maybe they don’t in Victoria because they get a lot of sunshine and rain.”

Experts estimated the timber losses from the summer’s wildfires at close to one year of the Provincial Annual Allowable Cut and up to six to 10 years of the ACC in Cariboo management units this week. Jeff Mycock, chief forester for BC Operations of West Fraser Mills Ltd., and Tom Hoffman, manager at Tolko Industries Ltd. spoke to the Cariboo Regional District Board at a meeting last week on the timber losses suffered. They also spoke about the potential impacts of these losses. Other estimates indicate hat approximately 24 per cent of the burned timber in the Cariboo can be salvaged. This was just one of the highlights from the CRD meetings this week.

Dr. Sally Aitken

At UBC, 47 per cent of undergraduates and 55 per cent of graduates in forestry program are women.  The gender balance has recently started to tip in British Columbia’s forestry industry as more women occupy leadership positions and complete post-secondary studies in one of the province’s key sectors. Sally Aitken, associate dean of forestry at the University of British Columbia, has noticed the shift in the classroom. Forty-seven per cent of undergraduate students and more than half of graduate students in the forest program are now women, and a third of the faculty are female, she told CBC Early Edition host Rick Cluff. “We see a big change in the numbers of women receiving professional degrees that relate to forestry,” Aitken said. “We’re now at about gender balance in terms of our educational programs.”

Brian Grandbois remembers the northern lights flickering across the sky over his childhood home. … An elder on the Cold Lake First Nation, Grandbois is especially worried about woodland caribou, which now share the forest with pipelines and oil wells. Development in Alberta has also opened pathways to woodland habitats for predators including wolves, which chip away at caribou herds. Roads and seismic lines allow wolves to travel two to three times more quickly, said Stan Boutin, a University of Alberta biology professor with more than 20 years experience researching caribou. “The way caribou have survived in the past is to basically avoid these guys at all cost,” Boutin said. … There are 15 caribou herds in Alberta, each with its own territory. Disturbances of caribou habitats throughout Alberta range from 55 to 96 per cent of land the animals use. Humans are responsible for most of the damage.

EDMONTON – A massive and uncontrollable buildup of mountain pine beetles in Jasper National Park is starting to explode into commercially valuable forests along its boundaries. Foresters along the park’s edge have seen a tenfold increase in beetle infestation in just months, and some scientists wonder if Parks Canada could have done more to control the invasion a few years ago. “They decided to consider the pine beetle a ‘native disturbance agent,”‘ said Allan Carroll, who has studied the beetles since the late 1990s. …”Just that hesitation intrinsic to producing a management plan precluded any effective outcomes.” West Fraser Timber manages about 13,000 square kilometres along the park’s eastern edge and runs a large mill in the town of Hinton just outside the boundary. The company removed about 40,000 bug-infested trees last year. That number has grown.

Dave Lasser

All forest licensees in B.C. have to go through a rigorous and complex process to obtain permission to harvest trees on public land in B.C.  The Community Forest is no different. It is a slow process to review and implement all of the applicable laws, regulations and requirements set by government, First Nations, utilities, etc., for each cutblock. We must meet the same requirements that the largest licensees must meet. There is a significant amount of consultation with the Sechelt Band. We have worked hard over the years to maintain a respectful and good working relationship with the Sechelt Band. …We hope when the public reviews the information on our website, they will better understand and appreciate the processes involved. 

A photo of an ancient red cedar being cut down on Vancouver Island is sparking outrage among conservation groups. The Wilderness Committee has received a photo of a record-sized ancient red cedar tree being cut down. The exact location and date when the tree was harvested is not clear but it is believed to be somewhere on northern Vancouver Island. “The fact that companies are cutting down the last of them highlights the unsustainable nature of old-growth logging and the fact that some companies are not willing to change course. BC needs a law to protect remaining old-growth forests,” said Torrance Coste, Vancouver Island Campaigner with the Wilderness Committee. The tree appears to be as big or even bigger than other record-sized members of its species.

MLAs touring B.C. communities in advance of the NDP’s first budget have called for incentives to salvage wildfire-damaged timber, and increased forest fuel management and reforestation. The all-party committee of the B.C. legislature held hearings in 12 communities this fall, and unanimously focused their main recommendation on the aftermath of B.C.’s record area burned in summer forest fires. …In an phone call from Tokyo during B.C.’s annual Asia lumber trade mission, Donaldson said efforts are underway to implement the main recommendations of the finance committee. “We’re expediting the harvest of fire-impacted timber and getting it to the mills in a timely manner, because we know how the wood can degrade quickly,” Donaldson said. “Also, we have allocated $140 million over the next two years into forest enhancement, and that also involves the management of urban interface forests and fuel mitigation.”

The manager of the UBC research forest near Williams Lake says that after a summer of wildfires, he’s considering more frequent thinning of the forest to prevent such out-of-control fires in the future. When a fire started in the Alex Fraser research forest on the afternoon of July 7, 2017, Ken Day remembers looking out his window and seeing a stormy sky. Half an hour later, he said it looked like a volcano going off in the forest near the Williams Lake Indian Reserve.  …Day said the areas of the forest that had been thinned burned in a significantly different way “It got me thinking that maybe there’s an opportunity to manage our landscape differently if we do more thinning,” Day said. “If thinning becomes a component of our regular harvest practices, we could potentially make the landscape more fire resilient.”