William Wagner

A few years after the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published Robert “Bob” Arthur Williams’, “Restoring Forestry in B.C.”, four aged and scarred reformers met to ruminate over the future of B.C.’s forested lands. We were an unusual group.

Bob Williams had been the Minister of Lands, Forests, and Water Resources during the historic first term of a NDP government noted by many as one of the most transformative periods in B.C. history. Another, Raymond “Ray” Travers, RPF, acknowledged by Bob as his advisor in forestry matters while serving as Minister. Further, Bob stated that the “Restoring” paper “…would not have been possible without his continuing deep knowledge and advice…”.  The other two in the room were Ronald Molander, an innovative semi-retired Port Alberni lumberman with considerable expertise in forest products industries, then there was the author, a semi-retired forest research economist.

We had one notion in common: B.C.’s experiment in public forestry was failing and we felt it required major reform. We wanted to develop an alternative. In a sense, the people of our province sit between two extremes: the status quo, which is really a form of liquidation and rent-theft, or, its major opponents, the preservationists. In so many ways, not much of a choice! 

B.C.’s forest sector then appeared to be an exception to the law of supply and demand or in the words of Corky Evans (past MLA and twice runner-up for NDP leadership):

We are living in a time of corporate control over forest land and forest policy…Corporate consolidation (of the forest sector) has wiped out the employment base all over B.C. putting the interests of capital over the interest of people who live where the resources are harvested.

As Bob pointed out in his “Restoring” paper, we no longer have annual reports from the Ministries responsible for our lands, forests and waters, we no longer have a Forest Service, and we no longer have adequate data and verifiable reporting from either the public or the private sectors of the forest economy.  Lately, there has been no shortage of poor public sector choices because truth in information is required to make good decisions.

Our stated objective was to bring about change by attempting to isolate macro-regions where we could demonstrate the reforms we advocated: pilots for tenure and pricing change along with an old-growth moratorium and second-growth research-based management.

We considered the plight of industry and its demand for more good wood and, if not forthcoming, further corporate decline.  Economic theory suggests that if limited log supply is the problem, then the price of good wood should increase until demand slackens. We knew that between 1990 and 2018, the number of large sawmills in the province had declined by some 60%, so domestic log demand and price should have decreased and supply should not be a problem.

Unfortunately, regional timber tenure monopolies operate to prevent competitive efficiency and even access by entrepreneurs with higher value products. These factors are driving the economic value of a domestic log to 50% of what it would be bring in the global market. No wonder the major timber tenure holders own and operate more sawmills outside of B.C. than they do at home.  B.C. government tenure and pricing policies were inadvertently subsidizing corporate capital expansion outside B.C.

The group determined that many Indigenous cultures had the idea right. Land and natural capital belong to all of us. Further, land, as space, is not used up. Its use, for a time, is pre-empted by the rules of the culture that evolved with it. We wanted to try to balance the application of capital and labour with the land in our proposed pilots.

We believed the pilots should:

• Represent a macro-region with a forest charter that articulates the goals and objectives of forest attribute stewardship in the pilot. Suggested macro-regions were the Kootenays, Central Interior, Northern Interior, Coast and Vancouver Island.
• Measure, report and maintain an up-to-date scientific inventory and database of land, capital and labour in each macro-region.
• Be supported by the government through an informed legislature along with regional oversight committees reporting to the House periodically.

Ray Travers argued for a solid evidenced-based arena where forest and policy managers focus on capital value growing on the land and being manufactured by the industry. Bob argued that people and communities must be empowered at the local level in our diverse regions to work with these issues directly so that local creativity, energy, and entrepreneurship can be employed with our land. 

Ray and Bob are now silenced by time but their lament over the land question in B.C. was, in part, a plea for rebirth through reform. Can we make land renaissance their legacy?

“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet everyone
Wished to stay, and is gone.
How am I theirs,
If they can hold me,
But I hold them?”
Earth-Song in “Hamatreya”

by Ralph Waldo Emerson