A failure of policy, spanning decades.That’s how Canada West Foundation CEO Gary Mar is describing the Jasper fires last week, which he described as a regrettable — and preventable — result of policy decisions made over several decades dating back to when he served as Ralph Klein’s environment minister.In an interview with The Western Standard, Mar said policy makers in the highest levels of both the federal and provincial governments knew the consequences of failing to act to combat the spread of the mountain pine beetle dating back to the late 1990s when the magnitude of the infestation was becoming clear.And though he was reluctant to criticize Parks Canada specifically, he did blame the political culture surrounding the national parks in general as a contributing cause to last week’s devastation in one of Alberta’s mountain gems.“The philosophy for many people is that (national parks) are fortresses of the natural environment. And of course, that assumes that people are not part of the natural environment. So the idea is that we should just let it be and let nature take its course.”“If you look at forests in places like Sweden and Finland, they don't call them ‘parks’, but ‘semi-natural’ areas, and they are aggressive in their management of the natural resource. I'm saying that if we had employed the kind of practices that they have in Sweden and Finland, it certainly would have mitigated the consequences that we saw last week in Jasper.” .Mar recalled a meeting shortly after Gordon Campbell became premier of British Columbia. Then-premier Klein convened a special joint meeting with Campbell’s environment minister Michael De Jong to specifically address the pine beetle issue. To no avail.“So at that meeting, this was the brand new Campbell government. I was there… and the issue was about what we should do about the pine beetle. Mike gave a briefing on what they were doing, but it was not aggressive enough,” Mar recalled. “They had, I mean, four scientists saying that you have to burn the whole forest in order to save trees from getting disease. And they didn't do that. And the result was the mountain pine beetle moved through British Columbia and into Alberta.”.And while Mar didn’t deny the impact of climate change — he actually set up the Alberta government’s Climate Change Central portal when he was environment minister — Mar said it’s disingenuous for the Liberal cabinet ministers like Steven Guilbeault and Jonathan Wilkinson to use climate change policy — including carbon taxes — as an excuse for failing to mitigate impacts. “I don't deny the climate is changing, but I would argue that proper forest management would go a long ways to ensuring that we mitigate the impacts of climate change. Again, if you look at the data, it's hard to argue that Finland and Sweden haven't done better than Canada.” .According to the Swedish Forest Agency, the country lost about 20,000 hectares to pine beetles since 2018. That compares to more than 18 million hectares in Canada, mainly in Alberta and British Columbia.And when they do find bark beetle, they move quickly to eliminate it. Both the Swedish and Finnish governments are presently implementing AI programs to identify and halt outbreaks in their tracks. It then has a policy of aggressively removing the deadfall, unlike Canada, and replanting the trees.Which brings Mar to this country’s second major policy failure — actually cleaning up the mess.“When a tree is killed by a mountain pine beetle, what forestry guys tell me is, you've got 10 or 12 years that you can still harvest that tree and get usable dimensional lumber out of it,” he said. “You get this blue tinted wood, but it's still good for, you know, dimensional lumber. But there was no way to be able to harvest as much as we would have liked.”.“In any case, those trees should have been taken down, because it was just like a giant tinder box waiting to be set off by a hot exhaust from a truck or spark off a railway track, or somebody's casting out a cigarette or a lightning strike.”The third policy failure is the inability to replant those trees.“And so, the Prime Minister, some number of years ago now, said we're going to get to 2 billion trees by 2030 and we're about 1,999,500,000 short of that goal so far,” he continued. “So if you took a carbon tax, for example — I mean, the federal government seems completely fixated on the idea of a carbon tax. If you took that and you applied it to something that actually works, like planting trees, you'd be sucking a lot of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. That would actually be a good program.”Indeed.
