FLETCHER: BC’s latest forest study leading to more ‘land back’

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.BC NDP Forests Minister Ravi Parmar avoided the usual political pledges to accept recommendations from the latest in-depth analysis of the province’s troubled forest industry.The NDP government’s appointed experts, the Provincial Forest Advisory Committee, tabled their findings on February 2 after a six-month review of an industry that is moving from decline to collapse. It is struggling with wave after wave of old-growth protection and other conservation measures that seem more aimed at pleasing anti-logging urban voters than salvaging one of the province’s core industries.Parmar took the NDP’s familiar path, rather than address the sweeping recommendations to restructure the entire forest land base. Mill closures that are devastating communities across the province are mostly Donald Trump’s fault.Yes, the US did nearly double its anti-dumping and countervailing duties in recent years, now as high as 47% against Canfor, one of the world’s biggest softwood producers. These are not tariffs, contrary to what the media typically tells you in their lazy pursuit of Trump story angles. They are duties extracted and paid to the US lumber industry, not to the Trump administration.These duties are a result of apparent industry capture of the US Commerce Department, a situation that predates Trump by more than 30 years. It’s a shakedown, based on a long-standing US claim that BC’s vast Crown-owned timber lands essentially represent a form of communism.To defend against this ongoing assault on trade, an earlier BC government created a Crown forest auction system called BC Timber Sales. Its purpose is to establish a clear market price for wood that the US insists is subsidized by the state, like today’s Chinese electric vehicles..It has had little discernible effect on US trade attacks that go back to the 1980s, with BC’s battered industry still sending about 70% of its lumber to the US.The expert advisory committee now says BC Timber Sales should be scrapped, and the provincial harvest system replaced with independent regional management areas. These would set allowable cuts and prices based on local conditions, and finally address fire interface zones around communities.The report calls this a “land care” system. Its recommendations give a careful nod to indigenous rights and title, “enabling indigenous groups to collaborate on solutions rooted in their own ways of knowing and being.” Whatever that means.Of course, the NDP government has already begun its own project to establish regional management areas. It’s informally known not as “land care” but “land back,” with Crown land control being quietly turned over to selected indigenous groups claiming title. This is presented as “joint decision-making” or “land use planning.” It sidesteps a too-slow BC Treaty Commission and bypasses Canadian case law that established the Crown must consult indigenous people, not surrender control to them.The NDP government’s last major forest initiative was “old-growth deferral areas,” established in 2021. These areas were mainly driven by anti-logging protesters who erected blockades, chained themselves to equipment, and in some cases covered themselves with urine and feces collected while keeping vigil in tree sits or wooden “resistance” tripods.These protesters ignore not only property rights and court orders, but also the earnest pleas of indigenous leaders who are asserting their rights over land and timber resources. It’s not often in the news anymore, but they’re still at it..The latest news is that the BC prosecution service has agreed to take over enforcement of a court injunction against roadblocks in the area next to Carmanah Walbran Provincial Park on Vancouver Island. This is to relieve the exhausted indigenous-partnered forest company that has tried to exercise its court-approved logging, which has been opposed by one self-appointed elder who has legal, media, and direct action support that never seems to end.Are these NDP-designated old-growth protection areas the right ones? Are they the areas indigenous people want protected? Five years later, the expert panel says nobody knows. The provincial forest inventory itself is out of date and far from complete.“We heard frustration across the spectrum that the system keeps asking people to endure more process, while delivering less certainty and little change on the ground,” said advisory committee co-chair Garry Merkel, a professional forester and member of the Tahltan Nation in northwest BC.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: BC’s latest forest study leading to more ‘land back’

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