Community forests are back on the agenda. Faced with a train wreck in the forestry sector, leaders in at least a dozen communities are thinking about how to get control of their resources and their futures. It will be interesting to see whether this reform movement will gain steam and whether any political party will grab the flag and run with it.
All three parties have tinkered with Ontario's forest management system in the last 20 years. All three have failed. Jobs are disappearing and we still don't have a sustainable economy based on forestry.
Part of the answer is to hand the forests over to northern communities. Let them take over the management, and let them decide how the wood is used. Over the long run communities would energetically promote local value-added production because their survival depends on it. The Minister of Natural Resources could keep his veto power to protect the interests of the rest of the province. Handing control to communities will mobilize a huge amount of talent.
Making Northerners responsible for their own future might help David Ramsay avoid going down in history holding hands with the captain of the Titanic.
Community forestry is obviously a wild, radical, terrifying idea. It appeals to the crazy people out on Canada's West Coast, and it is a solution that the UN is promoting for underdeveloped countries. Northern Ontario isn't technically an underdeveloped country, and Lord knows we aren't crazy enough to try anything like they do in BC.
Why after all, should the forests be run for the benefit of the people in the region and by the people in the region?
Who cares that the evidence suggests local control is more efficient? What does it matter that economic theory tells us that the current system can't work?
The idea that northern communities should have real control of their resource base crept onto the Ontario agenda in the mid 1980s. In the early 1990s the NDP set up several community forest pilot projects. Mike Harris let them shrivel away and environmental issues dominated the reforms of the late 1990s. Talk about saving Northern communities turned into talk about saving trees and companies. When the Liberals took over they basically continued the Harris consolidation agenda.
They did continue the Local Citizen's Committees. The LCCs are not about community control. They are simply advisory committees for the MNR. In the long run the greatest value of the LCC system is to provide apprenticeships in forest management for Northerners. LCC members should get advanced university credit for their work.
Community forests can't automatically solve all the problems produced by the system that has been in place for the last 180 years. In the short run, the most they can do is to start moving in the right direction. It will take more than 20 years to retire all the existing leases even if the province decided today to hand all of Northern Ontario over to the communities.
That's why it is so important to start now. A reasonable target is to have 7 per cent of the Northern forests under community management within seven years. The result would be a tremendous increase in management options and talent development.
Two big changes would come with community forestry. First, communities will work hard to promote local value-added businesses. They will want to shift wood from low-value uses to higher-value products. At first the diversion would be very small. The key fact to remember comes from Quebec forestry economist Luc Bouthillier: 50 per cent of Quebec's export revenues for forest products come from the 10 per cent of the wood supply that goes to the value-added sector. Putting control of the wood supply at the community level opens the way to innovation, entrepreneurship, and value-added.
Second, communities are much better equipped to take advantage of all the non-timber uses of the forests. They can't do it now because they have no authority over the forests. The current system basically guarantees underdevelopment.
Community Forests probably are the next stage in Northern development. The question is whether this government or the next has any time for new solutions. Or are they too busy dealing with the train-wreck created by their existing policies?
Dave Robinson is an economist with the Institute for Northern Ontario Research at Laurentian University.
