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The Missing Paragraph in the Crown Forest

The Crown Forest Sustainability Act governs our forest economy. The Act is quite clear about its purpose: Northern forests are to be run for the benefit of the south.

The Crown Forest Sustainability Act governs our forest economy. The Act is quite clear about its purpose: Northern forests are to be run for the benefit of the south.

The Act’s stated purposes are to provide for the sustainability of Crown forests and to “meet social, economic and environmental needs of present and future generations.”  Sustainability is defined as health. In the Act, health is defined as “complexity” AND “providing for the needs of the people of Ontario.”  We have circled back to the people.

Since most of Ontario’s  people live in the south, the Act requires Minister Donna Cansfield to run the forests on behalf of the people of Toronto and its neighbouring cities. The communites of Northern Ontario are not mentioned in the Act. Cansfield doesn’t have to worry about the sustainability of Northern communites. She doesn’t actually have to listen, either, although she is earning a reputaion for listening carefully.

Donna Cansfield, Minister of Natural Resources

The current crisis was still over the next hill when the Act was brought in. There was more policy interest in Northern trees, than in Northern people in Northern Ontario.

 What is needed now is one new paragraph in the Crown Forest Sustainability Act. The new paragraph will recognize that forest communities will have an important role in helping Ontario’s boreal forest adapt to a new climate system. It will recognize that forest communities must be sustainable if the forests are to be sustainable. It will recognize that “providing for the needs of the people of Ontario” means managing the forests for value-added products, and gradually moving away from volume exports as the basis of the forest economy.

The missing paragraph will say:

1.  The purposes of this Act are to provide for the sustainability of Ontario’s forest communites and the Crown forests that they depend on and are responsible for. In accordance with that objective, Crown forests are to be managed to meet the social, economic and environmental needs of present and future generations, to develop the capacity of the people of Ontario’s forest communities to protect and use the forest and to gradualy shift the economic base from high-volume commodities to lower volume value-added production.

This small change recognizes the interdependence of the people and the forests of the boreal region. As the climate warms the forests will need help. Sustainable forests will depend on sustainable comunities.

It also recognizes the economic realities of forestry. Communities can only be sustainable if they can support themselves by caring for and harvesting the forests. The more value they add to forest products, the less wood they need to take and the more they will value the forest itself. The missing paragraph shifts the emphasis from the current failed emphasis on commodity production to an economy that uses smaller volumes to produce more valuable products.

The missing paragraph will lead the minister to ensure that each Sustainable Forest Licence (SFL) plan includes a section on long term economic regional benefits. Today, nobody is thinking about this dimension in forest planning. Adding a proper  understanding of economics changes the entire philosophy for forestry in Ontario.

When the missing paragraph is finallly put into the Crown Forest

Sustainability Act it will have implications for virtually every branch of government. As things stand, responsibility for Northern policy is like a cookie that has been shared with a whole kindergarten class – no one has enough of the cookie to get more than a taste. In principle the Minister of Northern Development and Mines, Michael Gravelle, is in charge, but communites themselves fall under the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, promoting innovative businesses under the Ministry of Research and Innovation. The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, and the task of coming up with a unified strategy for Northern Ontario seems to have been handed over to the Minister of Public Infrastructure Renewal. The ministries will  have to pool their powers and combine their resources.

When that paragraph gets into the Crown Forest Sustainability Act, it will put forest communites in Ontario on the path to sustainability.

Dave Robinson is an economist with the Institute for Northern Ontario Research at Laurentian University.
drobinson@laurentian.ca