Does David Ramsay have any idea how badly out of date Ontario’s forest tenure system is?
According to “Canadian Forest Policy: Adapting to Change,” Ontario’s current model was developed in 1837. It had three main elements. The forest would be owned by the Crown, the wood would be sold to logging companies, and the money would go into general revenue in Toronto. These features haven’t changed for 170 years. They are the three pillars of Northern Ontario underdevelopment today.
We should probably ignore the fact that Toronto didn’t have jurisdiction over Northern Ontario back in 1837 – the government of Upper Canada certainly ignored the fact. It started selling off timber rights in Northern Ontario even before it had treaties with the people of Northern Ontario. When northerners objected, their leaders were invited to hand over the land to the government and to live on reserves for the rest of their lives. That strategy is still in place, by the way. Those of us of Aboriginal descent have federal reserves and the rest of us have provincial reserves called municipalities.
These days Toronto makes forestry companies consult the locals about some details of the forest management scheme. Toronto also requires companies to consult Toronto residents, of course. In Northern Ontario, majority rule tends to mean that Toronto rules.
There is no consultation about the three basic principles. The forests of Northern Ontario still belong to the Crown. The government in Toronto still decides who gets the timber, and it still keeps the money it takes in.
The system of Crown grants we use in Ontario was under attack when Adam Smith published his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. It lived on in colonies like Canada. Ontario’s Sustainable Forest Licenses (SFLs), are nothing but old fashioned letters patented under another name. In an important sense, Northern Ontario is one of the last bastions of 17th Century economics. Our forestry sector is one of the last places where the economic dinosaurs still roam.
A sustainable economy is like a sustainable forest. It has thousands of species competing and cooperating. It doesn’t stake everything on a few products and a few companies. The system in northern Ontario isn’t sustainable. It is a corporate monoculture – a few large companies producing almost the same product using almost exactly the same processes. Long-term extensive Crown leases are the main corporate equity. Monocultures are inherently unstable, and in 2005, David Ramsay’s Council on Forest Sector Competitiveness admitted that corporate ecology of Northern Ontario is crashing.
The discussion about what to do has been dominated by the captains of the current disaster. Ramsay’s 2004 Minister’s Council on Forest Sector Competitiveness included representatives of the six largest forestry companies, mayors of three communities totally dependent on the companies, representatives of two unions that work for the companies, two Aboriginal and one environmental representative and three others. Ramsay asked the foxes how to run the henhouse.
Ontario’s three pillars of policy have already been abandoned in much of the world. Scandinavia and the United States rely much more heavily on private ownership of the forests. Bristish Columbia and Quebec have been developing systems for community control of the forests. Both approaches leave revenues in the hands of those who live in the forests. For underdeveloped regions in the rest of the world, a technical committee of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations met in February of this year to promote “forest tenure diversification.”
Forest tenure diversification is just a polite way to say community control. Ontario is the only major forestry province that has not begun experimenting with real community control.
It may be good news that the Ontario tenure system is so far behind. So many other factors are in place that we could slingshot into the 21st Century in a single generation. The staggered 20-year Sustainable Forest Licenses are a perfect setup for a gradual transition to complete community control of Northern forests. The fact that the Ministry of Natural Resources has already cut its own management capacity and forced the SFL holders to develop forest management plans means management capacity is already partly decentralized. It is a small step to transfer responsibility to community run organizations. The Crown Forest Sustainability Act already provides a solid foundation for ecological management. Only minor changes are needed.
The only thing standing in the way of managing the forest to maximize value-added is our outdated tenure system.
Dave Robinson is an economist with the Institute for Northern Ontario Research at Laurentian University.
