Dr. David Robinson

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.

Where do we get good ideas, and what do we do with them? Where is pretty easy – for example consider reading “The Greenhouse Gas and Carbon Profile of the Global Forest Industry” by the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement in the USA.

Does David Ramsay have any idea how badly out of date Ontario’s forest tenure system is?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.

Northern Ontario lives by harvesting wood. Wood is roughly 50% carbon, so the northern economy is built on harvesting carbon. The contribution to carbon sequestration puts Northern Ontario on the front line in the fight against climate change.

The Minister of Natural Resources for Canada is Gary Lunn, a BC boy who seems to have some feeling for the forest sector. At the Paperweek international in Montréal on February 8, he promised to use $127.

When I was trying to understand why Industry Canada couldn’t accept the fact that there was an impressive cluster of mining suppliers in Sudbury, I found the answer on a page on the Industry Canada website.

The job description for a Northern Ontario leader might run like this: “The successful candidate will have a solid understanding of economics and politics and a commitment to working with private sector firms to advance the interests of the people of

It is possible we economists don’t really know anything about the future of Northern Ontario. Maybe, as the old joke puts it, we are just “trained professionals paid to guess wrong about the economy.

As Northern Ontario’s conservative, Tony Clement hasn’t been very effective in influencing federal policy.

Back in 1291 the Venetians used their secret police to promote the economy. They forced all the Venetian glassmakers to move to the nearby island city of Murano.