Goals for BC Forestry

Situation:

In the last 20 years, BC forests have suffered greatly due to pine beetle, forest fires and other attacks. Currently 35 million ha of forest have been substantially impacted. The NDP government at the start of the beetle attack did not allow aggressive action to attempt to halt the progress. The subsequent Liberal government has not invested in our forest resource; rather they have treated it as an expense rather than an asset. As a result, millions of ha are untended and we do not have proper inventories to even know how to evaluate our forests. Furthermore, at this critical time, the Ministry of Forests has been reduced from 4000 employees to 3000 and their mandate doubled to include lands and natural resources.

Goals the BC Conservative Party will strive reach:

·       Support local community values for our forests.

·       Maximize the value of our resource back to the public in terms of highest possible stumpage.

·       Create and sustain the maximum number of jobs not only in the short term but in perpetuity.

 

·       Reduce raw log exports in order to keep jobs in BC.

To achieve this, we will work with the chief forester and industry professionals to:

·       Update our inventory so that we can do proper serial stage analysis in each timber supply area and reset the annual allowable cut to sustainable levels. It is anticipated, based on the size of the impacted areas, that the cut will likely need to be reduced in the short to mid-term in order to safeguard the industry in the long term.

·        Increase the small scale salvage program in the short term. This will allow the final cleanup of impacted stands and to some extent mitigate the anticipated temporary AAC reduction.

·       Return to Scale based stumpage rather than Cruise based stumpage. This will identify high value off-sort logs and incentify the industry to find higher value uses for them. This will also return higher stumpage to the crown in most cases. In the case of salvage however, it may reduce the stumpage which would allow the operators to be profitable. Currently the stumpage on salvage is often set higher than what the logs can be sold for.

·       Expand the area based Community and First Nations forests. Area based tenures incentify the licensee to increase innovative silviculture and forestry. Forests that are tied to the local communities are more likely to support the local community values as they manage the forest, create local jobs and return value to the crown. Smaller operations will also allow for the diversity that will create value added options for off-sort logs. These will allow the large forest companies to pursue log brokering and should reduce the off-shore sale of raw logs.

We are at a crisis in our forest management where some people are calling forestry a sunset industry. The BC Conservatives believe in our professional foresters and our forestry industry. It will take collaborative action but we can turn our forests around.

Response to Bill 8-Part 5 - Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Amendments

In the past years we have seen Ministry of Forests Staff reduced by 25% while their mandate has been enlarged to include Lands and Natural Resources. Unfortunately nothing was done to ensure that they could achieve this expanded mandate with less personal and so the management of our forests has suffered during a time of unprecedented beetle kill, when firm management was needed more than ever. We now have a situation where:

  

• Our aging inventories are now next to useless over millions of hectares.
• The annual allowable cut has not been, and cannot reliably be, re-evaluated due to these massive areas that have completely outdated inventories. 
• The priority to replant devastated areas has been removed.

The decision in Bill 8 Part 5 to allow volume based tenures to be converted to area based tenures could help with this as it gives incentives to the license holder to update inventories and perform enhanced silviculture to improve mid-term timber supply on the forest that they are managing.

 

However, the changes presuppose that the current AAC must be maintained.  This negates one of the best reasons for converting to area based tenures. The license holder should be required to update the inventories and to recalculate the AAC based on this better knowledge. Only in this way can we ensure mid and long range stability in the forest industry.

 

Also, the bill  implies that the license holder will assume the management on behalf of the gov't at their own cost. This appears to be an attempt to off load gov't responsibilities. There must be some form of tax credit back to the licensee to off-set the cost of management of these licenses. These areas should see an increase in value and therefore increased stumpage dollars coming back to the province due to innovative silviculture and management. This should make it possible to offer tax credits without increasing net costs. (These would need to be done for the extra managment only and be done in keeping with the Softwood Lumber Agreement).

 

I am not convinced that this change will do enough to enlarge our community and first nations forests both in size and number. Also, further to promoting area based tenures, I would make 2 other changes to insure increased value from our forests.

• We must return to scale based billing rather than cruise based billing. The move to cruise based billing has removed the incentive to sort out the higher grade logs for greater value use. The costs of scaling will be more than off-set from the increased value that will be captured.
• For the next few years we need to greatly enlarge the small scale salvage program to deal with the clean up of our current forest situation and extract maximum value from our damaged wood.