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.
