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Forestry

OPINION: Will the political parties stick up for the ailing forest industry? – by Tom Clark, Jeremy Williams, Don Huff and Bud Knauff (Northern Ontario Business – January 30, 2025)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Voters should demand real action and investment commitment from party leaders to revitalize, ‘re-imagine’ this critical sector

As Ontario braces for a snap provincial election called by Premier Doug Ford, the languishing forest industry in rural and Northern Ontario remains a critical yet overlooked issue. The closure of major pulp mills in Espanola and Terrace Bay have dealt a severe blow to the region’s economy, with far-reaching consequences that demand immediate attention.

The indefinite idling of Domtar’s Espanola pulp mill in November 2023 and Aditya Birla’s Terrace Bay mill in January 2024 has resulted in the loss of over 850 direct jobs and the annual production of 600,000 tonnes of Northern Bleached Kraft pulp.

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BACK ROADS BILL Roadside labour monument remembers tragedy – by Bill Steer (Timmins Today – September 7, 2024)

 

https://www.timminstoday.com/

This week Bill finally stops at a roadside monument he should have long ago

Labour Day has just passed; it is an important statutory holiday that means more than the back-to-school transition and the pending end of summer.

Always on the way to somewhere else on the back roads I am ashamed to say, over decades, I have passed by this roadside monument far too many times. That misplaced streak ended recently. At this location Highway 11 North is straight as an arrow. You can see the overgrown derelict farmsteads of “broken promises and shattered dreams,” along the way.

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Province pours $7.9 million into forestry, mining in northeastern Ontario – by Colleen Romaniuk (Sudbury Star – July 19, 2021)

https://www.thesudburystar.com/

The provincial government announced more than $7.9 million in funding on Monday to support the forestry and mining sectors in northeastern Ontario. The money will support 16 different projects and create and maintain 112 jobs in the Sudbury and Algoma districts.

The funding is being delivered through the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC) and includes significant investments in the mining supply and service sector in Greater Sudbury.

“This is an important infusion of high-tech capacity in the supply chains of forestry and mining.

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Knock on wood: fortunes rise for logging town at root of North America’s lumber boom – by Joe O’Connor (Financial Post – May 15, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

Louis Audet has heard the stories on the radio about lumber prices hitting exorbitant heights, but he doesn’t pay them much mind. If he needs wood for the cabin he is building for his wife on their 150-acre property near Hearst, Ont., he just goes out and cuts it himself.

“Prices are nuts,” said the 63-year-old lumberjack. “We will probably be working more, because the demand is there, and we may be longer in the bush, but the prices don’t bother me.”

Audet dropped out of high school in 1978 to work in the bush. He was young and eager to make money. Back then, an aspiring lumberjack with a strong work ethic, and an even stronger back, could clear $100 a day felling trees in Hearst’s boreal forest.

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Opinion: Support loggers, don’t vandalize them. They’re environmental heroes harvesting a renewable resource – by Peter Kuitenbrouwer (National Post – February 4, 2021)

https://nationalpost.com/

The success of the post-carbon bioeconomy in Canada depends on a significant increase in our sustainable use of wood products

During this pandemic, more people have self-isolated at their cottages. Parks, conservation areas and Crown forests received record visitors. These people sometimes stumble on loggers, and some don’t like what they see.

Logging is ugly work. In short order, forest equipment can enter a woodland and make a mess. Still, we need loggers. The trees they cut become stuff we need: paper, tissue, plywood, two-by-fours and furniture. Plus, forests grow back.

Before Christmas, the Peterborough Examiner published an open letter from a logger. Last spring, he wrote, he had been cutting in the Catchacoma Forest, on Crown land about 200 kilometres northeast of Toronto.

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‘This was the way to do it’— towns, First Nations, logging companies join up to manage Temagami forest – by Eric White (CBC News Sudbury – January 25, 2021)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/

There’s a new attempt to find a balance between the economy and the environment in northern Ontario’s most watched forest.

For decades, Temagami was gripped by logging road blockades, with environmentalists and Indigenous protesters chaining themselves to bulldozers.

But now some of those who used to be on opposing sides are sitting around the same board table with the formation of the Temagami Forest Management Corporation. “This was the way to do it,” says Temagami Mayor Dan O’Mara.

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NEWS RELEASE: Canada Supports Indigenous-led Economic Development for First Nation Communities in Northern Quebec (September 14, 2020)

CNW GROUP – ABITIBI-TÉMISCAMINGUE, QC, Sept. 14, 2020 /CNW/ – Canada’s forest sector continues to be an important source of employment across the country, including in rural, remote and Indigenous communities. That is why the Government of Canada is investing in projects to equip Indigenous communities with tools to build greener businesses and promote further economic opportunity in the forest sector.

Parliamentary Secretary Paul Lefebvre, on behalf of the Honourable Seamus O’Regan, Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources, today announced $620,738 in funding allocated to two projects in northern Quebec:

A $100,000 investment to the Kebaowek First Nation for a training program that provides one-on-one guidance across a whole range of timber harvesting skills. This program will increase economic development and grow forestry businesses, creating additional full-time employment opportunities within the community.

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Infamous ‘War in the Woods’ in 1990s offers lesson for the Coastal Gaslink pipeline debate – by Cody Battershill (Financial Post – January 28, 2020)

https://business.financialpost.com/

“We hear of growing frustration among Canada’s Indigenous communities, who are tired of managing systemic poverty. They’re ready to turn to managing wealth, and to obtaining a safe, secure and sustainable future for their community members, particularly their youth….As Canada continues on a path toward reconciliation with its Indigenous communities, it makes sense that economic reconciliation, including genuine participation in resource projects, be a key part of the discussion.”

If you talk to participants of B.C.’s infamous “War in the Woods” forestry land-use debates of the 1990s, you quickly learn that virtually no one enjoyed the experience, no matter which side they supported. All these years later, each side can claim a handful of victories and plenty of defeats.

According to many of the participants I’ve spoken with over the years, a few First Nations leaders found the anti-forestry campaigns especially hurtful as their communities were pulled in — and then fractured — in large part by external campaign forces.

Back then it was the Forest Action Network (FAN) and a number of other early enviro-combatants that led the anti-resources charge over B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest. FAN became adept at finding divisions within First Nations communities, identifying roles for dissatisfied hereditary leaders and then elevating them before international media, often to the detriment of elected councillors and the Indigenous community at large.

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Why We (Still) Can’t Live Without Rubber – by Charles C. Mann (National Geographic – December 2015)

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/

As global car sales soar, the demand for tires is transforming Southeast Asia’s landscape. New plantations of rubber trees are lifting some out of poverty—but may also spark an ecological disaster.

SOMETIMES YOU JUST want to spend a few hours washing your truck. It’s a beautiful day, all of northern Thailand vibrant in the spring sun, so you drive your new Isuzu into the stream that runs through your village, Tung Nha Noi. Cows and people walk by as you stand in the water, a 21-year-old guy with a hot ride, sponging it so clean that the vehicle gleams like hope in the sun.

Not so long ago the chances that someone like Piyawot Anurakbranpot—“Chin” to his friends—would have a fancy truck at such a young age would have been close to zero. People in remote villages like Tung Nha Noi didn’t have the money. But recently families like Chin’s have become much more prosperous. The reason is visible in the hills behind him.

Ten years ago they were covered with dense tropical forest—a profuse tangle of native vegetation. Now most of the slopes have been shaved as clean as a drill instructor’s chin and replanted with a single species: Hevea brasiliensis, the Pará rubber tree. Night after night, Chin’s family and tens of thousands of others in Southeast Asia go into plantations and tap their rubber trees, maple-syrup style.

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Forest spraying violates treaty: Huron-Robinson elders – by Helen Morley (Sudbury Star – September 5, 2019)

https://www.thesudburystar.com/

First Nations in northeastern Ontario to take federal government to court

Some 21 First Nations along the North Shore of Lake Huron are preparing to take the federal government to court over aerial spraying they say is harming the environment and human health.

However, the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) Elders of Robinson-Huron Treaty territory say the spraying is only part of a larger issue: that First Nations are not being consulted about activities taking place on their land. The elders say this violates the Robinson-Huron Treaty of 1850.

Ray Owl, the spokesperson for the TEK Elders of Robinson-Huron Treaty territory, says the 21 First Nations will take the federal government to court for violating the Robinson-Huron Treaty. That court date will take place by October.

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[Sault Ste. Marie] Building a knowledge-based economy:Algoma University positions itself as a catalyst for community innovation – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – March 13, 2019)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Pedro Antunes gets excited thinking about the possibilities to create a more knowledge-based economy in Sault Ste. Marie. The associate biology professor at Algoma University marvels at the environmental research and science capacity both on the Queen Street campus and at two nearby government forestry labs.

“In a relatively small community, we have a huge number of people with post-secondary degrees in all areas of science and forestry,” he said. “From there it can stem into many so many areas.”

With an undergraduate population of about 1,000 students, Algoma University is still relatively young as an independent post-secondary institute, 10 years removed from its affiliation with Laurentian University in Sudbury.

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Large expanse of boreal forest straddling Ontario and Manitoba gets World Heritage recommendation – by Gloria Galloway (Globe and Mail – May 16, 2018)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

A massive tract of boreal forest straddling the Ontario and Manitoba borders that has been home to the Anishinaabe people for 6,000 years has received the two key recommendations it needs to become Canada’s first mixed cultural and natural UNESCO World Heritage site.

The Pimachiowin Aki, which means the Land That Gives Life in Anishinaabemowin, covers 29,040 square kilometres (almost the size of Vancouver Island) of mostly untouched wilderness and is home to one of the largest herds of caribou south of Hudson Bay as well as many other species of mammals, birds, insects and fish.

A World Heritage mixed designation is a declaration that an area is so important to the world, both culturally and ecologically, that it must be protected. There is another such site in Mexico but none in Canada or the continental United States.

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NEWS RELEASE: Ontario Alliance of First Nations and Non-First Nations asks Feds to Hit the Pause Button on Species at Risk Policy (May 9, 2018)

May 9th, 2018 – An Alliance of First Nation and non-First Nation leaders in Ontario are concerned about the potential social, economic and environmental impacts of species at risk (SAR) policy being developed by the Federal Government and the current direction being proposed for managing and conserving caribou.

Al Spacek, President of FONOM and Mayor of Kapuskasing commented, “The Ontario Government has taken these concerns very seriously and have committed to achieving a better understanding of the impacts of climate change on species at risk, the cumulative impacts of all species at risk on a broad, dynamic landscape, and a much better appreciation of the socio-economic impacts on our communities.

However, delivering on this commitment will take time and we remain very concerned that the window of opportunity being provided by the Ontario Government is now being placed in jeopardy by our Federal Government.”

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Forestry exemption extended under ESA – by Len Gillis (Timmins Daily Press – May 4, 2018)

http://www.timminspress.com/

TIMMINS – An exemption under the Endangered Species Act that allowing forestry to maintain current operations has been extended by the province for another two years.

Ontario Minister of Natural Resources Nathalie Des Rosiers, who was in Timmins briefly this week, said she is encouraged by that. She said the effort will now be made to achieving a balance — protecting the habitat of woodland caribou while continuing to provide wood fibre to the forest industry.

Des Rosier did not offer any specific solution to that, but said a newly-formed roundtable is charged with finding several solutions.  “Yesterday (Tuesday), I had a really good roundtable in Hearst with different partners in the forestry industry,” Des Rosiers said in a brief interview with The Daily Press this week.

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MEDIA RELEASE: Alliance Between First Nations, Municipal Leaders, and Industry Formed to Defend a Way of Life

Welcomes Nathalie Des Rosiers as Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry

January 18, 2018 – An Alliance of First Nation and non-First Nation leaders representing rights holders,  stakeholders, municipal leaders, unions, and Ontario’s forest sector has been formed to defend our way of life, with a mandate to grow the responsible use of natural resources in northern and rural Ontario.

Chief Thomas Johnson Jr., Seine River First Nation, said, “In light of reconciliation and economic sustainability, we as First Nations and non-First Nations must rally in support of one another to defend our shared forestry interests and lands unique to northern and rural Ontario through a working alliance, forged on the principles of unity, strength and prosperity.

Our collective action reaches beyond today by working to secure a sustainable future for the generations to come. As the Chief of Seine River, I stand in solidarity with The Alliance. I am calling all treaty partners to join and support us in moving the reconciliation agenda forward.”

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