Twitter

Forestry

Species at Risk policy fires up Northern leaders: Municipalities, industry, First Nations fear habitat protection rules could devastate forestry – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – October 4, 2017)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Queen’s Park can expect fierce resistance from Northerners if the province attempts to finalize controversial Species at Risk policy without proper consultation, said Kenora’s mayor.

“If they want to rush it through, they’re going to have a backlash like they’ve never seen before,” said Dave Canfield, past president of the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association (NOMA). “There’s going to be a lot of us standing shoulder-to-shoulder.”

At issue are the new Species at Risk rules, designed to protect 28 species in Northern Ontario, which will be woven into the fabric of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The ESA has raised the hackles of Northern leaders since it was passed in 2007.

Read more

Fires Affect Canadian Lumber Mills, Get Close to Kinder Pipeline – by Natalie Obiko Pearson, Danielle Bochove and Jen Skerritt (Bloomberg News – July 11, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

More than 300 wildfires in British Columbia have forced Canadian lumber mills to shut as hot, dry weather sparked blazes across swaths of western Canada and the U.S. Norbord Inc., the largest North American producer of oriented strand board used in residential construction, suspended production at its mill in 100 Mile House in central B.C. but stressed that, for now, the mill is safe.

“We were in a zone that got evacuated Sunday night so we shut the mill down and that continues to be the situation,” Norbord Chief Financial Officer Robin Lampard said by phone Tuesday morning. The Toronto-based company has 440 million square feet of annual production capacity. It hasn’t disclosed the cost per day of the shutdown, Lampard said.

Canfor Corp.’s operations aren’t directly affected by the wildfires, spokeswoman Corinne Stavness said in an email Tuesday. Interfor Corp. couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

Read more

Greenpeace is a menace to the world – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – June 24, 2017)

 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The little town of Saint-Félicien, in Quebec’s lovely Saguenay region, is under siege. The softwood lumber wars have broken out again, and that’s bad news. … Then there’s Greenpeace. “Greenpeace wants our total death!” mayor Gilles Potvin complained back in 2013. “If we listen to them, we can’t cut wood any more.”

Greenpeace has been waging a relentless campaign against Resolute Forest Products, the largest forest company in the region and in Canada. (It is the successor company to Abitibi and Bowater.)

Greenpeace has branded Resolute as a “forest destroyer” that is risking a “caribou herd death spiral” and harming the region’s First Nations. It has vigorously lobbied Resolute’s customers – including the world’s biggest book publishers – to boycott its paper and print products.

Read more

The boreal forest ‘agreement’ was an eco-radical shakedown. Thankfully, it’s finally dead – by Peter Foster (Financial Post – February 1, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement (CBFA), one of the most ignominious deals in Canadian business history, is being quietly euthanized. Last week, its Ottawa-based secretariat was closed, without fanfare or eulogy. However, most of the agreement’s signatories seem as reluctant to admit its demise as they have been to acknowledge its true nature.

According to Derek Nighbor of the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC), which led the industry into the deal in 2010, the agreement isn’t really dead; it is “transitioning to a new model.”

Nighbor, a veteran of retail and packaged-goods industry associations, who has been head of FPAC for less than a year, claims that the CBFA has had its successes, and that forest companies are keen to “leverage the good learnings” from six years of “investment in bilateral decision-making.”

Read more

Star Investigation: A Poisoned People – by David Bruser and Jayme Poisson (Toronto Star – July 24, 2016)

https://www.thestar.com/

The steady drip of the neurotoxin mercury has percolated through river sediment, the food chain and generations of Grassy Narrows First Nations residents for more than four decades, killing a community’s livelihood and then contaminating its people.

GRASSY NARROWS FIRST NATION—For more than 40 years the mercury has percolated through river sediment, the food chain and generations of residents. From 100 kilometres upstream, the slow, steady drip of the neurotoxin first killed a community’s livelihood and then contaminated its people.

A disability board — set up by government officials in the mid-1980s to compensate those who can show doctors they suffer symptoms consistent with mercury poisoning — has approved claims from more than 300 applicants who suffer from tremors, loss of muscle co-ordination, slurred speech and tunnel vision. One of them was Marlin Kokopenace’s 17-year-old son, Calvin.

“(Calvin) was pretty frail.

Read more

Resolute Forest Products uses mafia laws to go after the eco ‘mob’ – by Peter Foster (Financial Post – June 2, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

All too often, corporations, concerned about the potential damage to their bottom lines from any “controversy,” kowtow to media-savvy radical environmentalists. Thus the lawsuit brought three years ago by Montreal-based Resolute Forest Products against Greenpeace for “defamation, malicious falsehood and intentional interference with economic relations” represented a rare display of business backbone.

Greenpeace is still trying desperately to avoid its day in Canadian court, but now Resolute, under its arrow-straight CEO Richard Garneau, has upped the ante. On Tuesday, the company launched another suit — against Greenpeace and STAND (the environmental NGO formerly known as ForestEthics) — under U.S. anti-racketeering laws.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”) was introduced early last century, with both criminal and civil provisions, to deal with the mob; that is, a loose organization, or “enterprise,” with a pattern of activity and common nefarious purposes, such as extortion. That is exactly what Resolute is alleging of Greenpeace.

Read more

Endangered Species Act hot topic at upcoming NEOMA – by Len Gillis (Timmins Daily Press – May 25, 2016)

http://www.timminspress.com/

KIRKLAND LAKE – Concerns over Ontario’s Endangered Species Act continue to dominate discussions amongst Northeastern Ontario municipal leaders.

Less than two weeks after the annual meeting of FONOM (Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities) was held in Timmins, Northern leaders are now preparing for the annual meeting of the Northeastern Ontario Municipal Association (NEOMA) which is to be held in Kirkland Lake this coming Friday.

Several items on the NEOMA agenda include The Endangered Species Act and what the implementation of the act means for Northern Ontario communities that rely on resource-based industries, such as logging and mining. The Act will be spoken to in a presentation to be made by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF).

Read more

How forest fires shaped the history of Timmins – by Karen Bachmann (Timmins Daily Press – March 19, 2016)

http://www.timminspress.com/

You cannot talk about the history of Northern Ontario without talking about forest fires and their impact on the development of the region.

The Great Porcupine Fire of 1911 almost wiped out the entire Ontario gold mining industry in one day; fortunately, the early investors and residents of the camp were made of stronger stuff and they chose to remain here and rebuild (and they most certainly reaped the rewards of their decisions!).

Lesson learned: there is no escape route once the rail lines are destroyed.  Fast forward to 1916 – yet again, the north is threatened with huge forest fires, and Timmins, although not in the thick of it, certainly did not come out clean.

Read more

Resolute Forest’s day in court promises to expose global anti-development agenda -by Peter Foster (National Post – January 6, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Now the Quebec government is calling for the Forest Council to back down

Slowly but surely, multinational environmental enforcer Greenpeace is being dragged kicking and screaming to court to answer for its job-destroying misinformation campaigns in the name of “protecting” Canadian forests, which are among the best regulated in the world.

The company doing the dragging is Montreal-based Resolute Forest Products, which has distinguished itself for being prepared to stand up to Greenpeace’s brand of shakedown.

The case is immediately rooted in the rancid 2010 Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, under which a cabal of radical environmental non-governmental organizations, ENGOs,

Read more

BATTLE FOR THE BOREAL – by Peter Kuitenbrouwer (National Post – December 4, 2015)

http://news.nationalpost.com/

The workday is over at the Hotel Matagami. Guests in steel-toe boots eat club sandwiches with poutine, drink five-dollar bottles of Labatt 50 and cheer the TV as the Montreal Canadiens thrash the New York Rangers.

At one table, Nicolas Mainville, 37, a biologist with Greenpeace, opens a ThinkPad with a sticker on its lid. It reads: “May the forest be with you.”

The screen glows with 33,000 kilometres of red tentacles: these are the logging roads on Crown land in the boreal forest, the same forest that doubles as hunting grounds for the Cree Nation of Waswanipi.

Those two activities are clashing, with the Cree and the loggers both blaming the other for unfairly damaging their way of life.

Read more

COUNTING CARIBOU – by Ontario Forest Industries Association (May 2015)

http://www.ofia.com/

How Did Canada’s Most Populous Ungulate End Up On Ontario’s Endangered Species List?

The caribou is the most abundant wild hoofed animal in Canada. With 3.89 million caribou spread across the country, there are more caribou than deer, moose, and elk combined. It is globally abundant, too, since the caribou of Canada is the same species as the reindeer of Eurasia. So how did the most widespread and populous ungulate end up on Ontario’s Endangered Species List? It’s all about how they were counted.

There are five subspecies of caribou in Canada, with “woodland caribou” being the most widespread. It lives in mountainous areas, mature forests, and very sparse forests, where its preferred food – lichens – are abundant. Woodland caribou number about 1.28 million in Canada, according to the Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Canada. Accordingly, it is far too numerous for the subspecies to be considered at risk as a whole.

However, the woodland caribou subspecies has been subdivided into two ecotypes: the “forest-tundra ecotype,” which moves between habitats; and the “forest-dwelling ecotype,” which prefers to live in the woods. One of these ecotypes is less populous, and therefore considered threatened. Needless to say, if any animal population is subdivided enough times, the result is bound to be a very small population that can be considered at risk, threatened, or endangered. That could be what has happened with woodland caribou in Ontario.

Read more

Greenpeace responds to ‘eco-terrorist’ portrayal – by Alan S. Hale (Timmins Daily Press – June 12, 2015)

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

TIMMINS – Greenpeace is fighting back after members of North Eastern Ontario Municipal Association (NEOMA) likened the environmentalist group to “eco-terrorism.”

During a press conference this week, the mayors of NEOMA member communities, including Timmins’ Steve Black, announced that they were banding together to fight environmental groups such as Greenpeace, which they believe are making it impossible to start new forestry products in the region.

Greenpeace has responded by denying any claims they are calling for a boycott of companies harvesting in the Boreal Forest.

According to Greenpeace spokesman, Richard Brooks, the group has a problem with just one major forestry company harvesting in the Boreal Forest, Resolute Forest Products, and they don’t even operate anywhere near Timmins. Resolute closed its Iroquois Falls paper mill late last year.

“I think it’s important to clarify that we are not against forestry, we’re not against logging, and we’re certainly not against jobs in the North,” said Brooks.

Read more

Ontario gives northern industry permanent relief from energy costs (CBC News Thunder Bay – April 7, 2015)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay

The Northern Industrial Electricity Rate Program will carry on indefinitely, province says

A program that reduces energy costs for northern industries — like mining and forestry — will carry on indefinitely, the Ontario government says.

Speaking at a news conference at Resolute Forest Products’ Thunder Bay pulp mill on Tuesday, Northern Development and Mines Minister Michael Gravelle told reporters that Ontario would commit up to $120 million a year permanently to the Northern Industrial Electricity Rate Program, which was to expire in March of 2016.

First introduced in 2010, the program is a benefit to companies such as Resolute, Goldcorp, AV Terrace Bay, and North American Palladium, Gravelle said.

“It positions them to certainly be able to maintain operations but also potentially expand and create more jobs,” he added. The program can help cut up to 25 per cent from energy costs incurred by qualifying businesses. “It reduces our costs significantly on our site,” said Goldcorp’s Musselwhite mine general manager Bill Gascon.

“Our second highest cost on our site in production is energy — behind labour — so it’s huge for us. We’re a very energy intensive industry.”

Read more

[Northern Ontario – Iroquois Falls] Small Town Shut Down – The Agenda’s Steve Paikin interviews Michael Shea, Jamison Steeve, Madge Richardson and Stan Sudol (March 11, 2015)

http://theagenda.tvo.org/ Resolute Forest Products is shutting down the newsprint mill in Iroquois Falls, Ontario, a move that will result in the loss of 182 jobs , continuing to erode livelihoods in a town of just 4600. The forestry company essentially built Iroquois Falls a century ago and was its largest employer. Like many other single-resource …

Read more

Greenpeace stands for delay, delay, delay – by Peter Foster (National Post – July 30, 2014)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Greenpeace Canada continues to squirm to avoid coming up with a defence against Resolute Forest Products’ $7-million lawsuit alleging “intentional interference with economic relations;” that is, trying to destroy Resolute’s business by pressuring its customers

Last Friday, lawyers for Greenpeace sought leave to appeal the decision of the Divisional Court of Ontario (which had rejected an earlier appeal and told Greenpeace to file a defence, plus pay costs).

The case has significant ramifications for whether radical NGOs will be allowed to continue to spread misinformation, trample over corporate reputations, and destroy business and jobs. This is somewhat related to those over-ballyhooed CRA audits of charitable institutions, although Greenpeace had its charity status removed long ago. In fact, “intentional interference with economic relations” could almost be Greenpeace’s mission statement.

The suit goes back to claims made by Greenpeace about Resolute’s business practices after the radical environmental NGO exited the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, the deeply flawed 2010 deal under which forestry companies were persuaded that they could buy off their radical opponents by becoming “partners” in plans to sanitize huge swathes of Canada in the name of “environmental protection.” Screw the people who lived there.

Read more