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Quebec’s Minister of Natural Resources Claude Béchard brought a province-wide forestry conference to a ringing close by announcing the end of the province’s 25-year-old forestry regime.
Everyone was caught by surprise at Laval University in Quebec City last week, not the least of whom were the municipal leaders of dozens of West Quebec towns that rely on forestry as their single most important economic activity. “Everything is on the table,” remarked the minister. “The present regime no longer exists.”
The conference brought the forestry industry, unions and environmentalists together, and forged a position they could all support. It launched a year-long debate on restructuring the forest industry, a debate which will conclude at the end of 2008 with a new Law of the Forests.
The present law is a complex one. It allocates wood volumes and geographical zones of the public forest to individual mills, and contains rules on the transfer of that wood between mills and companies. The province treats the public forest as a common good to be utilized by the entire province and not one linked only to the communities within the forest.
The communities naturally see their concerns as primary. They are rural and isolated, usually one-industry towns with no other source of revenue available to them for economic diversification. Every forestry town in the Outaouais falls into this category.
The province, however, is dealing with multiple issues around the public forest. There is public pressure to expand protected areas, from old-growth forest to sensitive marshlands. Environmentalists think 12 per cent of public land should be protected, which means prohibiting all industrial activity, from logging and mining to hydroelectric projects and roads. Environmentalists accepted the forest industry’s maximum of eight per cent, but conditional to reaching it by the end of 2008. That would be a gargantuan undertaking, but one the minority Charest government has to respect to pull off this revision of the forestry act without a messy public backlash.
Industry agreed to eight per cent because it saw that figure coming from land already logged. The unions are of the same mind, as are most municipal officials in forestry towns such as Fort Coulonge and Maniwaki.
Another piece to this puzzle is a commitment to diversification undertaken by the province in its “common spaces” program.
Diversification means creating multi-use forest areas. The idea is that ecotourism, kayaking and canoeing, white-water rafting, even tree-top climbing, will bring in tourists and create jobs other than in logging. Ecotourism recycles a territory year after year, whereas logging, in reality, is a one-time use. By the time the next timber crop is ready to harvest, the industry has moved on to other regions.
This conflict is playing itself out in the upper Pontiac right now. The minister has proposed turning three Pontiac rivers into protected, common-use zones, the Dumoine, Black, and Coulonge Rivers. All three are easily accessible, magnificent canoeing rivers.
Given the weakness of the forestry sector, thanks to slow U.S. demand and a surplus of wood on international markets, the minister obviously expected a quick acceptance of his proposal for the three Pontiac rivers. The three together represent a substantial territory to be placed under protection.
But the local mayors see the situation less generously. They have seen new ideas come and go, and so have less enthusiasm for the new industry of eco-touring; their faith remains with the single-industry town, with mills working at full capacity, making up in volume what it was not gaining in price. But the mayors face a shortage of territory that still holds good timber; much of West Quebec’s accessible public forest has been cut over. So in early December, the mayors applied the brakes.
The mayors of the MRC Pontiac decided to approve protecting the Dumoine watershed, on the condition it becomes a “national park” within six years. As a national park, it will get the infrastructure it needs to attract and serve high volumes of visitors. The other two rivers would be the subject of study. Both have red and white pine stands along their banks.
Meanwhile, the forest industry has also dug its heels in on the question of wood allotments. The mill owners want to be able to sell transfer allotments, which has been prohibited.
The coming 12 months should prove to be noisy ones in the forest regions. If the minister can keep his collaborators on the same page, and produce a new law of the forests, why, that could qualify him for the premier’s job. Speculation says Jean Charest will not stay if his popularity remains in single-digit figures.
Fred Ryan is the publisher of the Aylmer Bulletin, the West Quebec Post and the Pontiac Journal.© The Ottawa Citizen 2007