Maybe it’s fitting British Columbia’s latest forestry report was released on Groundhog Day. After all, it’s roughly the 60th review touching forestry policy since the BC NDP took power in 2017, sending the sector into a never-ending time loop of study-upon-study.
Monday’s latest, co-authored by veteran foresters Garry Merkel and Shannon Janzen, goes down as one of the most ambitious efforts. Even if it may be destined to languish on the same dusty shelf alongside what Merkel himself called “a zillion reviews” of the past.
The difference, this time, is that the review has the political heft of the BC Greens, who got a commitment from the BC NDP to commission the work as part of last year’s confidence agreement.
“It’s absolutely true that when we started down this path, folks said, ‘Rob, another report?” said Green MLA Rob Botterell. “But I think what we saw… yeah we’ve got lots of reports, but we’re still stuck. We’re not getting places. And we’re not getting the solutions.”
The final Provincial Forest Advisory Council report sketches out a plan to move B.C. from a volume-based forestry system, guided by things like the Timber Supply Review and the Annual Allowable Cut, into a new framework for Regional Forest Management Areas where the local community decides which trees to cut and which to preserve, while looking to the long-term sustainability of the land base.
The goal is to remove governments from decision-making, and put people who are actually affected by what’s done to their local forests in the driver’s seat, said Merkel.
“You need stable direction, and we just can’t get that in four to 12 year political cycles and continuously shifting mandates,” he said.
The co-authors said Indigenous reconciliation pathways would guide the work, based upon legal advice given by former attorney general Geoff Plant, who has defended the Declaration of Indigenous Rights of Peoples Act (DRIPA) and the BC NDP’s reconciliation efforts.
One of the recommendations is “collaboration with First Nations to design governance structures that respect Indigenous Rights and Title,” which likely means joint or consent-based decision-making on forest management to align with the NDP’s interpretation of DRIPA and the principles of UNDRIP.
Uncertainty caused by government’s reconciliation policies is one of the problems the forest sector has cited in recent years, as well as a lack of economic fibre for both sawmills and pulp mills. American tariffs have also played a major role.
Read the full article at Northern Beat: Report recommends removing government from forestry decision-making