It will take 50 years for inland British Columbia’s forests to regain their richness of the last 15 years. Some municipalities are reinventing themselves and diversifying, others want to change their forest strategy.
At the entrance to the town, 1,000 kilometers north of Vancouver, a huge yellow steam roller weighing 175 tons greets visitors. The world’s largest tree crusher reads the poster, which helps guess what’s been driving Mackenzie’s economy since its inception in 1966. Good years for the municipality with 5,000 inhabitants.
A time that 66-year-old Vander Linden, who has worked in the industry for more than 40 years, looks back on with nostalgia. Mackenzie is a perfect little town. But it’s not what it used to be, he said. We have everything but jobs. If the Conifex sawmill ever closes, God knows what will happen to us. It is the last logging company in the area.
The Canfor sawmill was closed for the first time in 2019. The Paper Excellence paper mill left the company five months later. The Conifex sawmill has just shut down for a month. Closures leading to the exodus of 1500 residents.
But while some hope Mackenzie becomes a ski and mountain bike hub, others, like Jenna, see no way out. It’s very hard. Yes, in the north there is the gold and copper mine, but my husband never managed to work there. We have taken several slaps in the face over the past four years. It’s hard to keep up hope. It’s been like this for a long time and it hurts, she describes.
The largest log crusher in the world, at the entrance to the town of Mackenzie
Photo: Radio Canada
The rules of the game are changing
What feels like a final punch in the stomach, however, is driving through the village in long trucks loaded with large logs freshly cut in the region, which are transported to another location south for processing. An insult to Mackenzie workers, Vander Linden laments.
This is still a very sensitive point for many people here, he emphasizes. We’ve had trees and sawmills since the 1980s. We still have many trees, but they are no longer processed in the region. That’s what happened here with Canfor. They moved all of the harvested trees here to be processed south at Bear Lake and closed the sawmill. That killed Mackenzie. They also closed the sawmill in Chetwynd.
“It’s happened to all these little towns up north. The logs go everywhere but here. »
– A quote from Vander Linden, who has been in forestry for over 40 years
Jobs for logs, logs in exchange for work, was the logging contract previously introduced in British Columbia. Each strain had to be processed in the region where it was harvested. But in 2003, the devastation caused by the mountain pine beetle changed everything.
Faced with the urgency of saving all those dead, standing trees that were of some value to the industry, the then-liberal provincial government changed the rules, allowing the industry to process the harvested timber where it chose. A measure that should have included a sunset clause, argues Mackenzie Mayor Joan Atkinson. It should have been temporary. After all the mountain pine beetle infested wood was recovered, we should have reverted to the original contract. But that never happened.
And the forest companies, consolidating their activities, have closed their small factories across the province.
Downtown Mackenzie, 1000 km north of Vancouver
Photo: Radio Canada
fires
The mountain pine beetle will have destroyed more than 18 million hectares of forest, more than half of British Columbia’s marketable pine trees. Dry trees became the perfect fuel for the fires, which burned with an intensity never seen on the west coast.
Ted Traer, a retired Quesnel firefighter, has shared responsibility for fighting wildfires for a hundred years. We’ve been able to prevent fires for a long time because it gave us wood and jobs. I understand. But we created the perfect environment for mega fires. It’s Mother Nature’s revenge, if I do say so myself.
Since 2001, almost 100,000 square kilometers of forest have burned down on the west coast. Losses that prompted the government to stop logging. The government has sharply reduced our annual allowable inland cuttings, from a maximum of 70 million cubic meters in 2007 to almost 40 million. Less wood is now available in British Columbia, said Michelle Ward, spokeswoman for forestry company Canfor, which has closed eight sawmills and paper mills in British Columbia since 2013.
Rarer wood fiber, which is more expensive to exploit at a time when the price has fallen below breakeven and the quantity of which will not increase in the foreseeable future. For inland British Columbia, we can predict about fifty years with relatively stable amounts available, but much less than in the last 15 years, points out Gregory Paradis, professor of forestry at the University of British Columbia.
The fires have devastated the forests of British Columbia.
Photo: BC Wildfire Service
Go or adapt?
Fifty years of changing West Coast forestry practices, says Bob Simpson, former forest manager, provincial assemblyman and former mayor of the city of Quesnel. In his opinion, there is an urgent need for a paradigm shift.
Canada and British Columbia pride themselves on having the best sustainable forest management. It’s absolutely wrong. We have lost stump rights, forests are victims of fire and epidemics, our sawmills are closing and our workers are losing their jobs. “There’s no metric by which we can say we’re managing our forests well,” Simpson says.
“And I like to say, to parody the expression: ‘It’s not the economy, stupid, it’s the ecology, idiot!’: Once we have restored the ecological balance, we can talk about economics.” »
– A quote from Bob Simpson, former Forest Manager, MPP and former Mayor of Quesnel
A discourse oddly well-received in a city rich in natural resources like Quesnel, where the term environment has been taboo until now. But when the region’s stump fees were cut by nearly half, resulting in the permanent closure of a sawmill and pellet factory, the community, citizens and researchers decided to change forest strategy.
Everyone told me, “Quesnel is going to be a ghost town,” but it really wasn’t. “I think it’s going to be something of an incubator for change,” says Florian Bergoin, natural resource manager for the Nazko Aboriginal community near Quesnel.
In 2018, Quesnel established the Forestry Innovation Center, located on the second floor of City Hall. The goal: to create value-added wood products and change forest management practices.
beginnings of change
Quentin Stefani, project manager for the company’s Integrated Operations Group in Quesnel, began reaching out to sawmills in June 2022 by presenting them with an operating method common in Europe and Quebec, but not in the West.
We do what is called a first thinning, a second thinning, and then a final pruning. In this way, your trees not only get access to light, but also grow in height, but also in diameter; And when you harvest, if you add in the first thinning, the second and the last harvest, you get a volume that’s superior to classic clear-cutting and a higher quality that we can sell for more, he explains.
Less dense forests and less susceptible to forest fires, but which only pay off in the long term, says Quentin Stefani. That scares the industry. A lot of work needed to be done on the forest business mentality in British Columbia, Stefani adds.
These ideas have been seeping through the Quesnel incubator for the past five years, and it may be some time before they are adopted by the majority of industry players. They still prefer to invest in Brazil or the United States, where operating costs are now much lower, there is more fiber, and forests take 40 to 50 years to regenerate, compared to 80 to 100 years on the west coast.
West Fraser, for its part well established in Quesnel where it operates eight mills, says it is ready to try a new approach to forestry. It will take place on a smaller scale. But it remains a viable industry, and there is still a long way to go, says Vice President D’Arcy Henderson.
The changes are intended to support the British Columbia government as it prepares to introduce stricter standards for forest exploitation.