Province’s caribou plan threatens forestry restart in the Northern Rockies
Bronwyn Scott / Alaska Highway News
MAY 11, 2017 09:50 AM
The economic viability of the Northern Rockies hangs
in the balance as the province’s new push to protect
boreal caribou impedes the region’s planned
rejuvenation of its forestry industry.
The province has launched a draft Boreal Caribou
Implementation Plan, which protects vast swaths of
forest, including areas the regional municipality had
targeted for timber harvesting, and where locals say
caribou don’t live.
“I’m speaking to you from a community that, quite
honestly, without exaggeration in many ways is
fighting for its economic life,” said Mike Gilbert,
community development officer for the Northern
Rockies Regional Municipality (NRRM).
The once vibrant community of Fort Nelson, heralded
as the forestry capital of B.C. in 2006, now has a 70
per cent vacancy rate for commercial properties.
For residential rental accommodation, the vacancy
\ rate exceeds 40 per cent.our ability to restart the forest industry here because
certain areas that would be excluded (from
harvesting under the plan) would really make
it difficult for industry to re-establish, just because
of where they’re located,” Gilbert said.
The Northern Rockies was hit hard in 2008 when
the U.S. housing market crash led to the closure
of two large-scale timber-processing plants in
Fort Nelson. Since then, the municipality has
been working to restore its forestry sector.
Many loggers turned to the oil and gas industry
for work, but oil and gas activity has slowed
considerably with the economic downturn.
A concerted effort to restore forestry in the
region was launched in 2013, called the
Forestry Rejuvenation Project, which was
designed to address the issues that led to
the collapse of its forestry sector. Those
efforts are now in jeopardy with the province’s
release of the BCIP—deemed by the NRRM
to be unsatisfactory—for public commentary.
“I urgently request your government stop plans
by Ministry of Environment staff to release a
draft copy of the Boreal Caribou Implementation
Plan (BCIP) for public comment later this
month,” Mayor Bill Streeper told Premier
Christy Clark in a March 21 letter.
Although the province and the Northern
Rockies had been negotiating the BCIP for
more than a year, the municipality wasn’t
satisfied enough was being done to protect
its socioeconomic interests.
“No substantive changes to address our
concerns in the BCIP have resulted, and key
information and data promised have yet to
be forthcoming. It is our opinion that, in its
present state, the plan is not ready for
release for public comment,” the letter
continued.
The Northern Rockies wanted the plan to
reflect a balance between conservation and
regeneration as well as socioeconomic values,
“which, in our estimation, were lacking,”
Gilbert said in an interview.
“We think that can be done, there’s
compatibility there, one does not preclude
the other. But that requires then that we go
back and look at the science,” he said, stressing
a need to determine how much of the dwindling
caribou numbers is attributable to human
activity and how much to other factors.
Former logger and current NRRM Coun. Danny
Soles believes predation—wolves and bears
eating caribou calves—is one of the primary
factors impacting the population, and that
restricting land access is not the solution.
“It’s a plan that doesn’t really have the potential
to address the problem,” he said, particularly
because it doesn’t take predation into account,
and also because some areas slated for
protection, and which were formerly logged,
did not and do not support caribou.
“In order for caribou to survive they need
grass, they are a grass eating animal...the
forest that the logging has historically taken
place in had no grass growing under it,” he
said, adding that it therefore was not
caribou habitat.
Soles, who holds the forestry portfolio for
the NRRM, was a logger in Fort Nelson from
1979 to 2008. He believes the ministry hasn’t
looked into the issue carefully enough.
“As a logger, what’s relevant to me is that
the original plan didn’t even recognize that
the Northern Rockies had a forestry history,
and therefore the map was overlaid as though
there were no forest activity in the past, which
is just crazy because we were the forestry
capital of B.C. in 2006,” he said.
“The woodland caribou don’t inhabit the forest
lands we harvested, they don’t inhabit it at all,
so why would they exclude it as though that
is a measure to preserve caribou?”
The BC Ministry of Environment, not able to
provide comment for this article due to the writ
period of the election, released the plan for
public commentary despite the NRRM’s
wishes, but agreed the NRRM would be
involved in the preparation and review of
the final product, according to Gilbert.
In the midst of these talks, the Ministry
of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource
Operations committed $50,000 for the
creation of a joint community forest, with
the funds being handled equally by the
Fort Nelson First Nation and the regional
municipality.
It will be a working forest, including
harvesting, tree planting and related
activities, according to Soles. The
boundaries of this forest have not yet
been determined.
Anyone interested in reading the plan
can do so on the engage.gov.bc.ca website.
Public comments are being accepted
until May 31, 2017, and can be emailed
to CitizenEngagement@gov.bc.ca.
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THEME: Protecting
boreal
woodland caribou
Initiatives under
the Agreement
New logging and road building have now been suspended on
some 29 million hectares of Forest Products Association of
Canada (FPAC) member company tenures. This is one of the
commitments set forth in the Canadian Boreal Forest
Agreement to protect species at risk in the boreal.
The area under suspension is subject to third-party verification
and is part of a projected protected-areas network outlined in
the Agreement. Among other things, this will allow for the
development of caribou action plans to identify habitat-
appropriate conservation methods and other practices
that will aid in the recovery of the boreal woodland caribou,
while minimizing the negative effect on fibre supply, industry
employment and mills.
What does this mean?
As part of the Agreement, environmental organizations,
FPAC and FPAC member companies will work together
to identify caribou habitat risks on specific tenures, develop
land-use plans and consider other species-protection
practices. This scientific knowledge will then be overlaid
with social and economic concerns to form the basis of
the proposed caribou action plans.
These plans must then be approved by provincial
governments. Until then, the signatories of the Agreement
have decided to implement the plans to the best of their
ability without breaking the law. To that end, they have
created milestones, objectives and a timeline to track
achieved goals and commitments.
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