The B.C. government plans to introduce legislation that will give forestry companies rights and responsibilities to Crown land – a change critics say will benefit only the province’s largest forestry companies.
The bill will allow companies that hold volume-based licences [where multiple companies have rights to cut a specified amount of timber within an area] to apply to convert them to tree farm licences (TFL). TFLs allow one licensee to harvest and manage a specified area over several years. Currently, 80% of forest tenures in B.C. are volume-based, and most are held by the province’s largest forest companies.
The change is based on recommendations from the Special Committee on Timber Supply, said forestry minister Steve Thomson. Throughout the summer of 2012, the committee held public consultations throughout the B.C. Interior to try to find solutions to the timber supply shortage caused by the pine beetle infestation.
“We have area-based tenures currently in place now with community forests, with First Nations woodland licences, so this would provide the ability to shift from volume-based to area-based,” Thomson told Business in Vancouver. He added that there is currently no legislative framework to allow for such a conversion.
But Bob Simpson, independent MLA for Cariboo North, said the minister is misreading the committee’s report. “I’m … challenging the minister to tell the public which [recommendation] he’s referring to, because there is no recommendation to roll over [volume-based] forest licences,” said Simpson. “Because this is all this [legislation] is going to do.”
The committee report calls for government to “gradually increase the diversity of area-based tenures, using established criteria for conversion and a walk-before-you-run approach.”
Simpson is concerned that the change will only benefit large companies.
“It’s a very specific, targeted enabling legislation,” said Simpson. “It will only allow companies with [volume-based] forest licences to come to a politician, a minister, and say I want that … licence to become a TFL.”
The NDP will be keeping a close eye on the legislation, said MLA Norm Macdonald, the NDP’s forestry critic and the deputy chairman of the Special Committee on Timber Supply.
Macdonald said that during his time on the committee, he heard support for area-based tenure – and reservations about how such a system would be implemented.
“The thing with area-based tenure is that it could mean TFLs, but it could also mean community forests or First Nations areas, it could mean woodlots … what we were saying is that there may be cases where that makes sense,” said Macdonald.
“But what we also said is that you needed to move very carefully and really look at each case individually and make sure that the public good was really protected.”
Thomson said each potential licence conversion would go through a public consultation process.
The Council of Forest Industries, the association that represents the B.C. Interior forestry industry, declined to comment.
The case for area-based tenure
Proponents of area-based tenure say that giving forest licence holders rights over a specific area could improve forest health and productivity.
Peter Pearse, professor emeritus of economics and forestry at UBC, described the situation as he sees it under the current volume-based forest licences.
“There is no geographical area over which the licensee has continuing rights and responsibilities. As a result of that temporary occupation of the land to get at the timber that he has a right to take, he has no continuing responsibilities over the term of the licence, [so] he doesn’t have any long-term interest in the land. The result is that he fulfils his minimal requirements for silviculture and fire protection and regeneration, and then he forgets it. It’s not his business anymore.
“What’s happening in British Columbia now, under the [current] forest licences, almost nobody is investing in the forest. … Foresters are increasingly worried that we’re neglecting our forests, and the forests are falling far short of the potential of the forests to produce future crops of timber.”
