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“The logging industry gets away with a lot, and the province doesn’t step in to monitor what they’re doing.”
That’s what Tobyn Neame, a forest campaigner for the Wilderness Committee, a conservation organization, told B.C. biodiversity reporter Ainslie Cruickshank.
It was in response to something Ainslie uncovered after months of digging once she stumbled across a few mentions of unauthorized logging on a provincial database in February: in the span of about three-and-a-half years, logging companies allegedly had either cut, damaged or destroyed forests 173 times outside areas they had permission to log in.
Canfor was named in 22 of those instances — in one incident last November, a logging operator cut 342 spruce trees and 38 pine trees out of bounds. Canfor told Ainslie such incidents are “uncommon, typically with very low impact,” and are reported to the province by the company.
“Getting any information on these incidents from the province was a long and frustrating process,” Ainslie told me. “I asked how much area has been improperly logged and government spokespersons told me to file a freedom of information request. The fee on my request? A whopping $1,170.” (She’s still waiting for an answer on the total area of forests lost to such incidents — and to see if the province will waive her fee.)
The province doesn’t make it public when it fines a forestry company for unauthorized logging, even though it does when companies in other industries violate environmental laws. Officials wouldn’t even tell Ainslie what actions the government took against Canfor and other companies it alleged were not compliant with authorized logging boundaries — that information isn’t public either.
For Ainslie, the lack of transparency raises even more questions: Why did these incidents occur? Is there a systemic challenge logging operators are dealing with? Can anything be done to avoid this?
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