When governments make announcements on a Friday afternoon, it’s usually because they don’t want much scrutiny. 

That was clearly the case on Sept. 11 when the B.C. government released a consequential old-growth strategic review report, barely giving reporters a chance to glance at the fine print and recommendations prior to a press conference with Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development. 

Donaldson’s ministry simultaneously sent out a news release announcing the “protection” of nine areas in B.C., totalling almost 353,000 hectares, to kickstart the NDP government’s “new approach to old forests.” 

Sounds good, right? 

But wait. As the adage goes, the devil is in the details.

“If you look at the facts … it still essentially preserves the core of the old-growth logging industry,” said Ken Wu, executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance. 

“Left as it is, it will liquidate most of the remaining endangered old-growth.” 

So what did the government commit to? And what did the old-growth strategic review report say? 

Read on. 

Did the B.C. government implement permanent protections for old-growth?

In a word, no. 

Donaldson announced that development will be temporarily deferred in nine old-growth areas while consultations about future designations are held. “The areas that are announced today are already areas where harvesting is not taking place, and therefore the economic impact in the immediate term is going to be insignificant,” he told reporters. 

“Deferrals aren’t protection,” said Wilderness Committee national campaign director Torrance Coste. “They’re two-year deferrals, hopefully to buy time for those forests to be protected.”

Eight of the areas are in southern B.C. — omitting the northern boreal forest and rare and endangered interior temperate rainforest from logging reprieves.

It’s business as usual everywhere else in the province, including in the central Walbran and Fairy Creek on southern Vancouver Island, in endangered caribou habitat in the Anzac Valley north of Prince George and on the Sunshine Coast, where residents stapled felt hearts on old-growth trees as part of an unsuccessful effort to protect the Clack Creek forest from clear-cutting and other old-growth is slated to be logged.

“It’s largely talk and log in a lot of cases, with loopholes big enough to drive thousands of logging trucks through,” observed Wu, the founder of the Ancient Forest Alliance.

Retired B.C. government forester Judy Thomas surveys a clear cut near the Anzac Valley, just north of Prince George, B.C. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

What about the development deferrals?

Clayoquot Sound, with more than 260,000 hectares deferred from development, represents almost three-quarters of the deferrals in size.  

But when GIS mapper Dave Leversee crunched the numbers, he found that about 137,000 hectares of the land newly “deferred” from development in Clayoquot Sound is already under some form of protection, including parks, Wildlife Habitat Areas and Clayoquot management reserves. 

Less than nine per cent of the total area announced for a development deferral consists of old-growth forests of medium to good productivity, meaning there are optimal conditions for supporting the biggest trees, Leversee discovered.

“There’s a lot of non-forested areas in that number: rocks, mountain peaks, swamps, things like that,” he said of the 260,000-hectare Clayoquot Sound “old growth development deferral” area on the government’s map.

An aerial view of old-growth forests in Clayoquot Sound, part of a temporary deferral that will prohibit logging in this area for two years. Photo: TJ Watt / Ancient Forest Alliance

It’s much the same story in the Kootenays, where Stockdale Creek and Crystalline Creek in the Purcells are on the list of development deferrals.

Wildsight conservation specialist Eddie Petryshen pointed out that only 0.1 hectare of the 9,600 hectares deferred in Crystalline Creek area, a tributary of the south fork of the Spillimacheen River, was slated for logging.

In Stockdale Creek, just 223 hectares out of 11,500 hectares that received a development deferral were on the chopping block, Petryshen said, noting that both areas provide important grizzly bear and wolverine habitat and connectivity.

“It’s a far cry from the numbers they’re talking about,” Petryshen told The Narwhal.

“While both these watersheds are intact, have very high biodiversity values and need to be protected, most of the old growth in these drainages is not believed to be under immediate threat from logging.” 

After Clayoquot Sound, the largest temporary deferral from development consists of 40,000 hectares in the Incomappleux Valley east of Revelstoke, an inland rainforest with trees up to 1,500 years old. 

“The deferral areas appear to cover a lot of inoperable forest, or forest that’s already been clear cut,” said Valhalla Wilderness Society director Craig Pettitt. 

The society is suggesting that 32,000 hectares of the Incomappleux deferral unit be allocated “to actual endangered forest elsewhere, instead of protecting inoperable or clear cut areas outside of the ancient forest.”

Pettitt said he is happy the Incomappleux has been acknowledged. But he said the inland temperate rainforest — hosting some of B.C.’s rarest ancient forests — is “severely underrepresented” in the government’s announcement. 

Clear-cut logging of spruce in B.C.’s interior. Less than one-third of the world’s primary forests are still intact yet in B.C.’s interior a temperate rainforest that holds vast stores of carbon and is home to endangered caribou is being clear-cut as fast as the Amazon. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

And then there’s the deferral of about 5,700 hectares in the Skagit-Silver Daisy area, on the edge of Manning Park, where the B.C. government had already announced that logging permits in the Skagit River headwaters would no longer be permitted, but mining exploration has been causing friction with Americans downstream.  

Also on Vancouver Island, more than 2,200 hectares were deferred from logging around McKelvie Creek — the last unprotected, intact watershed in the Tahsis region, in Mowachaht/Muchalaht territory. And just over 1,000 hectares, an area roughly the size of two and a half Stanley Parks, were deferred in H’Kusam, near Sayward.

The remaining deferrals consist of just over 4,500 hectares in an area known as the Seven Sisters, northwest of Smithers, and more than 17,000 hectares around the Upper Southgate River in Bute Inlet on B.C.’s mid-coast. 

Coste said the Wilderness Committee is waiting on shapefiles and more information from the government so it can determine what portion of the nine deferrals lie in the 415,000 hectares of old forest left in B.C., home to trees expected to grow more than 20 metres tall in 50 years.

“That will be the real test,” he said.

Wait, what did the old-growth strategic review report actually say?

The report, commissioned by the B.C. government, was written by foresters Garry Merkel and Al Gorley.

The 216-page report calls for a paradigm shift in the way B.C. manages old-growth forests. It lays out a blueprint for change with 14 recommendations.

The report says old forests have intrinsic value for all living things and should be managed for ecosystem health, not for timber. It also says many old forests are not renewable, which counters the prevailing notion that trees, no matter how old, will grow back. 

The report was widely praised by conservation groups, which welcomed the temporary development deferrals and called on the B.C. government to commit to implementing Merkel and Gorley’s recommendations. 

“The report itself is fantastic,” Wu said. “It covers most of what we’ve actually been calling for for decades. What’s needed is to commit to those recommendations.” 

Ancient Forest Alliance campaigner and photographer TJ Watt surveys recent old-growth clearcutting by Teal-Jones in the Caycuse watershed in Ditidaht Territory on southern Vancouver Island. Areas of highly productive, endangered ancient forest like this still remain at risk in many regions. Photo: TJ Watt / Ancient Forest Alliance

What did the report recommend?

Top of the list is to engage “the full involvement” of Indigenous leaders and organizations in an old-growth strategy.   

Immediately deferring development in old forests “where ecosystems are at very high and near-term risk of irreversible biodiversity loss” and “prioritizing ecosystem health and resilience” are among the other recommendations.

In an interview with The Narwhal, Merkel said people from all sectors, including forestry, recognize “that the path we’re going down needs to change” and that B.C. forest-dependent communities — which have suffered from recent mill closures and job losses — need sustainable economies.

As such, the report recommends the government support forest sector workers and communities as they adapt to changes resulting from a new forest management system. 

“If the government does that, we can minimize the pain through this transition,” said Merkel, the former chair of the Tahltan Nation Development Corporation and the Columbia Basin Trust.

“But there is a transition coming in many areas … There are many, many areas that are going to have to do this regardless whether they implement our ideas or not. This is not a surprise.”

Did the government take immediate steps to prevent irreversible biodiversity loss?

No. The government has not followed the panel’s recommendation to immediately defer all logging in old-growth forests that are home to ecosystems at risk of irreversible biodiversity loss. 

Under Section 13 of B.C.’s Forests Act, Donaldson can defer harvesting activities for up to four years without compensating tenure holders. 

Conservation North director Michelle Connolly said areas at risk of ecological collapse include the Anzac River Valley north of Prince George, which provides critical habitat for endangered southern mountain caribou and a myriad other species, including at-risk migratory songbirds.

“The Anzac is an area of great ecological risk up here and it’s really odd that no protections have been announced for it,” Connolly said in an interview. 

Cutting permits have been issued all the way up the Anzac Valley “and they’re going after the highest productivity old-growth spruce, the areas with the biggest trees,” she said. 

Forestry giant Canfor and Coastal Gaslink, which is constructing a pipeline for the LNG Canada export project, recently teamed up to build a new road into the Anzac Valley wilderness, Connolly noted.

“The Hart [Ranges] caribou use that whole area. The road, the cut blocks, are in their core habitat.” 

Scientist Michelle Connolly said the Anzac River Valley north of Prince George is at risk of ecological collapse and has not received any protection under the NDP government’s recent announcement. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Petryshen said development deferrals omit “an incredible” drainage in the North Columbia mountains that BC Timber Sales plans to road and log. 

The Argonaut Creek drainage provides critical habitat for the endangered Columbia North caribou herd, which, at 150 animals, is the largest remaining caribou herd in the area. 

“It’s spectacular old-growth at lower elevations and then Engelmann spruce and subalpine fir and spectacular summer and winter caribou habitat, and it’s federal critical caribou habitat.” 

He said it is hypocritical to move forward with piecemeal deferrals while, on the other hand, “we’re seeing that critical caribou habitat move down the road on logging trucks on Highway 23.”

Coste said the B.C. government is limiting its future ability to ensure the survival of ecosystems by failing to follow the panel’s recommendation.

“There are hundreds of hectares of old-growth being cut down today and removed from the pool of old-growth that we could potentially protect six months, a year, two years, three years from now.” 

What does the B.C. First Nations Forestry Council say?

B.C. First Nations Forestry Council CEO Charlene Higgins said the council is disappointed the government has chosen to engage with First Nations “after the fact” and not as partners in the process, especially given the cultural significance of many old-growth areas.

“Public consultation and engagement stakeholder processes, and asking for submissions, really doesn’t recognize First Nations as governments and as rights holders,” Higgins told The Narwhal. 

“There’s been no meaningful input and engagement with First Nations.” 

Higgins said the process doesn’t reflect commitments made in B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and the government’s commitment to work in cooperation and collaboration with Indigenous peoples on forest policy changes, legislation and practices. 

She said the council supports the nine development deferrals provided they were decided in full consultation with First Nations in whose territories the deferrals lie. (Donaldson underscored that the deferrals all have the support of local First Nations.)

“Many First Nations have their own policies around old growth and they have their own old growth areas that they recognize, and the province needs to ensure that these areas line up,” Higgins said. 

An aerial view highlighting extensive clearcut logging of productive old-growth forests in the Klanawa Valley on southern Vancouver Island, B.C. Photo: TJ Watt / Ancient Forest Alliance

What about protections for big trees?

Donaldson’s ministry also announced that work is underway to protect up to 1,500 “exceptionally large, individual trees” under the special tree protection regulation, introduced last year by the government to protect monumental trees.

Coste called the big tree protections a “drop in the bucket.” They represent, at most, the preservation of 1,500 hectares of old-growth across the province — an area smaller than four Stanley Parks — because each monumental tree gets a one-hectare buffer zone around it, he pointed out. 

“Big trees are important but there’s so much more to old-growth forests than just those big trees.” 

Connolly, from Conservation North, called the protection of individual trees “a joke,” saying her science-based group sees more than 1,500 trees from the interior wet belt going down Highway 97 in a single day. 

“They don’t understand what is a minimum expectation for conservation,” she said. 

Higgins, from the B.C. First Nations Forestry Council, said there has been no First Nations input into the protection of individual trees. 

“Without nations having any input into what is considered a large tree species, there’s a potential for a disconnect.” 

“Many First Nations have developed their own strategy for what they deem as culturally significant areas,” she said. “It’s been a really flawed process that really doesn’t reflect First Nations input.

But Wu said big tree protections are an important part of protecting what little remains of B.C.’s high productivity old growth. 

“The goal is, and has always been, protection of old growth ecosystems. That’s got to happen on the trees and groves level, and on the level of watersheds, landscapes and ecosystems.” 

Tahsis Mayor Martin Davis stands beside a giant old-growth Douglas-fir tree in the McKelvie Valley, part of a temporary deferral that will prohibit logging in this area for two years. Photo: TJ Watt / Ancient Forest Alliance

Is this really a new approach to managing old-growth?

No — at least not yet. 

Merkel said the panel is recommending deep structural changes that go far further than saving a few key areas, although he said that is also important.

“If that’s all we do, we won’t change the way we’re doing things.” 

“We’re talking about changing a system that started almost a century ago. We’re fundamentally turning a corner here in how that whole thing works. That’s going to take a little bit of time.” 

For example, it will take several years to figure out the pieces that need to change to align with the panel’s recommendation to make ecosystem health a priority as an overarching directive for managing old-growth, he said.  

If the government acts on the panel’s recommendations immediately, Merkel said there will be substantial changes in the short-term “and we will get incrementally better over time.” 

What happens next? 

Conservation groups want the government to implement the report’s 14 recommendations within the timeline laid out in the report, with immediate, mid-term and long-term actions taken over the next three years.

So far, the government hasn’t committed to any of the recommendations, or to the timeline.

Donaldson told reporters that managing old-growth forests while supporting workers and communities “has been a challenge in the making for more than 30 years and it won’t be solved immediately.”

“But we know that the status quo is not sustainable,” the minister said. “Obviously, it’s not good for the industry to cut it all down, there’s no plan for transition. And we know that unchecked logging in old-growth threatens crucial biodiversity values. But at the same time, putting an abrupt halt to old-growth logging would have devastating impacts on communities and workers across B.C., especially on the coast.”

As rumours swirl of a snap provincial election this fall, Donaldson said the government will provide a progress report on a “renewed old-growth strategy” in the spring of 2021. (Shortly after announcing the deferral areas, Donaldson announced he will not be seeking re-election.)

Merkel said he and Gorley have agreed not to judge the government at this point. “They haven’t outright said they aren’t going to do it,” he said regarding the recommendations. 

“Our job was to think about what needed to happen,” he said. “We needed to put it out there. Now, the world has to think: ‘Are we ready, and can we do it?’ ”

Updated Sept 17, 2020, at 12:28 a.m. PST: A previous version of this story said Sunshine Coast residents have stapled felt hearts to old-growth trees as part of an effort to protect the Clack Creek forest from clear-cutting. The story has been updated to reflect the fact that the Clack Creek forest has since been logged. Additionally, the previous version of this story said each monumental tree gets a one-kilometre buffer zone around it. The story has been updated to say each monumental tree gets a one-hectare buffer around it.

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Donning a drysuit, plunging into a river in the heart of Clayoquot Sound and counting salmon while swimming from the headwaters to the ocean is an annual fall and winter ritual for Central Westcoast Forest Society associates.

Numbers and species are carefully noted on waterproof paper to inform Fisheries and Oceans Canada about spawning numbers and help the non-profit Central Westcoast Forest Society decide which of the many damaged watersheds are most in need of habitat restoration.

The swims provide a fishy snapshot of the day, said Dave Hurwitz, manager of the Thornton Creek Hatchery in Ucluelet.

“We hike up as far as the salmon can go and then we swim to the ocean,” he said.

Hopes always start high that the swim will reveal large numbers of returning salmon, said Jared Dick, Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council regional fisheries biologist.

“We start swimming downstream with the current and as we approach a big pool and see hundreds of salmon we just swim by really carefully and then start defining which species are there and mentally saying 10 chinook, five coho, 10 chum and then you write it down on your waterproof paper and keep swimming downstream,” he said.

Steelhead smolt. Photo: Jeremy Koreski

But, during the 2018 fall and winter swims, it was rare to find pools with hundreds of salmon and some runs in Clayoquot Sound appear to be on the verge of being wiped out. Fisheries and Oceans Canada figures show that, in addition to precipitous drops in chinook returns, fewer chum, sockeye, coho and pinks found their way back to home spawning rivers.

A DFO bulletin says few chinook made it back to the Clayoquot spawning grounds and describes numbers as “quite poor relative to the 12-year average.”

And that 12-year average does not look at historic numbers with descriptions of rivers teeming with fish, said Saya Masso, Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation natural resources manager.

Clear-cut logging’s legacy in Clayoquot Sound rivers

In some rivers and streams, most of which were damaged or destroyed by intensive forestry and mining between the 1960s and mid-1990s, numbers of returning spawners are so small that there are fears that genetic biodiversity is disappearing and efforts are underway to preserve genetic stocks through hatcheries.

“They are close to extinction. There could potentially be genetic extirpation with such low numbers. It’s a dire situation,” Dick said.

Some of the rivers used to have 10,000 or 20,000 fish according to traditional ecological knowledge, Dick said.

“Now we are seeing less than a couple of hundred fish returning. It’s sad,” he said.

Among the poor performers is the Tranquil River, which has historically supported more than 5,000 chinook. This year, only 59 returned.

The Tranquil watershed, where the Central Westcoast Forest Society, in partnership with Tla-o-qui-aht First nation, is currently doing habitat restoration work, also saw a two-thirds drop in the 12-year average coho returns, half the expected number of chum and only 22 sockeye.

Aerial image of the Tranquil watershed, 1937.

Aerial image of the Tranquil watershed, 1970. The Tranquil watershed is located Tla-lo-Quiaht territory and its restoration is supported by Ocean Outfitters, the Tla-Lo-Quiaht First Nation, Clayoquot Salmon Roundtable, Clayoquot Biosphere Trust, Patagonia, Long Beach Lodge, Tofino Resort and Marina, and Trilogy Fish Co.

Youth volunteer helping out on the Centennial Creek Restoration Project with the Central Westcoast Forest Society. Photo: Nora Morrison

Strangely, even the few pristine streams in Clayoquot Sound are seeing low returns.

“These are the most pristine, non-logged watersheds. These are places where you are never going to see a chocolate bar wrapper and, if you are ever going to see a Sasquatch that’s where it will be, but the chinook returns are terrible,” Hurwitz said.

DFO is also puzzling over those numbers.

“Some of the systems have pretty good habitat — systems that are coming out of parks and should be pristine and we are not seeing very many fish,” Diana McHugh, DFO West Coast Vancouver Island stock assessment program biologist, told The Narwhal.

Jessica Hutchinson, Central Westcoast Forest Society executive director, said the lack of fish in pristine habitat underlines that all the ecosystems are connected and, as the fish head north, they hug the coastline as they travel through areas where habitat is severely compromised by logging.

The significant drop in fish numbers spans all Clayoquot watersheds, Hutchinson said.

“It just seems to be compounding year after year with just a handful of fish returning to these rivers that used to support thousands of chinook salmon. We are at a critical point here and salmon are such a complicated fish because of their life history and there are so many factors contributing to their decline,” she said.

Jessica Hutchinson, ecologist and executive director for the Central Westcoast Forest Society and holds a spawned out coho. Photo: Jeremy Koreski

Overharvesting of Clayoquot fish in Alaska and Haida Gwaii, recreational fishing from lodges up and down the coast, possible diseases and sea lice spreading from some fish farms, pollution, climate change and ocean conditions are all affecting the stocks, but, much of the problem can be attributed to the industrial logging of Clayoquot Sound which destroyed vast areas of salmonid habitat.

Trees were clear-cut to the edge of rivers and streams, spawning gravel was removed from riverbeds for road building, logs were skidded across waterways without protection, obstructions  left in the streams changed water courses and, while vital shade and stability was removed from river banks, second-growth forests that replaced the old-growth, does not provide the patchwork of light and shade needed by salmon.

As landslides and erosion continue, because of unrepaired logging damage, vital pools disappear and sediment washes downstream clogging estuaries.

Aerials photos show the extent of logging in the Ah’Ta’Apq watershed between 1954 (image on left) and 2015 (image on right). The Ah’Ta’Apq watershed restoration project is a partnership including the Ahousaht First Nation and Hesquiaht First Nation and is supported by Clayoquot Biosphere Trust, Pacific Salmon Foundation, and the federal department of Fisheries and Oceans through their RFCPP program. 

A logging truck hauling freshly felled trees on West Main road, Ucluelet. Photo: Kyler Vos

In the Tranquil estuary, since 1994, more than 50 per cent of the estuary salt marsh habitat has been buried in sediment.

Discussions with DFO on harvests are underway, as figures show between 40 and 60 per cent of Clayoquot stocks are caught in Alaska and Haida Gwaii, and research is being done on diseases, but habitat restoration is one key to bringing back the salmon and the work has to be done now, Hutchinson said.

Old growth forests can’t re-grow overnight and much of the pay-off is long term, but, when habitat is restored, immediate results can be seen in water quality and temperature and, within a couple of years, there are noticeable increases in the number of salmon, she said.

Masso said one push from Tla-o-qui-aht members is to concentrate on building chum stocks that will return to the home river in two years — sooner than other salmon species — and the spawned out carcasses would help feed chinook smolts.

Sockeye salmon in Clayoquot Sound. Photo: Kyler Vos

War in the Woods led to improved forestry practices — at first

Forest practices improved dramatically after the 1993 War in the Woods, that saw more than 1,000 protesters arrested, and resulted in the 1994 introduction of the Forest Practices Code.

But that all changed in 2004 when the code was replaced with the less restrictive Forest and Range Practices Act and government oversight was replaced with company self-policing.

Today the government is overhauling the practice of professional reliance and environmental regulations have been tightened, but active logging is continuing in Clayoquot Sound and — except in areas where the Central Westcoast Forest Society takes on a habitat restoration projects — damage done in previous decades remains unremediated.

“I don’t think people grasped the scale of the destruction from that early logging, especially as all the good wood was at the bottom of these valleys, so we lost a lot of the rivers,” said Tom Balfour, Central Westcoast Forest Society project manager.

Megan Francis and Karine Lalancette planting trees as part of the Chenatha River Restoration Project. Photo: Kyler Vos

The apolitical, nonprofit group was formed in 1995 by loggers, environmentalists, First Nations, biologists and forestry professionals who wanted to restore some of the damaged habitat.

The society, which relies on federal government grants and donations, now has a core group of about four professionals and, for each project, the society partners with one of the five local First Nations.

So far, the group has restored about 90 kilometres of habitat.

The restoration work, which aims to speed up natural recovery processes, includes strategic planting of native species, landslide stabilization, terracing and thinning out second-growth stands.

Restored off channel habitat in Conference Creek. Photo: Jeremy Koreski

“Then, in the stream, we build structures made of logs and boulders cabled together to simulate an old-growth tree. Then as the water moves around that log, it will dig out a pool,” Balfour said.

All projects are made more difficult and expensive by the remote locations and money is always tight, said Hutchinson, who, with recent federal attention on salmon, would like the government to prioritize supporting the early life cycle of salmon.

It is vital to increase the numbers of eggs that survive, said Masso.

“Increasing fish habitat can mean thousands of eggs survive. If you can just access that next pool of water or ensure that the nutrient level for the smolts and the oxygen in the water is there,” Masso said.

“It’s really important work. We must fix this for our grandchildren,” he said.

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When 12,000 people showed up on the remote coast of Vancouver Island in the summer of 1993 for the Clayoquot Sound blockades, history was in the making.

It was one of the largest acts of mass civil disobedience in Canadian history, with almost 1,000 people arrested in what would become known as the War in the Woods. The arrests of youth and elders were seen on television screens and in newspapers around the world.

“We needed to put Clayoquot Sound on the map,” recalls Valerie Langer, who was a young literacy teacher at the time. Langer, who had travelled to Vancouver Island on a tree-planting contract, would become one of the core organizers of the Clayoquot Sound blockades and helped found the group that later became ForestEthics, now Stand.earth.

“Nobody could pronounce the word Clayoquot, let alone knew that it was an area of temperate rainforest. Nobody knew there were rainforests in Canada, rainforests were a tropical thing.”

The Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations — who had stewarded the natural abundance of Clayoquot Sound since at least the last ice age — were opposed to the industrial-scale forestry being practiced and the complete lack of consultation around land-use planning in their territories.

Langer set about strategizing with her allies in the Friends of Clayoquot Sound on how to support the Nuu-chah-nulth efforts to protect these intact old-growth watersheds from logging by timber giant Macmillan-Bloedel.

“We wanted to gain power with the company,” Langer says. “Rather than standing literally in the wilderness shouting about how wrong they were, we were going to go where their customers were.”

Within the next two years, Macmillan-Bloedel had lost at least $200 million in pulp, paper and wood contracts, Langer says.

This forced the company and the government to the table.

In 1993 protesters blocked an access road, preventing MacMillan Bloedel from continuing its Clayoquot Sound logging operations. Police arrived to read a court injunction, demanding the road be cleared. The order was summarily ignored by protesters. Photos: Ademoor

Macmillan-Bloedel gradually extricated itself from Clayoquot Sound and turned over control of the tree farm licence to the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations.

It was a big victory. And after sweeping changes to B.C. forest policy that came in its wake, a lot of people thought this issue had been dealt with. But 25 years later, B.C. forests are in crisis.

The province is currently facing a crash in harvest volumes, the closure of mills and widespread layoffs, not to mention the continued loss of old-growth forests.

Old-growth forests on the brink

Longtime environmental activist and Order of Canada recipient Vicky Husband talks about Vancouver Island’s ancient temperate rainforests with deep reverence and great sadness.

“You know, I’ve travelled the whole world,” she says. “We have some of the rarest forests on Earth — and we’re throwing them away.”

Husband has been fighting for ancient forests on the West Coast for more than 40 years. She has been on the front lines of the epic fights for Clayoquot Sound, Gwaii Haanas and many other historic wins for the ancient forest movement.

“We got some really important watersheds, with great battles,” she recalls. “But it was just not nearly enough.”

On Vancouver Island, the most productive old-growth forests in the valley-bottoms, those most cherished by environmentalists for their ecological, carbon and cultural values — and prized by the timber industry for their timber value — have reached crisis levels.

A clearcut on Vancouver Island, B.C., shows Big Lonely Doug exposed, centre left. Big Lonely Doug is the second-largest douglas fir in Canada. Photo: TJ Watt

According to Sierra Club BC, Vancouver Island has lost 30 per cent of its original forests over the past 25 years, leaving less than seven per cent of the island’s most productive and endangered old growth. On average, nearly 9,000 hectares of old growth were logged annually from 2011 to 2015. And old-growth logging is speeding up. In 2016, that annual amount jumped to nearly 11,000 hectares, the equivalent of 26 Stanley Parks.

Critics, policy analysts and environmentalists all agree that to understand the escalating loss of old growth, as well as the overall decline of forest health and industry employment, one must look back to how B.C.’s public forests became virtually privatized.

An aerial view of Flores Island in Clayoquot Sound. Photo: TJ Watt

The privatization of B.C.’s forests

After the Clayoquot Sound protests, the NDP government of the day set aside dozens of intact valleys and set about reforming forestry across the province. It introduced the Forest Practices Code in 1994, which had more stringent forestry regulations than ever before, and created the Forest Practices Board, an independent oversight body with real teeth for those who broke the law.

But in 2003, the BC Liberals came to power with a sizable majority, ushering in the dark years for B.C.’s forests. As environmental groups turned their focus to other issues, such as climate change, the Liberal government set about deregulating the forest industry.

Ken Wu of the Ancient Forest Alliance — who was 19 during the summer of 1993 and has not stopped fighting for old-growth forests since — says that while the ’90s saw significant progress in forestry, “under the BC Liberals it became a full-scale attempt at rollback.”

In 2004, the Forest Practices Code was replaced with a watered down Forest and Range Practices Act; the Forest Practices Board, the independent watchdog for the industry, was de-fanged; and industry oversight was outsourced from the public service to professionals paid by industry (a system known as “professional reliance,” which is currently under review).

Herb Hammond, a forest ecologist and veteran eco-forester from the Slocan Valley, sees it this way: “Professional reliance, coupled with getting rid of the forest service and legislated standards for forestry, simply privatized the forest.”

One of the most significant changes to forest legislation under the Liberals was the removal of appurtenancy — the longstanding requirement that to log public timber, companies had to operate local mills.

According to Arnie Bercov of the Public and Private Workers Union (formerly the Pulp and Paper Workers Union), which represents mill-workers and value-added producers, the elimination of appurtenancy, “was a complete betrayal of our social contract.”

Corporate consolidation of public forests

Deregulation was compounded by the vast majority of timber licences being consolidated into the hands of very few companies, which freely traded tenures to create regional monopolies.

The result is that the majority of public timber goes to large, centralized mega-mills cranking out cheap commodity lumber, while independent wood producers struggle to access the right logs for their mills.

According to the Interior Lumber Manufacturers Association, “Independents and specialty manufacturers will have increasing difficulties accessing enough of the right logs to remain competitive, so these sectors will continue to shrink.”  

From 2000 to 2016, 26 sawmills shut their doors in the Interior. On the coast, 18 mills closed up shop — a combined loss of 44 sawmills across the province.

The export of unprocessed logs from the coast also doubled under the BC Liberals, from less than 3 million cubic metres in 2001 to more than 6 million cubic metres in 2016. At the same time, employment in the forest industry declined by 32,000 jobs.

Old-growth cedar logs. Photo: TJ Watt

Truck Loggers Association executive director David Elstone refutes that there is any causal link between plummeting employment and skyrocketing log exports, attributing the loss of forestry jobs to “technological innovation” and “constant erosion of the working forest.”

By “constant erosion of the working forest,” Elstone is referring to areas that have been taken off the menu for timber companies to log, due to environmental protections, beetles or wildfire.

The technological innovations Elstone is talking about are technologies such as LIDAR, a surveying method which allows industry to plan operations and assess timber supply with far less boots on the ground. He is also talking about feller-bunchers, nightmarish machines that have made it possible for two people to take down an entire forest in a matter of days.

But even Elstone — who generally defends the status quo of volume-based industrial forestry — agrees with the idea that the forest industry has become overly consolidated: “We feel there is too much of the timber tenure in too few hands,” he says.

Mountain pine beetle and the interior timber supply crisis

The ancient forests of the coast are not the only forests that environmentalists and foresters are concerned about. B.C.’s interior forests have been ravaged by catastrophic beetle outbreaks, wildfires and unsustainable “salvage” operations by industry.

Now interior B.C. is facing a midterm timber supply crisis and a sharp reduction in Annual Allowable Cut. This may not come as a surprise as the mountain pine beetle wiped out more than 50 per cent of the merchantable pine forests across the province.

But according to ecologist and eco-forester Hammond, the pine beetle was far from being a natural disaster. “We created that problem,” he says.

First, we created global warming, “which removed the biggest control factor for the mountain pine beetle — cold winters,” Hammond says.

Second, we were so successful in suppressing forest fires that we stockpiled vast stands of mature pine, thus creating a buffet for beetles.

Third, we logged old-growth forests. Old growth scattered about the Interior once provided habitat for birds and other predators of the beetle, helping to regulate populations. With most of those forests now gone, beetles face less predation.

And fourth, “clear-cutting large areas dried out the landscape, stressed the ecosystems, and set forests up for successful attacks by the mountain pine beetle,” Hammond says.

But it didn’t stop there. With so much standing dead wood and a limited time frame in which to cash it in, the B.C. government increased the Annual Allowable Cut to vastly unsustainable levels and allowed the industry to recover what value they could from the dead pine.

“What the timber industry saw here,” Hammond says, “was a short-term gold mine to salvage pine.” He explains that if a stand contained 30 per cent pine, they were able to log the entire stand — including high value non-pine species — at a deep discount.

The result was years of over-harvesting, way beyond any notion of a sustainable yield, under the guise of a so-called salvage operation for dead pine, in which vast quantities of perfectly healthy non-pine were also being logged out of the landscape.

Potential for a breakthrough in old growth protection

Despite this bleak picture, there is actually some hope amongst environmentalists and some more ecologically minded foresters about the moment in which we now find ourselves, with the NDP once again in power.

While Wu was disappointed by the NDP’s approval of the Site C dam, he remains hopeful: “This is the first social democratic government supported by Greens in North American history, so right now we have the greatest potential for a breakthrough in the protection of old growth.”

While the NDP have thus far continued with the status quo forest policies of the previous government, their platform states: “In partnership with First Nations and communities, we will modernize land-use planning to effectively and sustainably manage B.C.’s ecosystems, rivers, lakes, watersheds, forests and old growth, while accounting for cumulative effects. We will take an evidence-based scientific approach and use the ecosystem-based management of the Great Bear Rainforest as a model.”

Premier John Horgan also dropped a few hints in his throne speech and in the following press scrum that changes are coming to B.C. forest policy.

B.C. Premier John Horgan visits Structurlam, in Penticton B.C. Photo: B.C. Government via Flickr

“The government will revitalize the forest industry’s social contract with British Columbians,” Horgan said. He also promised to, “make sure that every log that is taken from a public forest, the benefit is maximized to the people in the community.”

When pressed by the Vancouver Sun on whether he was proposing further restrictions on log exports and bringing back appurtenancy (that old requirement to log public timber near the area where it was harvested), Horgan confirmed that he was.

Bercov of the Public and Private Workers Union is encouraged by the prospect of reinstating appurtenancy, but is not satisfied with words.

“We expect action,” he says. “They campaigned on bringing forestry back to the communities and the only way they’re going to do that is through appurtenancy.”

‘The real problem is corporate control of public forests’

But Hammond says that appurtenancy does not get to the heart of the matter: “If you just add appurtenancy to the existing tenure system, you’re not dealing with the real problem. The real problem is corporate control of public forests.”

Bercov agrees that banning log exports or reinstating appurtenancy will not save the industry.

“The solution, quite honestly, is we have to build more mills,” Bercov says. “And the only way we are going to attract investment is to work with First Nations.”

Becov continues, “I would like to see every single log that’s cut here manufactured here, not because it’s mandated, but because we create the conditions. We create opportunities for First Nations to control their own destiny.”

“And that means real co-management, shared jurisdiction and decision-making authority,” Hammond says. “Then I think we will see some really good Indigenous models.”

Coastal temperate rainforest. Photo: TJ Watt

The Great Bear Rainforest agreements

When Langer looks back on the Clayoquot Sound campaign, she sees it this way: “It wasn’t an event. It was a process, in which First Nations increasingly gained decision-making authority over what was going to happen to the forests in their territories.”

If we pull on the thread from Clayoquot Sound to today it leads directly to the Great Bear Rainforest Agreements, a set of science-based rules for logging in the central and north coast forests established in 2016 and negotiated over a decade.

Langer was at the table for those tense and often fraught negotiations, which she describes as, “probably the most comprehensive forestry and human well-being framework that exists in the world. It has the most stringent commercial forestry laws in North America.”

The agreement protected 85 per cent of the Great Bear Rainforest from any kind of resource extraction, placed strict ecosystem-based forestry regulations on the logging that happens in the remaining 15 per cent and put First Nations into a co-management role with the B.C. government.

It also provided financing for First Nations to be able to seed economic development initiatives, such as clean energy projects, tourism and other alternatives to old-growth logging.

While some more strident environmentalists see the Great Bear agreement as less than ideal, with problematic loopholes, proponents argue that more intact forest was protected under this agreement than in any other environmental deal in history — and was done in a way that put First Nations in a leadership role.

While organizations like the Truck Loggers Association may decry the agreement as the “further erosion of the working forest,” the rest of B.C. does not come close to meeting the rigorous standards of ecosystem-based management set out in the Great Bear Rainforest.

Decolonizing forestry in B.C.

“I’m just going to say it: we have a colonial mentality in this province,” Adam Olsen, Green MLA from Saanich North and the Islands, told DeSmog Canada on the phone. Olsen,  a member of the Tsartlip First Nation, said, “It’s the same as it was 200 years ago.”

“We need to start being informed by my Saanich elders,” Olsen said. “So ecosystem-based management for me is about understanding what our place is in all this.”

Hammond has studied ecosystem-based conservation planning for decades and has worked with communities and First Nations across B.C. on managing their local forestlands.

For him, the current model of industrial logging that prioritizes timber value above all else is backwards.

“Protecting and restoring ecological integrity of forests needs to be the focus of forestry, not timber extraction,” Hammond says. “In the absence of that, we are only contributing to our own demise.”

Klanawa Valley on Vancouver Island. Photo: TJ Watt

This means prioritizing ecosystem services such as hydrology, biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Timber harvesting can still happen under this model, but in a much smaller and more strategic way than it is today.

Indigenous-led, ecosystem-based approaches to conservation planning are gaining ground across the province, which leads us right back to Clayoquot Sound.

The Ahousaht First Nation — one of the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations in Clayoquot Sound — recently revealed its new land-use vision, in which 80 per cent of the old-growth in Ahousaht territory will be off limits to logging, while tourism, fishing, selective forestry, ecology and cultural use will be prioritized on the remaining land-base.

Most importantly, the Ahousaht have asserted their right to manage all aspects of their unceded lands, waters, resources and economy for the benefit of their people and ecosystems. And the other nations in Clayoquot Sound are not far behind in their own land-use planning processes.

“The forest industry is not just about cutting trees anymore,” Bercov says. “It’s about climate change, it’s about First Nations rights and title, it’s about ecosystems.”

“That means a significant portion of the forest land base that might have commercially valuable timber on will not be logged,” Hammond says. “It’s going to be for water, for biodiversity.”

“We have to start doing more with less,” Bercov says. “We have to start getting maximum value out of the trees that we cut. We’re not doing that.”

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The province has given the go-ahead for Cermaq Canada to use up to 2.3 million litres of a pesticide called Paramove 50 to remove sea lice from fish at 14 salmon farms in Clayoquot Sound, but opponents fear the mixture of hydrogen peroxide, surfactants and other chemicals will harm other species and weaken the immune system of farmed fish, making them more likely to contract diseases that could infect wild fish.

Bonny Glambeck, co-founder of Clayoquot Action, a group circulating a petition against use of the pesticide in Clayoquot Sound, said studies show the pesticide can persist in the surface layer of the water, home to marine organisms, such as Dungeness crab, prawns, young salmon and herring.

“Right now the wild salmon smolts are migrating and using the shallow areas to make their way out to the ocean and this is where it will end up when it is dissipating,” she said.

The bigger problem is that it can suppress the immune systems of farmed salmon for two weeks and that means they are more susceptible to viral outbreaks such as piscine reovirus, Glambeck said.

“So just as the young salmon are passing by the farms, we could shock these farmed fish into getting PRV or that becoming HSMI (heart and skeletal muscle inflammation disease) which is deadly to wild salmon,” she said.

Recent studies have confirmed a link between PRV, which is common among farmed salmon, and HSMI.

Although the hydrogen peroxide mixture, called Paramove 50, has been used at other sites in B.C., it has never before been used in Clayoquot Sound and the provincial government says steps are being taken to ensure the pesticide is well-diluted before it is discharged.

A permit application, submitted by Cermaq to the B.C. Ministry of Environment, requests permission to use the pesticide between January 10, 2018 and January 9, 2021 at fish farms in Fortune Channel, Bedwell Sound, Cypress Bay, Herbert Inlet, Millar Channel and Shelter Inlet.

A proposal to pour pesticide directly into pens protected with tarpaulins was turned down and the province is demanding that a well boat be used to reduce the amount of pesticides and minimize the effect on other marine organisms.

“The treatment bath, inside the well boat, will begin naturally breaking down as additional seawater is added before it’s filtered and discharged into the ocean far from shore,” Environment Minister George Heyman said in an e-mailed statement.

In 2011, over 13,000 farmed Atlantic salmon were killed at an east coast fish farm after a well boat treatment that used Paramove 50, according to an incident report filed with Health Canada.

In Norway, 126,000 farm fish died in 2016 during delousing treatment, an event fish farming company SalMar said was likely due to overexposure to hydrogen peroxide.

The government is continuing to look at whether sea lice treatments are scientifically supported and consistent with international best practices and a new interim policy, to guide statutory decision-makers, demands more stringent information-gathering and reporting, Heyman said.

That interim policy will be reviewed “over time” to ensure it is having the desired effect, he said.

“We take very seriously the concerns related to sea lice treatment expressed by First Nations and the public as the the protection of our waters and health of our wild fish stocks is paramount,” he said.

The pesticide Paramove 50, which stuns sea lice, meaning they fall off fish as they rub up against each other, is being used instead of antibiotic insecticides administered in feed, because, globally, sea lice are becoming resistant to antibiotics given to farmed fish.

However, Cermaq says the company wants to use Paramove 50 because the hydrogen peroxide bath treatment has a low environmental impact and is a more natural way to manage sea lice than feeding pesticides.

“It’s important that, as farmers, we have multiple tools in the box to allow us to effectively manage sea lice on our marine farms,” said Cermaq Canada managing director David Kiemele in an e-mailed response to questions from DeSmog Canada.

“The request and subsequent approval for the use of Paramove 50 was our first step in achieving a multi-faceted approach to integrated pest management,” said Kiemele, adding that hydrogen peroxide has been used internationally and in other areas of B.C. without negatively affecting the environment.

The Cermaq website points out that “hydrogen peroxide is almost the same as water, with just one more oxygen molecule,” and that, as long as the treatment is used properly, there are no risks to wild or farmed fish.

The Cermaq website emphasizes that fish farmers take good care of their fish, which are their livelihood, and many steps are taken to ensure the treatment is done properly.

However, for Glambeck, the heart of the issue is that the discussion should not be about the best poison to put in B.C.’s coastal waters, but how to move fish farms out of the ocean.

“It will be a couple of years and then another chemical will be needed. We need to look for long term solutions,” she said.

“The problems of disease and sea lice are global fish farm problems that the industry has not been able to solve — and they are not trying to solve them because of concern about the environment but because it is costing them a lot of money — so the industry globally now is looking towards closed containment,” she said.

Land-based farms are the answer, for the industry and for wild fish, and both levels of government should be working at a transition strategy to support fish farm workers and communities, Glambeck said.

Two major land-based fish farms are opening in Maine, with the global trend towards land-based containment, and B.C. is going to be left out of the game if companies insist that ocean pens are the only way to go, she said.

“We are going to be stuck with 1980’s technology. Our governments need to be investing in moving this industry forward into the new millennium,” Glambeck said.

“At the same time we are losing our wild salmon and allowing them go the same way as the East Coast cod. All the markers are there, the science is there to show we really need to intervene and get these farms out of the ocean,” she said.

Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Land and Natural Resource Operations, who is in charge of provincial aquaculture tenures, has said that the province is interested in moving to closed containment and, with 22 fish farm tenures coming due for renewal in June, both the industry and environmental groups will be watching closely.

Image: Atlantic salmon farm in Clayoquot Sound. Photo: Clayoquot Action

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