Urban Renaissance Institute

National Post
September 12, 2000

It is hard enough being trashed by the National Post without the source of the attack being a colleague whom I respect. Unfortunately, Lawrence Solomon’s got his facts all twisted up with his free-market ideology in “The envirocrats’ betrayal of the environment“ (August 29).

Mr. Solomon has done brilliant work skewering the sacred fiscal cow of Canada’s nuclear industry, and the organizations he helped found (Energy Probe, Probe International and Environment Probe) do important work. But he doesn’t know much about Canada’s forests. Environment Probe, which Mr. Solomon quotes without acknowledging as his own, is fixated on advocating the privatization of millions of hectares of Crown land as the solution to over-cutting and damaging forest practices in Canada. Unfortunately, this fixation is blinding him to the evidence that private lands are no better treated than Crown lands, and, in many provinces, are noticeably subject to greater abuse. The issue of “liquidation cuts” is increasingly in the news in the Maritimes where privately owned woodlots are being clear-cut with serious damage to downstream water users and to the local environment.

But no regulations apply, and private multinational companies are buying up land, as well as pressuring cash-strapped contractors to bring feller bunchers onto long-held family woodlots. Contractors have literally been going door to door to get economically stressed landowners to agree to clear-cutting their whole woodlot.

Yes, we must get rid of perverse subsidies to logging operations. But the evidence is strong that regulations and enforcement, more than ownership patterns alone, will determine the post-logging health of forest land.

When it comes to attacking virtually every environmental group in the country over the current agreement in Clayoquot Sound, Mr. Solomon is even more confused. His premise is that Sierra Club of British Columbia and other groups made some sort of deal with the government. Actually, following long years of protests in Clayoquot Sound, discussions began between the industry, organized labour, environmental groups and the Nuu-Chah-Nulth First Nation. What resulted was protection of key pristine watersheds within Clayoquot Sound, which had previously been slated for clear-cutting.

The Nuu-Chah-Nulth and MacMillan Bloedel (now Weyerhauser) established a forest company to conduct ecologically sensitive logging — not clear-cutting — in areas already fragmented by logging operations. Environmental groups joined in an agreement to ensure employment opportunities for a community in desperate need of them.

It is hard to understand how the National Post could publish something so ill-informed. But, then again, it’s only a week since your call to bring back DDT.

Elizabeth E. May, Executive Director, Sierra Club of Canada, Ottawa

In his diatribe, Lawrence Solomon managed to malign many of the largest and most effective environmental organizations in Canada. The gullible traitors named, in order of appearance are: the Western Canada Wilderness Society, Greenpeace, Sierra Club of British Columbia, National Resources Defense Council, World Wildlife Fund, Federation of Ontario Naturalists and Wildlands League. Everybody is wrong it seems, except Lawrence.

I wonder why the Financial Post regularly gives Mr. Solomon a platform for his unusual views. Perhaps its because he represents the kind of stereotypical environmentalist that neo-conservatives love to hate: narrow, strident, righteous, arrogant and futile.

Today, most environmental organizations are more interested in results than righteous rhetoric and civil disobedience. In the difficult economy of the 1990s, they have found that considering all the interests of forest communities can result in real progress for nature, even though the outcome is less than perfect. Given the risks of negotiating for nature, it is important that hard questions are asked and the negotiators are challenged.

This is healthy and necessary. However, Mr. Solomon would be more effective if he shared information and views with the conservation organizations on the front line. Public attacks to weaken and deride conservation organizations are like standing outside a house and throwing rocks at the windows. This is less effective than getting involved with the folks inside, unless of course his real objective is the fun of breaking glass.

L. R. L. (Ric) Symmes, Executive Director, Federation of Ontario Naturalists

Unfortunately, the forest giveaway happened long ago. Almost all of Ontario’s public forests are under licence to forest companies. In the close to 50 million- hectare area covered by the recent land use strategy, all public land not within a park or conservation reserve was licensed to forest companies many years ago. This means all public forests not within protected areas will be logged.

Lara Ellis, project director, Wildlands League, Toronto.

Lawrence Solomon takes delight in criticizing my support for the Ontario government’s decision to permanently protect six million acres of the province’s wilderness, through 378 new or expanded parks and conservation reserves — the largest protected area in the province’s history.

I realize not everyone wants to believe that Mike Harris has done anything good for conservation, but the Living Legacy announcement represents a doubling of Northern Ontario’s protected areas network.

Monte Hummel, president, World Wildlife Fund Canada.

Read Mr. Solomon’s response: “Land deals save the exploiters”

Read “The envirocrats’ betrayal of the environment”

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
September 12, 2000

When the Federation of Ontario Naturalists’ Ric Symmes, along with his counterparts at World Wildlife Fund and the Wildlands League, negotiated the Ontario Forest Accord last year with government and industry, they achieved something that would have otherwise been politically impossible — this century’s largest giveaway of Ontario’s resources to logging and mining interests. This deal, Mr. Symmes claims, was a necessary compromise given “the difficult economy of the 1990s.”

The 1990s difficult? Apart from the early 1990s, the decade was recession-free. By 1999, the year these groups signed the accord, unemployment had dropped to 1970s levels, inflation was less than 2%, government debt plummeted as the federal government and most provinces began running surpluses, exports soared and the TSE — in its biggest bull run ever — had transformed itself into a high-tech index and was poised to overtake the Dow Jones.

Many industries boomed in the 1990s, but not the ones Mr. Symmes identifies with. Not the forest industry, whose investors were fleeing, and not mining, whose stock promoters abandoned it in droves for the dot-com world. Mining and logging, two of the country’s chief rapers of the environment, were on the ropes. In their time of need, Mr. Symmes was there for them. With his help, they received government guarantees no other industrial sector could ever imagine — including perpetual access to price-frozen resources.

Instead of letting nature take her course, and letting these outdated industries contract drastically to their economically rational size, the Forest Accord ensures that the mining and forestry industries live to rape another day. In his zeal to cut a deal, Mr. Symmes has not protected the environment; he has protected two of its chief exploiters from the marketplace. Mr. Symmes pretends his deal has widespread support. In fact, the deal he and his cohorts signed with government and industry behind closed doors had widespread opposition among environmental groups, the native community and tourist operators: If the tourist industry needs intact forests to grow, it will now be taxed to compensate loggers. Neither is this resource giveaway economically sound: No independent economist in the country would endorse subsidizing money-losing resource sectors at the expense of the productive parts of the economy.

My colleague at Sierra Club, Elizabeth May, claims forests fare no better on private lands than on Crown lands. Having studied forest land regimes in Canada, the United States, Sweden, Finland, and several Third World countries, I know Ms. May to be entirely misinformed. She deplores the state of private woodlots in the Maritimes, which she presents as some sort of unregulated bastion of free-market forestry. In fact, Maritime governments thoroughly control small woodlots, adjusting wood marketing board regulations to increase feedstocks to the mills, devising managed woodlot programs to subsidize those who agree to log, and punishing woodlot owners who would otherwise stop logging. Nova Scotia’s “change-of use” tax — a steep 20% of the land’s market value as a managed woodlot — dissuades small owners from, for example, retiring on their woodlots by putting them to cottage use. The tax “keeps it in production, in forestry use,” explains Arden Whidden, the province’s director of private lands.

Yes, in the Maritimes some small woodlot owners have been clearcutting. Some, to Ms. May’s way of thinking, may be greedy; Others may need the money for their retirement. But the vast majority — about 90% of New Brunswick’s 40,000 woodlot owners, for example — have refused to clearcut, despite government policies that push them to do so, despite six years of sky-high prices, and despite the aggressive tactics of logging contractors that Ms. May describes. Small woodlot owners tend to log selectively or not at all. Yet Ms. May equates their conduct to the government’s – – even implying they clearcut more than government — when clearcutting accounts for more than 90% of logging on Crown-owned timberland, regardless of wood prices. The contrast between logging on private woodlots and logging on Crown land could not be more clear cut.

The giveaway of Ontario’s resources did not start with the Ontario Forest Accord, as the Wildlands League’s Lara Ellis correctly notes. But prior to the so-called Lands for Life negotiations that led to the accord, resource companies had limited rights and – – without subsidies — little or no ability to wreak havoc on the environment. That has changed, explains the Canadian Environmental Law Association, one of Canada’s leading environmental law firms, in a damning brief on the dealmaking, which it dubbed “The Lands for Mining Companies.”

CELA fears the government has given loggers and miners new rights “to such a degree that future governments and future generations will be precluded from making land use protection decisions. By arguably increasing the tenure of forestry and mineral interests in land use allocations, outside of the parks and protected areas designated, now, there will be huge economic costs to future governments who want to protect more land. This is partly because the process for additional protection is vague and non-specific, while the forest industry is given guarantees to present levels of fibre and wood supply, and without increased costs.” The forestry companies also obtained “undisputedly and for the first time, access to the vast lands north of the 50th parallel,” explains lawyer Theresa McClenaghan, principal author of the CELA brief.

Put another way, the resource companies knew what they were doing. And so did the Mike Harris government, which selected World Wildlife Fund, Wildlands League and Federation of Ontario Naturalists — and excluded natives and all other environmentalists — to negotiate in secret on behalf of all the rest of us.

In the past, environmentalists fought for full disclosure and a transparent public process. The Ontario Forest Accord, and the government-backed Clayoquot deal Elizabeth May defends, rips the heart out of environmental principles. The Clayoquot negotiations “were anything but open and transparent,” says Valerie Langer of Friends of Clayoquot Sound. CELA’s report states: “[T]hese commitments have been given to a selected group of companies, based on an arbitrary, ad hoc and non- public process.”

Read part 1: “The envirocrats’ betrayal of the environment”

Read letters of response

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
August 29, 2000

The great battle to preserve Canada’s environment took another drubbing last week. The loser this time was old- growth forest in British Columbia’s Clayoquot Sound, where the chainsaws whirred while the victors — a species of environmentalists known as envirocrats — cheered them on. “We have changed,” enthused Adriane Carr of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, a fine specimen of the mutated environmentalist. “We realize there can be a mixed economy here.”

Your group has changed, Adriane. Western Canada Wilderness Committee once helped inspire one of the biggest shows of civil disobedience in Canadian history — the 1993 non-violent protests that led to more than 800 arrests, focused the world’s attention on B.C.’s coastal rainforests as never before, and dramatically restrained the wanton destruction of one of the world’s most special places. Now your group — along with fellow envirocrats at Greenpeace, Sierra Club of British Columbia and Washington-based Natural Resources Defence Council — has joined your former adversaries: the B.C. government, which remains bent on uneconomically cutting Crown-owned trees, and the forestry companies, which are only too willing to profit from the government’s squandering ways. You have become a self- appointed, quasi-government bureaucrat, negotiating deals on behalf of the public at large, making compromises on behalf of those who don’t want to be compromised.

You are not alone, I know. Envirocrats are teaming up with industry and governments elsewhere in B.C. and Canada. Last year in Ontario, envirocrats at World Wildlife Fund, the Federation of Ontario Naturalists and the Wildlands League signed the Ontario Forest Accord, one of this century’s biggest resource giveaways. The accord effectively delivers most of the province to mining and logging interests, promising, for example, to help sawmills and pulp and paper mills obtain improved access to Crown forests in order to log farther and faster, and endorsing the ever-richer taxpayer subsidies needed to maintain uneconomic resource operations. Working on the public’s behalf, our envirocrats agreed to punish eco-tourist operations that depend on wilderness areas: If tourist operators insist on plying their trade in wooded areas, they will be taxed to compensate forestry companies for the inconvenience of logging elsewhere.

The very day the envirocrats signed the accord, the Ontario government issued press releases trumpeting its triumph, and announcing a slew of new mining subsidies. “Ontario is open for business,” the government boasted, saying that under the accord, the mining industry is free to prospect in protected areas. If ore is found, the industry can “borrow park land for mining while substituting it with land of equal natural heritage value.” After the parks are mined out, the industry would “restore land to the parks system.”

Astonishingly, the accords require the envirocrats to become mouthpieces for the industries and the governments they claim to watch over. In British Columbia, envirocrats have committed not only to endorse but actually to market old- growth wood for forestry companies. To justify the logging of old-growth forest, some envirocrats rationalize that the logging will mimic nature by taking down big trees, just as a winter storm or disease would — as if big trees, or fallen trees, pose a problem for Mother Nature. In Ontario, as part of a multi-million-dollar PR campaign to boost the image of the Mike Harris Conservatives, envirocrat Monte Hummel, president of World Wildlife Fund Canada, did his PR duty this week.

“This government has made an unprecedented contribution to conservation on a global scale. This is definitely a good day for loons, for old-growth forest and protected areas, and it’s a good day for people too,” he says, in an extravagant poster-sized insert lauding the accord that arrived on Ontarians’ doorsteps Saturday and Monday, along with their morning newspapers. The glossy, four-colour insert — Ontario’s Living Legacy — says nothing of the accord’s legacy of senseless wilderness destruction.

Although envirocrats think they are driving hard bargains and striking necessary balances between the needs of the environment and the needs of the economy, they are, in fact, being gulled. Without government subsidies, such as those that Ontario’s envirocrats helped secure for the resource industries, Ontario would see little large-scale logging. Most logging in British Columbia’s old-growth forests would also stop, because the land is worth much more as standing forest. An Environment Probe study of logging in B.C.’s Carmanah Valley, another forest battleground last decade, found that MacMillan Bloedel then stood to earn between $1-million and $2-million for logging the entire valley over many years — less than the profit one high-end tourist lodge could expect.

The Wilderness Committee’s embrace of what Ms. Carr touts as a “mixed economy” for Clayoquot Sound should not be confused with a market economy. The B.C. government runs its forests as a giant make-work project, even in the prized residential and tourist country that includes Clayoquot Sound. Private woodlot owners don’t log at a loss and, when not coerced by governments, they often don’t log at all, because wooded areas generally have higher recreational value, whether for wilderness camping, hunting or cottage lands. Private woodlot owners, unlike governments, often dream of passing on their lands to their children and grandchildren. If only the envirocrats shared the same concern for the future.

From an Ontario government press release dated March 29, 1999, the day the Ontario Forest Accord was signed.

Hodgson says Living Legacy Good News for Northern Ontario

The province’s Living Legacy and the Lands for Life process on which it was built, are good news for Northern Ontario, Northern Development and Mines Minister Chris Hodgson said today. … we can assure the sector that it has achieved the certainty it wants for the industry. “Access for environmentally sensitive mineral exploration is being protected in areas of provincially significant mineral potential, and it is business as usual for existing claim holders and mining activity already underway.”

“We are satisfied with the degree of certainty Living Legacy provides for the long term,” said Michael Wills of RBC Dominion Securities. “The government is willing to put its guarantees in a written contract and that substantially increases our comfort level.”

“It is vital that we have the access we need to land in Ontario with significant mineral potential,” said Inco’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Sopko. “This initiative contributes to ensuring the continued success of the mineral industry in Ontario.”

“We are pleased that exploration will be allowed within the new protected areas,” said Don McKinnon, director of MCK Mining and Baltic Resources. “It makes good sense to follow carefully prescribed practices that have already proven successful in environmentally sensitive areas.”

The minister also announced that the province would be investing $21-million over two years for programs to boost mineral exploration in Ontario.

“Along with freezing mining taxes and fees, reducing red tape, streamlining regulations as well as lowering Workplace Safety and Insurance Board rates for mining, this government has demonstrated to the international mining community that we welcome its investments,” said Hodgson. “We’re proud of our track record on this front and fully intend to remain the front runners in this industry.”