A new report, The State of the Forest in Canada: Seeing Through The Spin, from eight leading North American environmental groups shows that the federal government is failing to tally the environmental and climate damage caused by industrial logging in Canada.
According to a press release this morning, the report “shows that Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)’s annual report downplays or ignores the significant impacts of industrial logging on biodiversity, the climate, forest integrity, and ecosystem services, and its potential infringements of Indigenous rights.”
The report accuses Natural Resources Canada of failing “to provide Canadians with a transparent and credible synopsis” of basic information about the state of the nation’s forests, and of using “highly selective statistics and distorting or excluding essential information.”
Specifically:
The organizations highlight glaring omissions in the government’s annual report, including its lack of attention to the cumulative impact of industrial logging on remaining primary and old- growth forests, failures in forest regeneration due to logging infrastructure, population declines of key forest-dependent species such as threatened boreal caribou and the endangered spotted owl, and the lack of transparent accounting logging’s emissions footprint. This new report also, unlike the government’s publication, exposes examples of where there is misalignment between industrial logging practices and Indigenous rights.
The report is a joint effort from Canopy, the David Suzuki Foundation, Nature Canada, Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), Sierra Club BC, Sierra Club Canada, Stand.earth, and Wilderness Committee.
“Forests, for generations, have loomed large in Canada’s national identity, both for their embodiment of wilderness, and as a source of timber,” reads the report. “These two values have co-existed under the myth that forests are an inexhaustible resource.”
But, it notes, “In recent decades this myth has unraveled. Many logging companies are running out of easy-to-access timber, and the most ecologically and economically valuable types of forest are being rapidly depleted.”
The federal government falsely “portrays Canada’s forestry industry as a sector with a minimal footprint and an unimpeachable record of environmental stewardship” to “boost the forestry industry’s image.”
The report looks at the loss of forest ecosystem integrity, forest degradation deforestation caused by logging infrastructure, the loss of biodiversity, Indigenous rights and at carbon and climate impacts of the logging industry.
It notes that Natural Resources Canada’s system of accounting and reporting on the forest industry’s carbon impact is “fundamentally flawed, hiding logging’s impact behind carbon sinks in unlogged forests.”
The report recommends that the federal government “transparently and comprehensively report on industrial logging’s impact.”
“We’re seeing a conversion of healthy forest ecosystems to, at the landscape level, younger managed forests, fragmented by roads,” notes Rachel Plotkin of the David Suzuki Foundation. “The cumulative impact of logging year after year is changing the face of our forests, and our government refuses to acknowledge it. “
“The federal government is risking the well-being of future generations by failing to accurately report on the degradation of forests in Canada,” adds Michael Polanyi, policy and campaign manager at Nature Canada. “How can we protect biodiversity, mitigate climate change, and ensure the future of forest-dependent communities without accurate information? “
Halifax mayor promotes industrial forestry
Of course the federal government is not alone in its gentle touch with the industrial forestry sector. Provincial governments are equally complicit, and even municipal politicians are being brought into the industry fold.
The report that decries “current forestry practices” in Canada that have “degraded forests” comes on the heels of what Halifax Mayor Mike Savage called the “High Production Forestry conference” that was held in Dartmouth earlier this week.
Savage both attended and promoted the conference, called “From Seedling to Success: Fostering Healthy and Sustainable Managed Forests through State-of-the-Art Practices.”
The conference on “high performance logging” was organized by the organized the forestry industry group, Canadian Woodlands Forum, and it was dominated by industrial forestry heavyweights from J.D. Irving and Port Hawkesbury Paper among others whose business involves industrial logging, as well as Nova Scotia’s minister of Natural Resources and Renewables, Tory Rushton, and several public servants from his department.
As the Halifax Examiner reported here, the Canadian Woodlands Forum shares office space with the vociferous industry lobby association, Forest Nova Scotia, and many of its board members are the who’s who heavyweights in Nova Scotia’s forestry industry.
Canadian Woodlands Forum was also a supporter of the astroturf “Concerned Private Landowner Coalition” and its “Stop Bill 4 campaign” that led then-Premier Iain Rankin to give in and completely emasculate the province’s Biodiversity Act in 2021.
Calls for government transparency
Today’s report is by no means the first time environmental groups have criticized governments for bending to forestry interests in Canada, and failing to correctly account for the negative environmental and climate impacts of industrial logging.
Related: Industrial logging is one of Canada’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions: report
As Philip Moscovitch noted earlier this week, Benjamin Shingler of CBC News reported on a new peer-reviewed study published in the academic journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, which found “annual greenhouse gas emissions attributable to forestry between 2005 and 2021were, on average, nearly 91 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent — which would put the sector on par with emissions from the agricultural sector.”
And yet, Natural Resource Canada claims the forestry sector acts as a “carbon sink” that absorbs more carbon from the air than it emits into the atmosphere.
In launching today’s report, Richard Robertson, forest campaigner at Stand.earth noted that this simply not the case:
The reality is that current forestry practices in Canada have degraded forests making them vulnerable to larger and more intense fires, instead of leveraging their ability to act as carbon sinks. Canadians just lived through a devastating forest fire season and 2024 is expected to be even worse. It’s time for the federal government to realize that business-as-usual forestry is not a fix for the deepening climate catastrophe.