Logging on Private Land: Not in my own back yard!

Wilderness Committee Educational Report Vol.14 - No.08, Summer 1995

WCWC File Photo

The great Alberta timber rush

By Andrew Nikiforuk (excepts taken from an article which appeared in the "Georgia Strait")
  • Throughout Alberta, log purchasers from British Columbia (and Montana) have begun a concerted run on the province's private timber supply. Because of a growing scarcity of Crown or public wood in "Beautiful British Columbia", Alberta's privately owned timber has suddenly become the hottest of commodities. It's not unusual for an Alberta rancher to find in the mailbox the latest sales pitch from a tree starved British Columbia firm or contractor: "Attention Land Owners-Wanted: Standing Timber."
  • The pace and scale of Alberta's timber rush has been feverish and grand. More than $3 million worth of timber now rumbles off to B.C. sawmills every two days. That's more than three hundred truckloads of spruce, pine and fir per day, and that represents enough wood to employ 10 Alberta forest workers for a year.
  • The technological and financial pressures that have sent forestry companies... on 2,000-mile-long-fibre-hunting trips are varied and complex. Rising pulp prices are certainly one driving force, but so is the province's (B.C.'s) liberal supply of sawmills and pulp mills. "In essence, the B.C. mills have more capacity than allowable timber cuts available," notes Ron Hammerstedt, a forestry consultant in McBride, B.C. "They simply have to go out of province to ante up these mills."
  • Ten years ago, British Columbia was a net exporter of wood, says Charles Widman, a Vancouver forestry analyst and the publisher of World Wood Review. "But now we are a net importer. The scramble for fibre is going to get worse, not better. And the pressure on Alberta's wood is going to increase."

    • The Alberta advantage comes in two forms: unregulated private timber (pillaging is permitted) and cheap prices.

  • Compared to B.C. wood, Alberta's Crown timber is grossly under priced, due in part to government concessions and low stumpage fees granted to Japanese pulp mills in the boreal forest. (The price of Crown wood traditionally sets the price of private wood.) "Relative to the cost of logs in B.C., Alberta's wood is less expensive," notes Victor Komori, logging foreman at Slocan Forest Products in Valemount. Even with hauling charges, Alberta wood comes with a $20- to $40-per-cubic-metre price difference. Komori adds that if Alberta changed its stumpage fees to bring Crown wood up to a more competitive price, "the private logs would stop at the border."

    • Logging truck

    WCWC File Photo

  • To local (Alberta) mill operators, who see their futures, like bird's nest, being exported to B.C. everyday, the central issue is simply unfair competition. Because the same big corporate players operate in both provinces and can afford higher prices (given their access to cheap Crown timber), many small businesses fear they will be squeezed out of the industry altogether because they don't enjoy the same level of access to Crown lands.
  • Robert Essau, a farmer and mill operator in Flatbush in northern Alberta, says he may well be one such casualty by early spring. In the past three years, he has witnessed the price of timber increase from $30 per cubic metre to $163 per cubic metre.
  • Essau cuts two million board feet per year, employing 10 people for 150 days of the year and another 20 during the winter. "It's no great shakes, but it's better than welfare and fore me, as well." But unless the government intervenes and makes it more difficult for big mills to bid for private timber or local commercial timber permits - the lifeblood of small operations - his labour-intensive operation will die. "The big mills have tried to eradicate the small woodlot guys for years," he says. "We have always been a thorn in their side. Unless there is some help by spring, I don't think there will be a little mill left."
  • Perhaps the most drastic and immediate solution to the rush on privately owned timber would be an outright ban on the export of raw logs. Crown timber, for example, can't cross provincial border unless it has been modified by a mill blade. "If Alberta put in a ban, the rush would be over like that," says Hammerstedt.

    • "No matter how you look at it, it's a price war the little guy can't win."

  • Since the beginning of the timber rush, Alberta Environment Minister Tylund has steadfastly defended the right of Albertans to pillage their own land. He even blamed B.C. Forests Minister Andrew Petter for establishing forestry policies "that are causing us trouble".
  • To keep short-term thinking at a minimum, the municipality of Pincher Creek in southern Alberta has responded with a model bylaw designed, in the words of development office Doug Pickell, to address "the current surge [of] cutting frenzy in our back yards." He says the bylaw encourages simplicity and neighbourliness. With a dramatic landscape characterized by steep slope, high winds, and highly erodible soil, neither Pincher Creek nor its tourism industry can afford clear-cutting -where loggers denuded the land 100 years ago nothing has grown back.
  • If adopted throughout the province, though, Pincher Creek's bylaw would bring Alberta into the 21st century and enhance woodlot management. Nearly every European country has some restrictions on the cutting of timber on private land. So do most other provinces, particularly in the east, where small, privately owned woodlots play a major role in the forestry industry.

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