Hands off our publicly owned land

[GrooveTunes]

This must be stopped. Im sick of being locked out of publicly owned land by gates put up by the logging companies.

http://www.castanet.net/news/BC/112257/BC-to-revamp-timber-supply#.UzwYlDYOd7I.facebook

BC to revamp timber supply

Forests Minister Steve Thomson says the Liberal government is taking another shot at giving forest companies more rights to control British Columbia's public forest lands, but he rejects criticism that the plan would privatize provincial forests.

The move could dramatically change the way public forests are managed by granting lumber companies tenure rights, or logging rights, to large pieces of land. Companies are currently allotted timber harvest rights on a specified numbers of trees.

The proposed changes prompted immediate scorn from an environmental group and skepticism from the Opposition New Democrats.

"We're going to go totally to the wall over this one," said Ancient Forest Alliance spokesman Ken Wu. "The large forest companies have too long been special interest groups over our public forest lands."

Plans to amend the Forest Act last year to move towards area-based tenures were dumped after a public outcry.

Thomson announced a consultation program Tuesday that will consider public and industry opinion over converting forest land management to area-based tenures from its current volume-based tenure system.

The minister said area-based tenures will not be provincewide, moving only to areas where there is public approval.

He appointed Jim Snetsinger, a former B.C. chief forester, to oversee a two-month consultation process, with a report and recommendations due June 30. Snetsinger will hold public hearings in 10 communities.

Forest tenures or licences are agreements between the government and a person or company to provide logging rights on Crown land. Tenure holders must make payments to the government for timber harvested on Crown land.

Thomson said moving to area-based tenures will give forest companies more certainty over the land on which they harvest timber. He said the government still owns the land, but the companies would have long-term management rights.

"This only gives them timber-harvesting rights to the area as they currently have with volume-based licences," he said. "This is not privatization and not transferring rights to that area to the land holder other than those harvesting rights."

Thomson said last March when the Liberals shelved the changes that they require broader public consultation.

Wu said the only certainty British Columbians can expect from land-based tenures for forest companies is environmental destruction.

Opposition NDP forests critic Norm Macdonald said he understands why companies want to control forest land, but the government will have a tough time convincing the public to support the changes.

"Why the public would buy into this is beyond me," he said. "They have not made the case that this is for the public good. If this is a sales job, that's a problem."

[WhenWhatWho]

Well, judging by what I see how the public respects BC forests, this is probably a good thing.

[Rwede]

Volume-based tenure: go out and log X cubic meters of wood
Area-based tenures: go out on this piece of forest and log X cubic meters of wood

No change to AAC (annual allowable cut)

TFL 49 on the Westside is an area-based tenure. Is anyone gated off by Tolko from going fishing at Bear Lake? Nope.

[Daspoot]

But other areas of public land have been gated off, including popular fishing lakes. The best examples I know of are on the Island.

[Rwede]

But other areas of public land have been gated off, including popular fishing lakes. The best examples I know of are on the Island.

That land is all private property. It is not a Crown forest tenure.

[GrooveTunes]

http://focusonline.ca/?q=node/513

BC Liberals go ahead with another giveaway of publicly-owned land to corporations.

Three years ago, in a feature report entitled “The Big Burn,” Focus revealed the findings of a dozen retired forest service professionals about BC Liberal plans to privatize BC’s forests under pressure from what are called “distressed asset managers.” These are the mega-corporations like BAM (Brookfield Asset Management; now the top performing company in Canada) and TAM (Third Avenue Management) that buy up majority interests in distressed logging companies (including Canfor, Weyerhauser, Catalyst, Western Forest Products, TimberWest, Island Timberlands etc).

Through political pressure for deregulation (eg lobbying to get rid of riparian zone and watershed regulations), they manage to enhance their lands’ value. Then they strip off the timber and rationalize the lands into categories of real estate, bioenergy plantations, etc. Then they flip them. They’ve been incredibly successful in liquidating hundreds of thousands of hectares of heavily-subsidized private forests on Vancouver Island.

Now the BC Liberal government is amending the Forest Act in ways that will help such companies gain more control over public forestlands.

Distressed asset companies have been lobbying behind the scenes for a decade for their ideal tenure reform: changing volume licences—where they just get the trees, to the more lucrative area licences—where they get everything, including the underlying land.

The aftermath of a tragic fire at a Burns Lake sawmill and the perceived need to leverage money for a new sawmill to restore jobs in a distressed community—with an election looming—was just the prompt the Liberals needed to introduce “area-based tree farm licences at the minister’s invitation.”

Of course this legislative change may also open up a Pandora’s box for the Liberals just before an election. In 1988, the Socreds tried sneaking in this form of privatization—which is called “rollover”—and failed.

Forest licences were originally set up with checks and balances to limit companies from creating excessive “shareholder value” and to ensure some benefits came back to the public—either in the form of royalties or leaving the forest standing to provide all the ecosystem services that we enjoy. In the last 10 years, however, regulations governing licence holders have been eroded to such an extent that those checks and balances just aren’t there anymore.

With forest legislation and regulations gutted, licence holders don’t even have to provide management plans anymore. The natural next step for an aggressive, corporate-friendly government has now been taken: allowing companies to roll over their volume-based licences into area-based Tree Farm Licences. Many see this process as de facto privatization of public forests. Anthony Britneff, a retired government forester, says, “These tenures are like the granting of fiefdoms in which the company can strip and sell whatever they want without any requirement to invest in local infrastructure and to manufacture timber locally as a condition of holding tenure. There is no social contract in the public interest.”

A leaked Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations document dated April 7, 2012 revealed the Liberals were considering tenure reform back then to address an apparent request from Hampton Affiliates, the American company that owns 89 percent of Babine Forest Products, for government assurance of an adequate, secure timber supply before it would rebuild the mill at Burns Lake.

The memo suggests the annual allowable cut to feed the mill could be expanded far beyond what the region can sustain, leaving it decimated even by Ministry of Forests’ own internal accounts. The document also posits reducing the rules around old-growth timber, wildlife management and viewscapes. It notes that it may be necessary to suspend the chief forester’s authority to set the annual allowable cut and have those decisions made by the cabinet instead, without any public consultation. And it warns that such a dramatic policy change could trigger legal challenges.

Bob Simpson, independent MLA for Cariboo, first drew attention to the leaked document and correctly predicted new legislation would consist of “a few short paragraphs that will enable a designated politician to set the rules by which a private corporation can be given exclusive rights over areas of our public forests.”

Hampton Affiliates has a history of acquiring distressed forestry assets, stripping the timber and later selling the sawmills and underlying land. Their website currently features three sawmill sites in Washington and Oregon, levelled and ready for sale. One wonders how many jobs disappeared with closure of the sawmills in Leavenworth, Fort Hill and Packwood. Hampton also has a relationship with Brookfield Asset Management, having sold 67,700 acres of North Cascade Tree Farm to them in 2008 after it was stripped.

The details of Minister Thomson’s capitulation to Hampton’s demands are confusing. In a September 2012 letter to Hampton Affiliates, Thomson stated: “Based on the recommendations of the Timber Supply Committee regarding conversion of volume-based licenses to area-based licenses, we will bring legislation to the House at the next session.” And the Timber Supply Committee’s “approval” was front and centre again at the February 20 press release announcing the Forest Act amendments.

But the report of the bipartisan Timber Supply Committee, which is made up of sitting MLAs, didn’t make any such recommendations. Instead, it called for maintaining the past, cautious approach under the Forest Act, and if any conversions of tenure are to be made, the Committee suggested they should be towards more community-based tenures with public consultation. There’s also a discrepancy in timing. Thomson claims in the September letter to be listening to the Timber Supply Committee, but the leaked document from April suggests his mind was already made up a month before that committee was even struck.

But problems with the Liberals’ plan go deeper than the bad optics of misrepresenting the facts. No proper inventory of forest resources has been done in the last ten years in BC, so the Liberal government has no idea of the value of the forest being traded. As well, Thomson seems to be guaranteeing Hampton Affiliates—in addition to an increased annual allowable cut of saw logs—virtually every standing stick or shrub for their bioenergy plant. That kind of scorch-and-burn policy doesn’t leave any room for climate and biodiversity protection. And Thomson is offering this to a company that has a record of consolidating assets, dismantling sawmills and flogging the underlying land for higher earning ventures. Hampton will also be eligible for what such companies refer to as “entitlements in progress,” including potential compensation from First Nations’ claims, having say over other resource uses, and, of course, selling their TFL to whomever they want.

The worst-case scenario sees Hampton getting its TFL, decimating the region in search of fibre, not finding enough, coming up against legal challenges from everyone, launching a few of its own by claiming the fibre supply was misrepresented to get them to invest in the mill, and then walking away with compensation from taxpayers. The public would be left with devastated lands and “For Sale” signs for the abandoned sawmill.

There is also this precedent-setting issue: If one corporation gets a more secure forest tenure then what about all the others? And what expensive legal challenges will result if British Columbians vote for a new government in May, one that wants to change course?

Perhaps the most predictable aspect of the Hampton tenure question is that a debate over how Crown land is used was hijacked by the separate issue of how to get Burns Lake millworkers and others in the pine-beetle-impacted areas back to work. It’s a typical “shock doctrine” maneuver in which an important debate gets suppressed because of the urgent necessity of dealing with an emergency. Who wants to get between a man and the prospect of a return to his job?

But if we continue to carve up and lose our forests to short-term, private interests, our ability to fight climate change and keep functioning ecosystems that sustain life will be gone forever.

Briony Penn has been reporting on Crown land issues for many years; she believes a public forum on how we value our Crown lands is long overdue.See “The Big Burn” (August 2010) at http://www.focusonline.ca/?q=node/71.

[Rwede]

Penn is a far-left federal political wannabe who is angry at everything business-based as she lost her bid for the MP gravy train. She's also an enviro-looney with Raincoast, which are violently anti-logging/anti-business.

Of course she will conjure up a bunch of fear-mongering baloney as she tries to create an issue where there is none. That's what political wannabes do - and some are gullible enough to fall for it.

Why are people so against those who have jobs that provide the lumber for our homes and the paper we write on?

I ask again - who here has been denied access to TFL 49?

[twobits]

This must be stopped. Im sick of being locked out of publicly owned land by gates put up by the logging companies.

Right off the bat, with the first line of your post, you have demonstrated that you know nothing about forest tenures and prefer to launch a revolt with nothing more than a knee jerk reaction rooted to a political ideology.
Fact is these proposed land tenures do nothing to the status of the lands. They are and always will be crown lands. It is simply a change in how the forest assets are managed.
And there are basically two reasons why you would ever be denied access to Crown Lands. First would be protection of a sensitive area or species. Second would be for safety concerns for you. Active logging show and blasting, slide or washout or some such thing. If you are ever stopped by a gate or other physical barrier in the bush and it is not for one of those reasons then you are looking at private property and the owner has every right to deny you access. The gate was probably put there by the owner in frustration because of yahoo's that have no respect for the land and trash it with empties, un extinguished camp fires and mudder tires.

[Daspoot]

Penn is a far-left federal political wannabe who is angry at everything business-based as she lost her bid for the MP gravy train. She's also an enviro-looney with Raincoast, which are violently anti-logging/anti-business.

Of course she will conjure up a bunch of fear-mongering baloney as she tries to create an issue where there is none. That's what political wannabes do - and some are gullible enough to fall for it.

So aside from attacking the source, do you have any points to counter the original point?

Why are people so against those who have jobs that provide the lumber for our homes and the paper we write on?

They aren't, nobody said as much or even implied that. people have issue with how resource allocation has been going on under the current government who are all about selling off the resources to balance the books, so they can point at the books and say "see they are balanced" Which might be nice, because down the road it would seem all we'll have left is the books.

Don't play the tired old tune of "you must not like jobs" or "what you don't live in a house or use wood products" this isn't an either/or argument, even if you try to present it as such.

[Rwede]

This change to tenures has zero to do with "selling off" as nothing is being sold!

You've obviously never had any involvement in the industry but you sure raise a stink about something you know nothing about.

I've already told you what it means, yet you continue to post bafflegab.

Have you ever been denied access to TFL49?

[Daspoot]

This change to tenures has zero to do with "selling off" as nothing is being sold!

Symantics, you're ignoring the point.

You've obviously never had any involvement in the industry but you sure raise a stink about something you know nothing about.

Raising a stink is all relative, having involvement in the industry doesn't have anything to do with anything except attacking the source, rather than the points, again.


Access being denied due to "safety concerns" is just a little flip for my liking. Denied access to previously accessible lakes and areas on public/crown land is what this is about for most of us posting from the other side of the fence. If the safety concerns are there, why is Joe-Public denied access rather than the operator not making safe for both parties?

And yes I know how the roads got their in the first place.

[Rwede]

Forest and Range Practices Act already has the exact same provisions for operators to deny access to areas for safety concerns and for enviro concerns. No change there.

The operator falling trees beside the road should be denied access the same as the mushrom-picking guy driving his pickup that the operator is trying not to kill with a falling tree? Really? Is that what you're suggesting?

Non-industrial use of a road
22.2 (1) Subject to subsections (2) to (4) and to regulations respecting roads made under the Industrial Roads Act, a road that is

(a) a forest service road, or

(b) constructed or maintained by the holder of a road permit or a woodlot licence

may be used by any person, other than a person referred to in section 22.1, without charge.

(2) The

(a) district manager, for a forest service road, or

(b) holder of a road permit or a woodlot licence, for a road under the permit or licence,

may take action under subsection (3) if

(c) use of the road under subsection (1) would likely

(i) cause significant damage to the road,

(ii) cause significant sediment delivery, or

(iii) endanger property, public health or public safety, or

(d) the presence on the road of a vehicle or animal would likely cause damage to the road or environment or endanger life or property.

(3) In the circumstances described in subsection (2),

(a) the district manager, for a forest service road, may

(i) close the road or restrict its use, or

(ii) remove a vehicle or an animal from the road at the expense of the owner of the vehicle or animal, and

(b) the holder of a road permit or a woodlot licence, for a road under the permit or licence,

(i) with the prior consent of the minister, may close the road or restrict its use, or

(ii) may remove a vehicle or an animal from the road at the expense of the owner of the vehicle or animal.

Forest Service Roads are private roads. They are not public as the law stands today, depsite the fact we all use them.

Not a public highway
24 Despite section 42 of the Transportation Act, a road constructed or maintained under this Act, the Forest Act, the former Act as defined in section 1 of the Forest Act or the Forest Practices Code of British Columbia Act is not a public highway unless the Lieutenant Governor in Council declares it to be by an order in council that he or she may make under this Act.

[Daspoot]

The operator falling trees beside the road should be denied access the same as the mushrom-picking guy driving his pickup that the operator is trying not to kill with a falling tree? Really? Is that what you're suggesting?

Did you read that scenario in my post? Using an extreme example never mentioned is an age old way of trying to discredit someone's point. That's all your quote above is, a variation on a strawman argument, and far from the content of my post, or the subject of this topic.

Forest Service Roads are private roads. They are not public as the law stands today, depsite the fact we all use them.

As mentioned already, I know how the roads got there.

This is about, or has become about industry having the right to deny access to non-privately owned land, nobody wants to gather buttercups on a hillside they are actively blasting either. Just a simple matter of maintain dwindling public access rights, as, in some cases, people feel the closing of roads has been abused for illegitimate reasons, or no reason at all.

I know some extremists have taken to hysteria over what you see as trivial concerns, or maybe even no concerns at all. they represent one side, you, on this thread, have represented the other side. My guess is somewhere in the middle ground is probably the best compromise.

[Rwede]

Did you read what I posted? The operator already has the right to close the road. This is unchanged with the new Act.

If you don't like that a logging company can close a road when there is a dangerous operation going on, then go after the decade-old Forest and Range Practices Act, and don't waste your time battling legislation on forest tenures that is unrelated to your access concerns.

[Daspoot]

The answer lies in the link to the article.

Second line of this whole thread, and the topic of this thread.

Don't agree with the article? that's okay too, you don't have to try to sell it as something other than that.

Many people are tired of the actions of the governing bodies in regards to industry & allocation of natural (and in some cases non-renewable) resources vs. parks, public land, access, ownership and rights in general.

Many people do not like how the current governing body sneaks, or try to sneak through changes for the interest of industry/resource extraction at what the perceive to be the expense of the public, the environment, the future and Nature in general.

Many people don't believe what the current governing body says, as they've proven themselves unreliable, and to have ulterior motives.

We have seen a systematic dismantling of the rules and regulations put in place to protect and preserve.

Anything like this sets off alarms. get used to the loud and vocal outcry, rightfully aimed or not in your opinion. Hopefully we'll see change with the next election.