VICTORIA — The B.C. government’s new “results-based” forestry regulation system is due to go into effect at the end of the year, and Forests Minister Rich Coleman agrees with critics that there is plenty of work remaining to make sure B.C.’s vast public forests and watersheds will be protected.
The Forest Practices Board, B.C.’s independent watchdog on the industry’s use of 47 million hectares of provincially-owned land, found numerous weaknesses in the first 15 “forest stewardship plans” submitted by industry.
Board chairman Bruce Fraser said he supports the results-based approach to replace a long list of regulations imposed on industry, but draft plans examined so far are vague, cover enormous regions and are written in complex legal language. Most provide little detail about where logging would actually take place, and “do not make commitments to measurable results or outcomes,” the board concluded.
“These forest stewardship plans simply do not reflect the high level of forest practices we find in our regular board audits and investigations,” Fraser said.
Coleman said the plans are still in draft form, and he accepts the board’s recommendations for plain-language stewardship statements, more detailed maps, and shortening the lifespan of stewardship plans from five years to allow faster response to public concerns.
“We’re going to implement their recommendations, frankly, and then we’re going to move forward,” Coleman said in an interview.
NDP forestry critic Bob Simpson questioned whether 400 stewardship plans could be done properly by next December.
He said the government’s new Forest and Range Practices Act also gives companies an “escape clause” from their obligations, because it states that objectives such as water quality and biodiversity must be met “without unduly restricting the flow of timber.
“People are concerned that we’ve taken our public forests, which we want to manage for a whole range of values, and said that timber values are pre-eminent,” Simpson said.