News Coverage

May 26, 2024
By Stefan Labbe
The Times Colonist

Original article here.

BC and Canadian forestry associations aim to tell a story that places them as the ‘hero’ in a fight against wildfires. One critic says the strategy is ‘mendacious and dangerous.’

On a rainy Friday in April, industry executives and government officials were sitting on the fourth floor of a Vancouver casino hotel. From the stage, a pitch for the future of forestry was on repeat: what if logging companies could be the heroes who saved British Columbia from wildfires?

Many of the speakers at the annual BC Council of Forest Industries (COFI) convention focused on how the sector could return to higher levels of harvest or slow the pace of government regulations. Then the conversation turned to wildfires.

David Coletto, head of the market research firm Abacus Data, presented the results from a poll he designed with COFI. After Canada’s most destructive wildfire season on record, the results suggested the BC public was ready to accept a narrative that the forestry industry could act as a saviour.

As Coletto put it, everybody in this province agrees who is the villain: it’s the fire.

“And so now you have a place to be a hero in that story,” he said, speaking to members of the logging industry in the room. “That’s a complete paradigm shift to where you were a few years ago, where you were often seen as the villain.”

Leaning on the data, COFI president and CEO Linda Coady said BC needs a “compelling story” that attracts investors, one that describes a convergence between fixing wildfires and increasing the supply of wood fibre.

Jamie Stephen, the managing director of the energy and resources consulting firm TorchLight Bioresources, put it another way.

“Counterintuitively, if governments and the public want forestry to contribute to climate mitigation in Canada, we have to harvest more, not less,” he said.

Does logging more prevent wildfires?

The call to re-frame forestry as the solution to wildfire comes less than a year after the most destructive season in Canada’s recorded history burned an area roughly half the size of Italy.

Experts interviewed for this story agreed the best solution to a growing wildfire crisis is to reduce the amount of forest fuels that have built up for more than a century — the result of unbridled wildfire suppression and logging practices that have left forests primed to burn. But just who should decide how to do that has divided many in industry, government and science.

On one side, the timber sector says it should drive the solution; on the other, critics say it’s dangerous to allow an industry that helped spawn the problem direct its solution through their version of “forest management.”

​“It appears to be that they’re asking government and Canadians to write a blank check… It’s disaster capitalism — where industry takes advantage of a crisis to make money,” said Julee Boan, the Canada program project manager for the National Resource Defense Council.

Boan said the record 2023 wildfires “really scared people” and left many looking for answers to a “wicked and complex problem” too big for any single sector to deal with.

“This is really complicated,” said Boan, who also has a PhD in forestry science. “They need to be part of this discussion on what to do. But they can’t be leading it.” ​

The 2023 Donnie Creek wildfire north of Fort St. John, BC, was the province’s largest ever in terms of area burned. BC Wildfire Service

​The disagreement hinges on what appears to be a simple question: does logging more reduce wildfires? Glacier Media asked seven experts in wildfires and forest ecology to help answer that question.

Karen Price, an old-growth ecologist who served as a technical advisor on BC’s Old Growth Strategic Review, said she now frequently hears the argument for logging to solve wildfires from people inside the Ministry of Forests.

She described the argument put forward at the COFI conference as “mendacious and dangerous” and that she has “seen no evidence to support logging to reduce wildfire risk in most of BC’s ecosystems.”

Price said thinning — removing small trees, leaving big ones and then burning understories — can reduce fire risk in some fire-dominated ecosystems. But in the thin-barked ecosystems that make up most of BC, those practices would burn big trees.

“And even worse, where people have thinned in the name of ‘fuel reduction,’ they’ve taken the big trees and left small ones, removing old-growth values with no decrease in wildfire risk…” said Price.

‘Forest management’ far more nuanced than ‘logging’

Price pointed to evidence from BC, collected in May 2023, when BC Forest Service ecologist Paula Bartemucci carried out a field visit in a forest at Deception Lake outside the town of Smithers. The forest had earlier been deemed to have a “sufficiently high fuel hazard to warrant treatment.” A contractor was brought in to thin the forest and remove 15 tons of surface fuels per hectare, according to her report.

The forest there has spruce up to 200 years old and is classified as “big-treed old forests.” But after it was thinned, the forest “no longer had large, standing dead trees, large downed wood, large live trees, or abundant regeneration of various sizes,” wrote Bartemucci.

“The treated forest has lost old forest structure and function.”

Bartemucci later added that “the thinning treatment will likely make the site vulnerable to fire” — a result of increased drying, stronger winds, and lower relative humidity than before.

Price said that report is part of a body of evidence suggesting only fire-dominated forests of interior BC should be thinned and burned with low-intensity fires.

Fireweed grows among forest fire tree snags in BC’s Kootenay National Park. James Gabbert / iStock / Getty Images Plus

Most of the forest ecologists interviewed for this story agreed that limiting wildfires would require a combination of leaving moist forests unharvested, leaving burned forests unsalvaged, and encouraging the re-growth of more fire-resistant deciduous trees.

​​Lori Daniels, a professor in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry, said the forestry industry would need to go through a transformative change if it wants to be part of the solution to wildfires.

“While it is true that fuels need to be reduced and reconfigured across many landscapes of interior BC, forestry as it is currently practiced in BC contributes to the wildfire problem. So more of the same is deeply problematic,” said Daniels in an email.

Mathieu Bourbonnais, an assistant professor at UBC Okanagan’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Geographic Sciences, said that if logging to reduce wildfires means more cutblocks and more conifer tree plantations of a single species “then it won’t help at all.”

Bourbonnais said mechanical thinning may use some of the same equipment as logging but generally involves removing fibre that is not profitable, such as small trees and saplings.

“They aren’t wrong in that we need to figure out ways to remove large amounts of hazardous fibre from many of our forests, but how to do that is far more nuanced than ‘logging.’ I hear this a lot but conflating logging with fuel treatments is a problem,” said Bourbonnais.

Evidence from U.S. show limits of ‘forest management’

Forest ecologist Rachel Holt, who also served on BC’s Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel, said that for forest management to actually reduce wildfires, it needs to focus on feeding value-added mills with small bits of wood — not chipping logs to feed the pellet industry and not exporting barely processed timber.

When Holt hears the words “forest management” she says it’s never clear what vision is actually being talked about. Rarely, she said, is there a recognition that to be successful, forest management will require cutting fewer trees.

“I hear the same words, but they don’t mean the same thing,” she said. “They are talking about sanitizing the forest of its biodiversity values — i.e. its old trees, its dead trees. They are talking about creating an agricultural forest.”

One 2022 study looking at thinning practices across the American West found “active management” led to widespread logging of fire-resistant live trees and snags. Degradation of wildlife habitat was “functionally equivalent to clear-cutting the forest understorey” in many cases leading to “weed-infested woodlands or savannahs that look nothing like the original forest.”

High-severity wildfire, found the study, is “substantially underestimated in thinned areas.”

A firefighter from the BC Wildfire Service’s Rhino Unit Crew prepares to cut down trees to reduce potential fuel on the south edge of the Stoddard Creek wildfire. The 2023 wildfire season was BC’s most destructive ever. BC Wildfire Service

Dominick DellaSala, who led the study as the chief scientist at Oregon’s Wild Heritage, said he is now working on studies across southeast Australia, the western U.S. and Canada that suggest previously harvested young forests “prime the fire pump” and burn hotter than old forests. In each region, he said logging has replaced old forests with slash and densely packed trees grown on a plantation model.

“And everyone knows when you start a fire, you start with kindling, small material, not the gigantic trees that you get in an old-growth forest,” he said.

DellaSala, who has been testifying about the effects of logging before the U.S. Congress since the 1990s, said in recent years, the U.S. timber industry has ramped up a lobbying campaign that frames wildfire as a solution only they can fix. The evidence suggests the “complete opposite” of what the timber industry is saying, with “messaging is akin to tobacco-cancer denialism and climate change denialism.”

“Right out of those playbooks,” DellaSala said.

A 2020 joint investigation involving the Oregon Public Broadcasting, The Oregonian/Oregon Live, and ProPublica uncovered documents that showed the timber industry aimed “to frame logging as the alternative to catastrophic wildfires through advertising, legislative lobbying and attempts to undermine research that has shown forests burn more severely under industrial management.”

In one 2019 presentation to the Oregon House Committee On Natural Resources, Chris Edwards of the Oregon Forest Industries Council showed a slide of a timber-framed building next to a young child with an oxygen mask.

“Where would you rather store carbon?” it reads. “Here? Or here?”

A national campaign to show ‘Canadian Forestry Can Save the World’

In Canada, using wildfires to influence public opinion appears to only just be taking off. Holt, who attended the COFI conference, said it was the first time she heard BC’s forest industry explicitly planning to frame itself as heroes ready to solve wildfires. She said she was shocked by the open conversation on how to influence public opinion and government.

But a closer look at forestry industry groups across Canada shows BC is not the only province where such a public narrative is taking shape.

Many of the largest forestry companies operating in Canada count themselves as members of multiple industry groups. Paper Excellence, West Fraser and Weyerhaeuser are all members of both the BC-based COFI and the Forests Products Association of Canada (FPAC).

According to Meta’s Ad Library, FPAC has spent thousands of dollars and reached millions of people on its “Forestry for the Future” campaign. The ads frame industry as players reducing wildfire risk as early as 2022. In one advertisement shared across Facebook and Instagram, the national industry group tells people to “take action” by emailing “your MP to support the policies that will improve forest conditions and keep communities safe.”

It goes on: “We can help mitigate wildfire risk through responsible forestry.”

On June 8, 2023, near the height of the 2023 wildfire season, FPAC’s president and CEO Derek Nighbor presented a blueprint for the campaign in a presentation to the Maritime Lumber Bureau in Saint John, N.B.

“Persuasion and opinion change are not something that happen overnight. Retention of information requires multi-platform saturation, memorable executions, and consistency of message to seed the underlying facts,” reads one slide.

The presentation, first reported by the Halifax Examiner, then lists a number of campaign activities — on transit shelters, at airports, through a “Capturing Carbon” documentary and through its “Canadian Forestry Can Save the World” podcast.

Other activities include TikTok and Instagram influencer partnerships, Indigenous partnerships and cross-platform digital advertising. By June 2023, the public influencing campaign had already reached 13.1 million Canadians — more than a quarter of the country’s population.

The presentation ends with a three- to five-year plan in which FPAC looks to expand its reach and appeal “to drive policy change and the sector’s place as a critical part of a growing, green economy.”

Glacier Media asked David Coletto what role Abacus Data had in shaping FPAC’s Forestry for the Future campaign, and who came up with the idea for COFI to use wildfire as a way to turn the forest industry into the ‘hero.’

Coletto declined to comment.

Familiar tactics from the same PR firms

Melissa Aronczyk has spent years tracking the PR strategies corporations and politicians use to reshape the narrative around environmental problems. A professor of media studies at Rutgers University, Aronczyk said FPAC and COFI’s public messaging are all well-known tactics.

“They are sometimes used in crisis situations, but more often these tactics are part of a long-term strategy to change the narrative around the industry to appear less environmentally destructive. This is a common playbook that gets opened up time and time again,” she said.

What’s remarkable about the playbook, Aronczyk said, is that it’s been around since at least the 1990s, an indication they are effective in influencing both the public and politicians.

Like COFI, documents show FPAC has also leaned on market research from Abacus Data to frame its Forestry for the Future campaign. Founded in 2010, the market research firm was formally chaired by Bruce Anderson, who worked alongside Coletto while leading accounts for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and the Canadian Energy Pipelines Association, among others, according the website of his current PR firm spark*advocacy.

Anderson was also the founding partner of the Earnscliffe Strategy Group back in the 1990s, a firm that more recently has carried out lobbying for Pathways Alliance, a coalition of six fossil fuel companies that together account for 95 per cent of Canada’s oil sands production.

Aronczyk learned of the connections in a recent peer-reviewed study she carried out with two colleagues from Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. The research, published earlier this month, found the coalition had engaged in several examples of greenwashing — including producing non-credible claims to the public and selectively disclosing and omitting information.

Aronczyk said public relations firms are “notorious for their coordination and communication across industry sectors,” and often share resources and strategies through industry coalitions.

She said Abacus’s latest work for Canada’s forestry industry appears to be carrying on that tradition.

May 17, 2024
By Shannon Waters
The Narwhal

See the original Narwhal article here.

As the BC Conservatives surge in the polls, party leader John Rustad — kicked out of the BC Liberal caucus for promoting a tweet spreading misinformation about climate change — says he would scrap the province’s pledge to create new conserved areas

A BC Conservative Party government would walk away from the province’s commitment to protect 30 per cent of its land base by 2030, party leader John Rustad told The Narwhal in an interview.

“The Conservatives would absolutely axe doing that,” Rustad said. “That’s nonsense.”

“It’s 30 per cent of all of our ecosystems,” he said. “What are we going to do if we have 30 per cent less food production? What are we going to do if we’re going to have 30 per cent less forestry production? What are we trying to achieve here as a province?”

Rustad’s comments come as the BC Conservatives surge in the polls five months before the provincial election, with Premier David Eby calling the Conservatives “a real threat” to the NDP’s chances of regaining power. An Abacus Data poll released May 14 showed the Conservatives only eight points behind the BC NDP, which has been in government since 2017. A Pallas Data poll released May 16 put the two parties in a dead heat, with the BC Conservatives leading the NDP by one point at 38 per cent of the vote.

Rustad has led the upstart BC Conservatives for just over a year, after being kicked out of the opposition BC Liberal caucus in 2022 for promoting a social media post that expressed doubt about climate change science. Since Rustad’s acclamation as party leader, and as the popularity of federal Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre grows, support for the BC Conservatives has steadily climbed.

The BC NDP’s pledge to protect 30 per cent of the province was made as the world faces a growing biodiversity crisis. It follows a commitment from almost 200 countries, including Canada, to address the unprecedented loss of wildlife and biodiversity worldwide by protecting 30 per cent of their land and waters over the next six years. According to the World Economic Forum, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse represent one of the largest risks the world faces over the next decade, with dire consequences for the environment, humankind and economic activity if not addressed.

Rustad’s Conservatives reject plan to protect more of B.C.

Rustad asserted that protecting more land in B.C. would “create more vulnerability” for residents, saying 15 per cent of the province is already protected in some form. He also said B.C. has “more protected land … than any other jurisdiction” in Canada.

In 2023, all provinces and territories agreed to contribute to the federal government’s 30-by-30 conservation targets, saying in a joint statement they would help work toward “halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030 and to put nature on a path to recovery by 2050.”

The BC Conservatives are also pledging to repeal B.C.’s law upholding the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

“The vast majority of [B.C.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act] is fine,” Rustad, who was minister of Aboriginal relations and reconciliation under the former BC Liberal Party government, said in the interview. But he said the legislation effectively gives First Nations a veto over activities on their land, a claim countered by the B.C. government and many others.

“The government doesn’t admit it, but they won’t make any decisions unless they reach consensus — that’s equivalent to a veto,” Rustad said. “I want to see us actually go after what I call economic reconciliation. We need to work with First Nations, we need to help them get engaged economically — not to take from one people to give to another, but to add to the economic pie to make sure that First Nations can prosper from the land, from their traditional territories.”

Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Nathan Cullen called Rustad’s stance on conservation targets unfortunate, telling The Narwhal the 30-by-30 targets have broad support in B.C.

“I’m hearing more and more from the natural resource sector, from hunters and conservationists and environmentalists, that [the] relationship-based approach, rights-based approach is a good way to go,” said Cullen, who is responsible for implementing the conservation policy.

“Indigenous-led conservation through land use planning processes is the way that we’ll achieve durable and diverse conservation. We can bring communities together — [and] bring our best science and understanding together — to make sure that the conservation that we undertake represents the many diverse ecosystems in B.C. and is done in full co-operation leadership with First Nations rights and title holders.”

Rustad represents ‘a scary way of doing things,’ Na̲nwak̲olas Council president says

The Na̲nwak̲olas Council is one of the Indigenous groups currently participating in discussions about how B.C. can implement 30-by-30 conservation targets. In an interview, council president Dallas Smith said the policy’s positive impacts will reach far beyond the areas protected, adding the council is interested in expanding the Great Bear Rainforest protected areas on land and in the marine environment.

“It’s about how do we actually make a sustainable path going forward that includes the economy, and community human wellbeing as well,” Smith said. “That’s just the way it’s got to work going forward. We can’t have these discussions in isolation anymore.”

Smith is no stranger to provincial political life, having run for the BC Liberals (now called BC United) in 2017. When Rustad was minister of Aboriginal relations and later minister of forests, lands and natural resource operations in the BC Liberal government, Smith was part of the negotiating process that led to bilateral agreements with First Nations.

Smith, who said he once considered Rustad a friend, called the Conservative party leader’s stance on the 30-by-30 conservation targets policy short-sighted, especially since the province has already begun to negotiate land protection agreements with First Nations.

“To have someone like John come back and act like all these agreements [with First Nations] — that started a discussion going in the right direction, finally — are ready to be scrapped is very frustrating because 30-by-30 is actually a good way of bringing it all together so people understand what the target and goal is,” Smith said.

“It also motivates us to find what we do with the other 70 [per cent of the land].”

Increasingly rare old-growth forest ecosystems could gain more protection under the province’s 30-by-30 conservation targets.

Rustad’s characterization of what the 30-by-30 policy would mean for B.C.’s food production and forestry sounds like fear mongering, Smith said.

“People don’t know what it is and he seems to want to make them afraid of it. It’s really a scary way of doing things when we’ve already come this far down the line,” he said. “There has been so much significant progress made and he’s threatening to take that all away. That’s a very, very, very concerning thing to not only First Nations, [but] I think to all the people who have started to see the benefits of the collaboration that reconciliation has brought.”

Ken Wu, executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, said it’s unlikely any agricultural land in B.C. would be impacted by creating new protected areas.

“Farming occurs on private lands, not on Crown lands where the protected areas expansion will occur, and private lands are only protected from willing sellers after buying their lands at an agreed upon price,” Wu pointed out in an interview. “[Rustad] knows that, but he mentions ‘farms’ as a misleading, bogus dog whistle to rouse up his base.”

“We are on the precipice of the biggest protected areas expansion in B.C.’s history but it may be cut short if the BC Conservatives get in,” Wu said.

Last November, the NDP government dedicated $500 million to advance the conservation policy and the federal government also chipped in $500 million. Of that, $50 million is earmarked to permanently protect “high priority” old-growth forests.

“They should be given huge kudos for this,” Wu said.

While concerns have been raised about how the province is defining protected areas — the NDP government has yet to make details public — Wu said he is encouraged by the effort he has seen so far.

“[The NDP] is now moving forward with negotiations over dozens of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas projects of First Nations across B.C., totalling thousands of square kilometres, to protect ecosystems and their cultures,” he said. “In B.C., protected areas require the consent and shared decision-making of the local First Nations whose territories they will be established in.”

Ken Wu, executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, says the BC Conservatives’ agenda is diametrically opposed to conservation and biodiversity protection. Photo: TJ Watt

According to the BC Conservatives website, if the party forms government it would also reverse many of the climate action policies the BC NDP has championed since it came to power in 2017, including eliminating the carbon tax and low-carbon fuel standard.

B.C. hasn’t had a name-brand Conservative government for nearly a century — although the role was filled by the now defunct Social Credit Party for more than 30 years, ending in 1991.

Wu emphasized the importance of recognizing what is at stake in this year’s election for the future of conservation and biodiversity protection in B.C.

“I want to be sure that no environmental group comes forward with any nonsense false equivalency, that because there have been failings from the NDP so far — and I recognize where those genuine failings have been — that’s not the same as having an agenda that is antagonistic and diametrically opposed to these goals,” he said.