The two issues are quite linked, indian land claims and forestry tenure review ... the claims work as a de facto lien against all crown land until they're settled, so they help to slow change to the status quo
Which status quo has evolved over twelve or so decades into a complex system of overlapping quotas and timber berths and tree farm licenses and timber sales and harvesting licenses and a bunch of other tenure classes, most specific cases with a holder who now considers his ticket a capital asset on his books .... what the pine lobby calls subsidies are largely the deals made years ago under which a firm would receive access to timber in exchange for building a mill to cut it, well if you break that deal you need to compensate for what you're taking away, which would get very costly in some cases ... not in all, in some the deals are coming up for review periodically ... each case is different, is the simple way to put it ... and remember, there is constant public pressure to get full value for the timber, 'crown' land means we own it in common
There have been subsidies - around 1990 there was a big push on the coast to something called the Small Business Value Added Programme, which was set up to encourage 'small' businesses to find innovative uses for wood - furniture and log homes being all i can think of now, but there were various uses, none of them resulted in lumber however .... this may have had net benefit some places, not around where i was though, definite harm done there to the market for sellers of private wood, of whom i was one then
You'll find subsidies in the US, for instance where roadbuilding cost is paid by the BLM or whatever, instead of being covered as in BC by the logger in addition to the 'stumpage' he pays .... that word 'stumpage', btw, can mean a variety of things, depends on what you include and exclude
To compare private and public land here as you do with Timberwest is useful only if you add in the differences in forestry regulations and taxes and responsibilities of the tenure holder, etc ... not simple at all ... exporting logs - remember that the offshore buyer can pick and choose grade and size and species etc, while the local tenure holder is responsible for use of, and payment of stumpage on, all wood harvested .... i've exported logs, and let me tell you, the sorting and bucking to grade etc makes you work for those extra dollars ... also with Timberwest - aren't they selling to themselves across the line? ... so what they're doing really is shifting profit to the side taxed lower
Anyway, none of it much matters, we know this yellow pine lobby a long time now, it wouldn't matter what we do, we could bankrupt the province removing one of their pretexts and they would simply make up another ... problem is corruption in the back rooms of your federal government ... as do all places, we have the same here to lesser degree, look up Shawinigate some time, thing is though we didn't get whacked hard by that on the wet coast ... this thing against lumber is severe enough that i think we as canadians, all of us from here to the maritimes, need to reassess very carefully our assumptions regarding our neighbour to the south .... 'love the country but we can't stand the scene' as Leonard Cohen would say ... 'but we're stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay, we're junk but we're still holding up this little wild bouquet, a wakening should be coming to the USA' |
