The Strathcona Regional District (SRD) referred concerns with old forest management on Quadra Island to the Natural Resources and First Nations Relations Committees for recommendation.
In August, the Forest Practices Board released a report stating that three Forestry companies were out of compliance with ‘some aspect of forestry legislation.’ ‘TimberWest does not employ a strategy to ensure that the appropriate amount of mature forests will become old (p 16).’ Okisollo Resources Ltd ‘did not follow its wildlife tree retention strategy when it harvested cutblocks 19-01 and 19-02’ (p 22). Younger Brothers Holdings ‘harvested trees from an area where its Woodlot License Plan said harvesting was to be avoided (p 23).
Recording by Bryan McKinnon; Broadcast and text by Roy L Hales.
NDP incumbent Michele Babchuk came to Cortes Island Saturday, October 12, in the second in a series of meet the candidate events organized by FOCI’s Climate Action Committee.
There is not room to unpack close to two hours of fact filled conversation into this half hour, but the full podcast is at the bottom of this page and here are some highlights.
In the foreword, Briony Penn wrote, “If you’ve picked up this book, chances are that you’ve fallen in love with the islands in the Salish Sea. You might have wondered how the heck they’ve retained their natural beauty against the hostile tsunami of contemporary clear-cuts, cookie cutter suburbs, and mindless malls that are encroaching elsewhere.”
Briony talks about the collective efforts of thousands of people over generations that have actually been working to maintain the beauty of the islands.
Sheila’s book documents the last 30 years of people (voices in the islands) who have been working at conservation. She includes a chapter on Cortes, so we’re in there with the best of them! I encourage everybody to pick her book up and have a read to see what the island community of conservationists have been doing.
The most exciting conservation story on Cortes today is definitely the Children’s Forest! This is the 624 acres of forest lands that stretch all the way from the Carrington Bay Road trailhead, east across Carrington Lagoon to Goat Mountain, just on the northern shore of Blue Jay Lake. These are lands owned by Island Timberlands. It’s part of their privately managed forest land base on Cortes Island.
Together with Klahoose Forestry, they make up the Cortes Forestry General Partnership. Mark Lombard, General Manager for the Partnership gave Cortes Currents an overview of their operations this year and plans for the future:
Mark Lombard: “We have pretty good support from the community. Our emphasis is building value for the community, training workers and providing firewood for seniors and logs for local mills. We’re the lightest touch logging operation in the province by a mile and a half.”
“Log prices are really low right now. There’s potential concerns about a recession in the US, or globally, for whatever reasons and because prices are low, we’re not planning to do any logging right now.”
Cortes Currents: So where were you working this year?
In April 2023, the Discovery Islands Forest Conservation Project filed a complaint with the Forest Practices Board. Our surveys showed that the area of old forest on Quadra had fallen below 5 percent of the Crown forested area and three logging companies continued to log old forest or degrade it. We asked the Board to find a way to stop the degradation and reverse the loss.
The Board just released its report. It found that TimberWest, the tenure holder of TFL 47, has for the past 20 years failed to develop a plan for how it will meet the minimal targets set out in the 2004 Order Establishing Provincial Non-spatial Old Growth Objectives. That order sets a target of “greater than nine percent” old forest for the 11,000 hectares of TFL 47 on Quadra.