Canadian Forest Policy

Arguing that the complexity of policy-making in the forest sector has led many analysts to focus exclusively on specific sectoral activities or jurisdictions, this collection of essays offers a simplifying framework of analysis.

Three quarters of Canada’s forests are under provincial control, so provincial forest policies are crucial to long-term sustainability. By offering an up-to-date comparative scrutiny of forest policies, this book provides forest managers, policy-makers, scholars, and students with the information and concepts to critically examine Canada’s complex forest tenure systems. Looking at tenure, stumpage fees, and other forest practices, the authors assess how well different provincial schemes achieve the goals of sustainable forest management. They identify essential policy attributes that could be used to guide tenure reform, consider barriers that could prevent meaningful change, and offer much-needed practical guidance on overcoming these obstacles.

This book brings together the work of over twenty-five researchers to provide a comparative and empirically rich portrait of community forestry policy and practice in Canada. Tackling all forestry regions from Newfoundland to British Columbia, it unearths the history of community forestry across the nation, demonstrating strong regional differences tied to patterns of policy-making and cultural traditions. Case studies reveal innovative practices in governance and ecological management but also uncover challenges related to government support and market access. This book also considers the future of the sector, including the role of institutional reform, multiscale networks, and adaptive management strategies.

The canadian forest. Early forest use. Industrialization of the forests. The rise of forest conservation. Sustainable forest management.

“This thoroughly referenced book reveals the importance of the development of forest resources to Canadian social and economic existence. Rather than presenting just a compilation of facts and figures, the authors synthesize the information to make interesting observations. History is revealed as a series of interactive movements by various industrial, social, and political groups. ... Highly recommended for college and university collections that include forest history, forest policy, Canadian history, and conservation history.”–Choice “Lost Initiatives surveys Canadian forestry policy since the early nineteenth century, and particularly between the second American Forestry Congress, held in Montreal in 1882, and 1939. The authors achieve a Canada-wide perspective by including separate chapters on New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia, and offering an extensive account of federal forestry policy. The latter, which derives from archival research, is the most original of the book's contributions. . . Indeed, the book has considerable relevance to those interested in the development of professions in Canada. . . the book can be warmly recommended as a well-documented, genuinely national study that provides numerous points of departure and of context, whether for a comprehensive history of Canadian forests and forest policy or for analyses of parts of a very large subject. And the eloquent concluding chapter, on the last forty years of forest policy, could well serve as a call to arms even for those not persuaded that the previous chapters tell the real story of how we got here.”–The Canadian Historical Review

Although the provinces face many common forest management problems and could learn much from each other's experiences with different policy and administrative arrangements for the management of Crown lands, a detailed comparison of forest tenures across the country has never been undertaken. This study provides a framework for policy analysis within which such comparisons can be made. The report addresses the concept of forest tenures as property rights and their role in a market economy; provides a comparison of the varied public forest tenure arrangements in the 10 provinces; and addresses the problems faced by provincial governments in designing forest tenure systems to effectively meet public resource management goals. The interactions among tenure characteristics are discussed and some of the trade-offs governments must consider in pursuing multiple resource management objectives are described.

In recent decades, new scientific information has transformed our understanding of forest ecosystems, driving forest policy changes in both Canada and the United States. The extraction-oriented policies that dominated forest management for more than a century have given way to new approaches, leading often to acrimonious public debate, controversy over the interpretation of science, and frequent litigation by groups who support conflicting points of view. Today, the U.S. and Canada face a common challenge: to achieve a sustainable form of forest management that has wide public support. Many books discuss the scientific changes underlying forest policy, but this is the first to examine the social and economic aspects of sustainable forestry and the resulting impacts on resource policy in the two countries. The authors attempt to make sense of citizens' expectations for forests, and the responses by public-land managers and policymakers. Contributors include sociologists, research foresters, economists, political scientists, and geographers, as well as scholars in recreation and tourism. Together, their writings provide an in-depth interdisciplinary perspective on Canadian and U.S. efforts to manage public forests on a sustainable basis. The premise of "Two Paths toward Sustainable Forests is that academics and students, resource professionals, policymakers, and members of industry, environmental, and forest community groups can benefit from a comparison of the situations on either side of the border. By comparing the challenges of sustainable forestry and the different approaches adopted in Canada and the U.S., this book points the way towards potential solutions to common problems.