B.C. First Nations building their forest economies are facing foreign and domestic challenges that must be met for the resource to provide wealth and employment in the coming decades.
During a keynote address and panel discussion Friday, June 20, at the Indigenous Resource Opportunities Conference in Nanaimo, Ravi Parmar, B.C. minister of forests, discussed those challenges with John Jack, chief councillor of the Huu-ay-aht First Nations, Kim Haakstad, president and CEO of the B.C. Council of Forest Industries, and panel moderator Dallas Smith, council president of the Nanwakolas First Nation.
“We’ve got solid lumber duties that are set to go up, we’ve got threats of a tariff…, wildfires that are burning our province and have for the last number of years that have certainly devastated our fibre supply in different pockets of the province and, as much as those are significant challenges, there are so many opportunities as well,” Parmar said.
The forests minister acknowledged “dark days ahead” for the industry, but also a time of “opportunity to move us away from the boom and bust, towards stability.”
Jack said the Huu-ay-aht First Nations people need to understand the real economic landscape to be competitive and employ the tools to build their community and “demonstrate that we’re being realistic and respectful.”
“At the same time, we need to ensure that people understand that we’re not just any old shareholder … We’re not just putting it in a bank account somewhere in New York. That we are trying to make our community work in a way that is more sustainable, in a way that is more independent and less dependent on the government,” Jack said. “All these things help make our society better.”
He said what’s needed is an approach to the industry that takes into account the concerns of the land and the community first.
“The First Nations need to be a part of that conversation,” Jack said. “When it comes to our lands we need to actively involve ourselves in demonstrating that we have a handle on not just the safety aspect and the environmental aspect, but the economic aspect, as well.”
During a trade mission to Asia, he said he came to understand that in international markets, “it’s about team Canada.”
“We need to be competitive with Finland. We need to be competitive with Russia. We need to be competitive with all these other countries and listen to Japan when they say we’re falling behind because we’re not investing in the technology of productivity and we’re not always there when it comes to fibre,” he said.
Those investments matter, Jack said, to be a competitive supplier to foreign and domestic markets in a time when Canada may no longer be able to rely on the U.S. Some hard conversations also have to happen internally, he added, but the Canadian forest industry can’t afford to air its “dirty laundry" publicly without doing harm to all stakeholders.
“I believe we need to demonstrate confidence in one another and that will help us move forward to being competitive, because so many things run on confidence," he said.
Haakstad said collaboration with First Nations is important for the industry’s long-term success, but among the biggest problems hindering the industry is getting cut permits.
“First Nations are partners in that and we have a process right now where it’s taking much too long,” she said. “We’re moving not at the speed of business to get to solutions.”
Parmar noted the complexities of forestry and how other ministries, in addition to his own, need to be part of what can be tough but necessary discussions to support the industry.
Smith said 22 First Nations have come together to talk about policy challenges, but also the investment opportunities.
“We’ve had some places where we don’t necessarily agree at the same time and people leverage those discussions,” he said.
Smith noted activists pitted First Nations against one another over involvement in old-growth forestry and suggested the result has been a declaration that First Nations are in charge of their territories.
“We do not need outside NGOs to tell us what to do…" he said. "We have an understanding of our own lands, our own resources, our own community needs and we have better relationships with government and with business and with our own people and our neighbours in non-Indigenous communities … and we did the work to show that we could handle it from a business and government perspective … We need to let people know that we do not need help in that way to navigate our own lands and waters.”
Haakstad said it’s also important to bring other entities, such as unions and the Truck Loggers Association to have everyone in the forest industry understand they ultimately have shared outcomes.
She stressed, too, the importance of updating production technologies.
“I think about it, as someone who grew up in Grand Prairie, Alta. – a town with a beehive burner – and now we make what we used to put into beehive burners into real products,” she said. “We take a log and we use artificial intelligence and other machine-learning tools to make sure that we get the highest value out of every single log … and also get byproducts that are usable for bioenergy and pulp and paper and other parts of the value-added forestry that we’re so well-known around the world for, from British Columbia.”
Parmar called on the federal government to support efforts to find opportunities for diversification within the province's forestry trade, noting timber harvested in B.C.’s north and Haida Gwaii is shipped offshore as raw logs that could be barged to the south B.C. coast and processed into products to provide jobs locally.
