A Ban on Parks Logging in Manitoba

A Ban on Logging in Parks

By David Nickarz

The Province of Manitoba has decided to ban logging from all provincial parks (except Duck Mountain) by April 1 of 2009. This is good news.

It’s about time that our Provincial Parks were saved from logging. People have been working for 18 years to accomplish this goal. It’s a credit to people such as Pat and Russ Popp, Eric Reder and Billy Granger of the Wilderness Committee, Ron Thiessen of CPAWS and numerous park users who spoke out successfully for our Wilderness.

The late Alice Chambers worked for years to preserve our parks before anyone thought of even asking for logging to be removed from parks.

I’ve been working on this issue since about 1990. Tembec (Then Abitibi-Price), the newsprint mill in Pine Falls, Manitoba was renewing their logging licence and had successfully lobbied the provincial government to allow them to log in parks. They raised the spectre of job losses due to the mere 5% of their wood sources that came from parks.

In 1993 the Parks Act was amended to allow logging in parks all over Manitoba. By 1997 parks had been carved up into land use categories, allowing for resource extraction in the oldest stands of trees. The older trees (meaning more volume of wood for the mill) in parks were targeted first—perhaps in an effort to avoid any new conservation measure that would get logging out of the parks.

The once lush forests near Bird Lake, Cat Lake and Long Lake have been permanently degraded for their private profits. Tembec’s legacy is marked by clear cuts, degraded soils and displaced wildlife. If you look at a ‘forest inventory’ (what an awful term for a living ecosystem) map of Nopiming Park, you see that most of the areas off limits for logging are recent burn sites, which have younger trees not suitable for the mill. The other places are too close to cabins and campgrounds.

The province will pay Tembec more than three million dollars to get out of Nopiming Park. This is as a ransom for our public heritage. Tembec has profited off the destruction and degradation of Nopiming ever since it was a park established in the late 1960’s. They’ve roaded it, clear cut it and left it a shell of its former self. Over the years, they have also been charged for violating numerous conservation laws.

They’ve made their clear cuts too big, logged right up to rivers and streams, logged too close to bald eagle’s nests, clear cut in threatened Woodland Caribou habitat and spray toxic pesticides. They spill oil in the forest, leave garbage behind and lie about it all through their front man Vince Keenan.

Tembec should be held accountable for these crimes against nature. They should be paying three million dollars to start reforestation work in the park. Their assets need to be seized and the mill needs to shut down. They pollute the mouth of the Winnipeg River to the tune of thirty million gallons per day. They burn coal to fuel their mill and don’t even use recycled paper anymore.

The mill buildings should be torn down and the land reforested. The name of the town should be changed to Pine Stands, Manitoba.

Does this all sound too unrealistic to you? So did asking for a parks logging ban 18 years ago.