State of the Forests report

The David Suzuki just released a report with other environmental organizations, titled “Advertising or Accountability? A Critical Review of Canada’s State of the Forests Report.” It’s a response to the 2024 federal report “The State of Canada’s Forests.”

When reading the federal report, it can be easy to be lulled into a soothing feeling of complacency, to think that maybe forests in Canada are fine after all! It’s more than 100 pages of facts, figures and photographs, and the assertion, conveyed repeatedly through different phrasing, that forest “resources are developed to the highest environmental … standards.”

If only.

Here are quick refutations to three significant claims in the federal report that are explored in more detail in our report.

1. “Canada is a world leader in sustainable forest management and is confronting challenges head-on, including wildfires and climate change.”

Yes, the federal government is putting more resources into addressing wildfires. But the report fails to address glaring challenges head on and, in fact, continues to look away from some, including primary and old-growth forest loss, fragmentation of intact forests and the role that industrial logging plays in driving boreal woodland caribou decline from coast to coast.

2. “NRCan is playing an active role in implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act through legislation, policy and programs.”

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples includes the commitment to obtain free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous nations for development approvals. If this were truly implemented in forest management, it would be a component of forest-planning processes and reflected in forest-planning manuals. It is not.

3. “Provinces and territories are shifting their policies, regulations and operational guides toward the overall ecological well-being of the forest, supporting biodiversity and other values.”

Provinces are shifting their policies, increasingly AWAY from regulatory environmental and forest safeguards. It would be great to see examples wherein provinces are changing operational guides and regulations with an increased focus on ecological wellbeing and biodiversity rather than, say, throwing out the Endangered Species Act (as the Province of Ontario just did), logging the remaining habitat of imperilled caribou herds (Alberta and B.C.) and determining that huge swaths of forests will be priority zones for intense logging (Quebec).

Clearly, Natural Resources Canada knows what it needs to do to halt and reverse forest degradation in Canada and uphold Indigenous rights; it’s all the things it says it IS doing. But examples to the contrary abound.