(2024-09-13) Evasion of forest regulations on Quadra Island confirmed by Forest Practices Board

Although the Board's investigation found that TimberWest, Okisollo Resources and Younger Bros Holdings failed to follow provincial forest regulations, it admitted there would be no consequences.

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 Island had fallen below 5 percent of the Crown forested area and yet three logging companies continued to degrade or log old forest. Hoping to find a way to stop the degradation and create conditions for future restoration of an adequate level of old forest, we asked the Board to investigate.

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.

The Board recommended that “TimberWest amend its forest stewardship plan to include a measurable or verifiable strategy for the recruitment of old forest that describes how it will ensure the full target amount of old forest is achieved in the Quadra Landscape Unit”.

As for existing old forest, TimberWest does not usually cut old trees on Quadra Island but logs out all of the younger trees around the old trees, eliminating all ground-level old-forest attributes (see photo below). Forest ecologist Dr. Rachel Holt has advised our project that this practice does not conserve the biodiversity associated with old forests.

On Quadra Island, TimberWest leaves trees older than 250 years but logs everything around them.

The Forest Practices Board gave TimberWest until December 31 to respond to its recommendation.

The Board also found that TimberWest did not comply with section 21 of the Forest and Range Practices Act when it located a wildlife tree retention area too far away from the associated cutblock. Our project had complained that TimberWest’s “group retention” strategy to meets its requirement to retain a percentage of each cutblock as a wildlife tree retention area was ineffective.

The Board also found that Okisollo Resources, a woodlot licence holder, “did not follow its wildlife tree retention strategy” when it logged two cutblocks near Hummingbird Lake. The Woodlot Planning and Practices Regulation allows licensees to cut wildlife trees, but only in the circumstances agreed to by the licensee in their woodlot plan.

Okisollo’s wildlife tree strategy stated the company would only remove wildlife trees if they were “assessed” and determined to be a “safety hazard” or “infested with insects”.

The Board found Okisollo Resources had failed to document any assessment of the wildlife trees it logged and so there was no evidence that the logged trees met either of the company’s two criteria for wildlife trees that could be logged.

Satellite images included in the investigation report show Okisollo had cut and removed all of the younger trees in the block and later came back and logged the large wildlife trees. “Safety” had apparently not been an issue. None of the trees showed signs of insect infestation when our project surveyed the cutblock.

In 2019, Okisollo Resources had logged 38 of the 55 large-diameter (>100 cm) Douglas fir and cedar trees located in a 3-hectare cutblock beside Hummingbird Lake. Our project later counted the growth rings of many of the tree stumps and found they ranged between 300 and 440 years of age. The density of live old trees, dead standing trees and large fallen trees would have qualified the stand as “old forest” under the guidelines for the Great Bear Rainforest, just 6 kilometres away.

But this small area of primary forest had been burned in 1925 and a rich understory of western hemlock had since grown back between the Douglas fir veteran overstory trees. Both the veterans and the younger hemlock are sought after by the logging industry.

Below: top photo taken in 2019 during logging of old forest at Hummingbird Lake on Quadra Island; the bottom photo shows the same area in 2019.

The Board found that another woodlot licensee, Younger Brothers Holdings, did not comply with the Woodlot Planning and Practices Regulation when it built a road and “harvested trees from an area where its [woodlot plan] said harvesting was to be avoided.”

The Board’s report noted that the forest where “harvesting was to be avoided” was shown in Younger Brothers’ woodlot plan to be “Age Class 9”—that is, older than 250 years of age.

The areas outlined in green were identified in Younger Bros Holdings’ woodlot plan as areas where harvesting would be avoided. In 2018 and 2019 the licensee built roads through these areas.

One question that was not addressed by the Board in its report: Are there any consequences for licensees that do not follow the regulations or fail to abide by land use planning orders?

The Board’s Director of Investigations Chris Oman, contacted after release of the report, agreed there were no consequences. Instead, Oman offered, “Much of the Board’s influence resides in unbiased reporting of facts and compliance. This has an effect on a licensee’s social licence. In practice, when the Board finds non-compliance, parties have a vested interest in remedying the issue even without a recommendation from the Board.”

The hands-off style of forest management by the Ministry of Forests on Quadra Island—which is a reflection of the situation across BC—was captured by the Board’s chair, Keith Atkinson: “While we found that each of the licensees did not comply with some aspect of forestry legislation, the bigger issue is that no one is responsible for monitoring or ensuring that Quadra Island’s old forests are conserved, or that enough mature forests are protected from logging so they can develop into old forest in the future”.

The main consequence of the Board’s investigation is that the public is now aware that approximately 1000 hectares of mature forest along with the remaining pockets of old forest in TFL 47 on Quadra Island need to be left to become old forest over the next century and a half—and that needed to start 20 years ago.

The Board’s report notes that it used a different definition for “old forest” on Quadra Island than it used in an earlier investigation of the logging of old forest at Hummingbird Lake. This detail may seem too technical for most people to want to try to digest, but the definition of “old forest” has an important consequence for remaining old forest on Quadra Island: The Board’s new definition would allow most remaining patches of old forest to be logged in the same way that TimberWest has been degrading old forest on Quadra—by leaving the old trees but logging out everything between them.

The latest report notes: “The Board has previously described coastal old forests in BC as stands that are older than 250 years, structurally complex with large old living trees, and with large dead snags, fallen dead trees and multi-layered canopies. The Board believes this qualitatively describes old forests but has no legal bearing.”

For the purposes of this report, however, the Board states: “On Quadra Island, old forests are legally defined by the Non-Spatial Order as forests greater than 250 years of age for the natural disturbance type and biogeoclimatic zones within the Quadra LU. The Non-Spatial Order does not incorporate stand structure or successional stage into the legal definition of old forests”.

If the Board had left it at that, the existing old forest over 250 years of age on Quadra would be included. But the Board didn’t leave it at that.

It went on to tie the determination of whether a forest stand is “old forest” or “not old forest” to the results of the Vegetation Resource Inventory, a Ministry of Forests database that is based on aerial photo interpretation. Using that inventory, forest technicians estimate whether the old forest in a stand has a higher or lower “basal area occupancy” than the understory trees. If it’s higher, it’s old forest. If it’s lower, it’s not old forest. “Basal area occupancy” refers to the area of the top of the stumps that clearcutting the area would create. The process, in effect, compares estimates of the total stump area of the old trees in a stand with estimates of the total stump area of younger trees. Using this definition of “old forest”, no ministry technician has to actually visit the site to make a more qualitative, accurate assessment. Talk about “artificial intelligence”.

The Vegetation Resource Inventory database is notoriously poor at identifying old forest and so it is disappointing that the Board relied on this unreliable tool. Our project requested any “basal area occupancy” data the Board had used for the Hummingbird Lake cutblock to come to its conclusion that this was not old forest. No data was provided to us. We’ll let you know if it materializes. Our own survey of every old stump in the cutblock at Hummingbird Lake suggests that even on the basis of this inadequate and mechanical definition of old forest, the old forest at Hummingbird Lake was old forest.

The Board’s problematic definition of “old forest” is only part of the challenge in coming up with an adequate level of conservation of old forest. The “greater than 9 percent” target for old forest has long since been discredited by advances in the science of natural disturbance. Forest scientists have determined that once the percentage of old forest in the coastal western hemlock forests on Quadra dropped below 30 percent, the forests became subject to a “high” risk of loss of ecological function, biodiversity and resilience.

Quadra Island forests can recover, but only if mature forests are allowed to grow old.

Who should decide where those new old forests should be on Quadra? Having evaded its responsibility for 20 years, TimberWest has proven it can’t be trusted. Quadra Island is part of the unceded territories of We Wai Kai First Nation and the legal right to decide where in TFL 47 those 1000 hectares (or more) should be located is theirs. Since forests are a critical part of everyone’s life support system, we all want to ensure that an adequate amount of old forest and the wildlife it supports will continue to exist here. We need to encourage and support the We Wai Kai to make this journey as safe as possible for all of us. After all, we are all in the same tippy canoe.

Related documents:

The original complaint to the Forest Practices Board

The Forest Practices Board’s full report IRC252-Mgmt-Old-Forests-on-Quadra-Island.pdf