Brazil of the north.

Looking for bareknuckled, frontier capitalism at its most rapacious? I am currently engrossed in Empire of Wood by Donald MacKay, a history of Macmillan-Bloedel, the British Columbia-based multinational corporation which, from its small beginnings in Vancouver, has become one of the world's largest timber, pulp and paper corporations. I am searching for a clue to explain the company's stranglehold on local government. Administrations come and go in Canada's westernmost province - the latest being "social democrats" - but Macmilland-Bloedel (known reverently as Macblo) continues to call the shots.

Currently at issue is the companys insistence upon cutting down a magnificent ancient forest in Clayoquot Sound, on Vancouver Island's Pacific coast, that is one of the last intact coastal temperate forest ecosystems in North America.

For their increasingly brutal treatment of the country's natural resources, the leaders of the loose federation of provinces we call Canada have earned their country the nickname "Brazil of the North." All told, this is an insult to Brazil, which can still lay claim to being something of a Third World country.

Canada, by contrast, with one of the highest standards of living on Earth, seems oddly lacking in standards of public integrity, finding no conflict of interest, for example, in the British Columbia (B.C.) government purchasing $50 million in Macblo stock just a few weeks before granting the company the right to clearcut some 80 percent of Clayoquot Sound's marketable timber.

Opposition to the devastation of Canadian forests has gone international. The various purchasers of Macblo's pulp, including Japanese and American telephone book printers, and assorted German magazines, are beginning to cringe under public pressure from environmentalists armed with grizzly photos of streambanks and mountaintops stripped clean of vegetation. The response? The B.C. government has joined with timber company executives to hire international public relations giant Burson-Marsteller (whose other clients have included Romania's late despot Nicolai Ceausescu, the government of Kuwait, Exxon, Union Carbide, and other pillars of the community) to organize a massive, partially tax-funded public relations campaign to counter this concern by discrediting groups like Greenpeace - in effect, using taxpayer's money to hoodwink the taxpayers.

During 1993, the tiny Vancouver town of Tofino became a launching pad for civil disobedience directed at Macblo's logging roads. On the authority of an overly broad and legally questionable restraining order provided to the company by a compliant local court, zealous Crown police arrested 800 protesters and jailed dozens, including a pair of local grandmothers who were clapped in leg irons before being transferred to prison, demonstrating a martial enthusiasm that might have embarrassed even South Africa's erstwhile rulers. As Justice William Newsome of California put it, Canada is "a country run along lines that would bring great credit to the Sicilian mafia."

The economic history laid out in my Macblo hagiography offers some insights. The timber industry has always depended on the public purse, in the form of massive land giveaways. The modern wood business is capital intensive, very competitive and wholly dependent on the vagaries of the global economy. Perhaps more than any other commodity save oil, timber, pulp and paper per rise and fall with other major economic indicators. When things are tight, the big paper companies reel, at which point they can wrest further concessions from whatever party happens to be sitting in Victoria that election cycle.

So, with the aid of fawning legislators (and after slashing 20,000 jobs over the last two decades), the B.C. timber industry has achieved the enviable state - from the boardroom point of view - of being able to cut more timber with fewer employees than any other nation on Earth. Meanwhile, the "stumpage rates" - the dollar amounts timber companies return to the public purse for each tree cut down - are the lowest in the world, lower even than Malaysia's Sarawak, or Thailand. Indeed, Canada is undercutting the rest of the world with a vengeance, forcing other companies to adopt the worst cut-and-run timber harvesting practices in order to compete.

As we go to press, the B.C. government has fashioned an agreement with Vancouver's indigenous population, creating yet another oversight board that will have to approve cutting practices in Clayoquot sound. Putting First Nations people in positions of authority is a welcome change. But whether new agreements will protect old growth still remains to be seen.