Supporting fair forest policies for the North.

The Minister of Natural Resources for Canada is Gary Lunn, a BC boy who seems to have some feeling for the forest sector. At the Paperweek international in Montreal on February 8, he promised to use $127.5 million of a $400-million aid package for the forestry sector to address long-term competitiveness. Based on forest sector size, Ontario should get at least 20 per cent of those funds. Since almost 90 per cent of Ontario's forest production is in Northern Ontario, we should be getting about $72 million, with $22 million specifically to promote competitiveness.

Mr Lunn says he is committed to shifting to higher-value products. This almost certainly means he will want to invest some of our $72 million in creating a Northern Ontario School of Industrial Design focussed on developing improved wood products. Any fool knows that before you produce high-value products you have to produce high-value skills and Lunn is no fool.

He has already committed money to a redesigned Value to Wood Program, an idea that Northerners will support. Most of the money is going to the Quebec Wood Export Bureau based in Quebec City. According to Lunn, the Wood Export Bureau has helped open new wood export opportunities for Quebec firms. That may be why Quebec mills need Ontario logs. Or it may be evidence we need a similar organization in Northern Ontario.

Lunn is rightly proud of the new PFInnovations, an umbrella organization for forestry research. It is a project that was underway long before Lunn came on the scene, but he pushed it across the goal line. FPInnovations includes three old organizations with funny initials and one new one. FERIC is the Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada. It is dominated by the major forest companies and largely funded by government. It focuses on forest management. Forintek, stands for Forestry Industry Technology. It was privatized by Trudeau in 1978, just when it reached retirement age. Paprican, the Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada, grew from the same Montreal root and was also privatized by Trudeau. The research laboratories for all three organizations are in Quebec City, Montreal and Vancouver.

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The Canadian Wood Fibre Centre of Natural Resources Canada is the new kid on the block. Executive Director George Bruemmer is based in Ottawa, but the staff of this virtual organization are scattered across the country. We probably should be happy to have this new organization working for the forest industry, but seems to be focused on saving the pulp sector when pulp is a low-value product that should be phased out. If our boreal woods have such unique properties because it grows so slowly, should we be looking for better ways to turn them to paste?

Together the four research organizations have over 600 employees. A fair distribution would have about 120 in Northern Ontario. So why do we have no forest industry labs in our region? Canada's forestry labs all grew up around major universities. In those days a major university was quite a bit smaller than Lakehead or Laurentian. Those universities weren't interested in sharing with the newer universities, especially in Ontario.

There is a lesson for our representatives. Just as southern universities resisted the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, the established research centers in Quebec and BC will resist building labs in Northern Ontario. It is time for David Ramsey, Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources, to sit down with Gary Lunn and explain what he needs to do for Northern Ontario. It is time for Rick Bartolucci, as minister of Northern Development, to lay out a plan to use our share of that forestry money effectively.

The key to a long-term strategy is to focus on developing people. Throwing money at companies is a dead end. We have to begin training people and developing products based on the special qualities of the wood we have. If the wood is slow growing and has unique properties, as Michael J. Bradley of CanFor claims in the latest NRCan Viewpoint, then the boreal forests are an irreplaceable treasure and they should be harvested carefully and only for high-value uses.

Forget the fact that the junior economist running the country doesn't understand global warming and still can't figure out the economics of the Kyoto Accord. We just need Gary Lunn to support a fair and sensible policy for Northern Ontario. Mr, Lunn wants to do the right thing. He just needs to be told that Northern Ontario exists and is watching him.

Dave Robinson is an economist with the Institute for Northern Ontario Research at Laurentian University. He can be reached at [e-mail]