Over the course of these years, the movement’s diverse campaigns produced some important results. In considerable part because of its efforts, more than 5 million hectares of the province were added to the protected areas system. While this system still underrepresents the province’s forest ecosystems, some magnificent areas of old growth forest were preserved. The new parks created during the 1990s include dozens of areas that were the focus of environmental campaigns during the previous two decades. In Clayoquot Sound, the area that received most attention from environmentalists during the early 1990s, the scale of logging has been sharply reduced; the Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel initiative stands out on a global scale as a noteworthy experiment in incorporating conservation biologists’ advice into the policy process. Elsewhere in the province, compared to even a decade ago, environmental considerations play a more significant role in shaping the way logging and road building activities are planned and carried out. In his 1993-6 round of allowable annual cut determinations, the chief forester did significantly reduce harvest levels in the southern part of the province.

The movement must, however, weigh these gains against a list of significant disappointments. At the end of the story, we find the industry still clearcutting more than 150,000 hectares of timber per year. It is campaigning to justify harvest levels much higher than what environmentalists say are sustainable, and working to loosen the constraints embodied in the latest round of forest policy reforms. The industry is battered and bruised; many analysts predict it is on the verge of a turbulent period of massive restructuring. Nonetheless, with its core prerogatives intact, it continues its unrelenting advance on the remaining expanses of low-lying old growth forest. Proponents of the ecosystem management alternative have so far failed to discredit the industrial forestry paradigm.

This account of the BC political system’s response to issues raised by the forest environment movement might be likened to a description of developments and interactions within an ecosystem. As such, this account should be approached with some scepticism. No matter what mix of lenses, vantage points, and methods the student of ecology uses, no matter how much is invested in overcoming ‘night vision’ problems and other difficulties, and no matter how much time is spent recording predator-prey dynamics and other interactions, the resulting composite picture is unlikely to provide a completely accurate description. And likewise, no account of life within a political system can hope to describe the full range of interactions. I make no claims about having sufficient lenses, or anything like the resources and skills needed to surmount the political scientist’s version of night vision problems and other obstacles. I have tried to describe developments and offer some reflections on patterns, connections, and trends. Readers do not have to be reminded that other observers would undoubtedly present different pictures of who preyed onwhom and why.

These caveats aside, the story offers some important insights into the capacity and adaptability of BC political institutions, as well as into the limitations and potential of the cabinet government system in general. It tells us about the political evolution of the adversaries at the heart of the story, about the obstacles they faced, and about their success in overcoming those obstacles. It also provides a base for some educated guesses as to the fate of future attempts to protect the province’s biodiversity.

The BC Forest Policy Process and the Response to Environmentalism

Governments the world over muddle through. They try to plan, but mostly they react. They spend a fair bit of time grappling with states of full or partial paralysis brought on by uncertainty, inadequate information and capacity, internal divisions, and conflicting advice or pressures. They are frequently forced to wrestle with circumstances beyond their control, or with the unintended and unhappy consequences of decisions over which they did have some control. For the most part, they move incrementally. In Paul Pierson’s words, ‘Overwhelmed by the complexity of the problems they confront, decision-makers lean heavily on preexisting policy frameworks, adjusting only at the margins to accommodate distinctive features of new situations.’ Occasionally, when the planets are aligned, governments seize the opportunity to consolidate disparate policy tendencies into a coherent shift in policy direction. Opportunities, capacities, and dispositions converge with positive assessments of political costs, benefits, and risks to produce the conditions for policy change. But reformers usually find it difficult to protect territory won; change is followed by backsliding and reversal.

The account of BC governments’ responses to the forest environment movement presented in the last eight chapters rhymes with this general picture of policy making. Throughout the story, governments struggled with conflicting pressures and advice, searching amidst the fogs of uncertainty for ways of clarifying confusing choices. Mostly they moved incrementally, allowing themselves to be swept along by the accumulated momentum of policy paths set in motion by the decisions (or nondecisions) of their predecessors. Since the Second World War, there have been three significant attempts to adjust course. Each episode came about when developments in what we called the ideas and pressure streams combined to alter perceptions of problems and convince central policy participants that significant changes were necessary. Following each episode, the supporters of the status quo geared up to press for policy reversals. The latest round of reaction has just begun to play out, but the results of the earlier rounds predict that those opposed to change will use the administrative nullification route to great effect.

The first of the policy change episodes was embarked on in the 1940s. Responding to concerns about conservation of the resource expressed by both citizens and government officials, the Coalition government made the changes deemed necessary to put forest development on a sustained yield path. The accompanying images projected the clear message that the ‘devastation logging’ of the past was at an end; to ensure perpetual supplies of timber, liquidation would be superseded by liquidation-conversion. As noted in Chapter 5, these changes and the ensuing record of half-hearted implementation of the conversion side of the model added up to a good example of a familiar policy dynamic. Citizens worried about forest perpetuation were reassured by a symbol-laden response. A mood of public quiescence returned, leaving government officials considerable latitude as to how the policy was to be implemented. Capacity problems and political pressures exerted by those most intensely involved combined to bring about backsliding on the putative intent of the new policy.

The second episode of change unfolded in the 1970s in reaction to an assortment of pressures. I have emphasized those that gained prominence as the forest environment movement put down roots and began to criticize postwar forest practices. In response, government and the forest industry attempted to demonstrate a renewed dedication to sustained yield and a new sensitivity to other forest values. Initiatives on these fronts began under the Barrett NDP government. The ensuing Bill Bennett Social Credit regime jettisoned many of its predecessor’s ideas but inaugurated a number of changes in its 1978 legislative package and follow-up measures. I have portrayed these changes as reflecting efforts by the development coalition to contain the environmentalist threat by restoring the legitimacy of the liquidation-conversion project. Whether interpreted this way, or less cynically, as a genuine attempt to respond to public concerns, these measures failed. Pressed by an industry feeling the effects of the early 1980s recession, the government backed off. Sympathetic administration cancelled the positive potential of its reform program. As a consequence, the Bennett-Waterland policies were ineffectual - both as a response to shifting societal values and as a way of containing the political pressures emanating from the movement. It is true that Social Credit managed to get itself reelected in 1983 and 1986, and that the forest industry increased its harvest of Crown timber to record levels by 1987-8. Concern about the forest environment, however, did not abate. Critical scrutiny of forest management performance intensified during the 1980s, exposing the development coalition’s failure to live up to the commitments made during the Bill Bennett government’s first term. The failure of this attempt at relegitimation forced the forest industry to reexamine its political strategies and led government actors to reconsider their relations to the industry.

By helping to generate debate about alternatives, these problems set the stage for the third reform episode. Assisted by the convergence of change-facilitating factors noted in the previous two chapters, the Harcourt government moved quickly to design and implement a broad set of moderate reforms. To end the war in the woods and refurbish BC’s reputation abroad, it initiated regional and subregional land use planning processes, expanded the protected areas system, established the Forest Renewal fund, and adopted the Forest Practices Code.

The future impact of the Harcourt initiatives remains unclear. The government’s protected areas additions were clearly significant. Away from the Coastal spotlight, good news on the protected areas front continued to come in as the second NDP government settled into office. For example, in September 1997, the Clark government announced preservation of the Lower Cummins Valley near Golden. A few weeks later, it established a Northern Rockies (Muskwa-Kechika) wilderness area consisting of a 1.2-million-hectare protected area and a 3.2-million-hectare buffer zone. With the government moving closer to the 12 percent target and planning processes in areas such as the Okanagan-Shuswap and the central Coast underway, it was clear, however, that many protected areas sought by the movement would not be achieved. Meanwhile, the significance of other parts of the agenda, including the code, will be determined by ongoing implementation decisions, as well as by further rounds of allowable annual cut determinations by the chief forester.

Not surprisingly, the Harcourt record has become the object of disparate interpretations. The industry and the government portray the 1991-6 initiatives as a burst of fundamental change that established the province as one of the most environmentally sensitive timber producing jurisdictions in the world. Unfortunately, say forest companies and their allies, the industry’s ability to compete has been jeopardized by the increased costs associated with the code, by higher stumpage rates, and by timber supply worries brought on by protected areas decisions and decreased allowable cuts. Throughout 1996 and 1997, industry spokespersons escalated their warnings about looming difficulties, contending that mill shutdowns would become commonplace unless the industry received some relief on stumpage rates and logging costs. According to Price Waterhouse’s leading forest analyst, Mike MacCallum, the industry’s wood costs had climbed $2.5 billion a year.3 The collapse of the Japanese market, depended on by many Coast lumber producers, intensified the gloomy talk. Said respected industry analyst Charles Widman, ‘What’s happening is, as usual, the highest cost producer goes down first and we in B.C. are now the highest-cost producers in North America. This is the worst crisis I have seen in the last 20 years.’

Spokespersons for the environmental movement offer a very different interpretation. They contend that the industry’s mid-1990s aches and pains signal the fact that it is being forced by broader economic conditions to face up to the consequences of the development path it has pursued. This path, environmentalists say, has involved overbuilding capacity and highgrading the resource. By allowing companies to log the best, most accessible timber first, past governments guaranteed future problems. If the Harcourt initiatives contributed to these problems, environmentalists say, it is certainly not because these policies significantly enhanced the protection of forest ecosystems. Despite the impressive additions, the protected areas system still underrepresents those areas. Most of the remaining low- and medium-elevation forests are slated to be logged. There are reasonable grounds for hope that under the Forest Practices Code, this and other logging will be done in more environmentally sensitive ways than in the past. The code’s potential, however, has been proscribed by the government’s 6 percent cap edict. Meanwhile, the industry’s efforts to ‘streamline’ administration of the code provide a discouraging reminder that although forest management rule books may change, the pressure for sympathetic administration never relents.

By late 1996, the mainstream of the movement had coalesced around the view that despite progress towards protecting wilderness and improving forest practices, fundamental problems remained. According to Jim Cooperman, the chair of the BC Environmental Network Forest Caucus ‘B.C.’s forests continue to be cut at unsustainable levels, clearcutting remains the dominant logging system, damage to streams is still occurring, rural water supplies are at extreme risk from logging, timber targets are making a mockery of land use plans, biodiversity planning is still at the wishful thinking stage, old growth forest liquidation is still the plan, [and] the major forest companies continue to maintain a stranglehold on he forests.’ Sentiments like these were reinforced by a string of Sierra egal Defence Fund studies of the Forest Practice Code’s shortcomings, and by report card results every bit as negative as those offered in investment analysts’ evaluations of industry prospects. In its 1997 wilderness protection report card, the World Wildlife Fund Canada dropped BC’s rating to ‘C,’ citing the provincial government’s determination to treat the 12 percent figure as a ceiling, its reluctance to seek better representation of low-elevation forests, and its tardiness in implementing the special management zone dimensions of land use plans. BC fared even worse on the Canadian Endangered Species Coalition’s 1997 report card, receiving an ‘F.’

Environmental critics, then, question whether the policy flux of the 1990s equals policy change. Their verdict might be cast in the terms used by Murray Edelman in his writings on ‘words that succeed and policies that fail.’ Much of the sound and fury of the political world, says Edelman, emanates from the construction of political spectacles, from activities which, though they may advance the interests of diverse policy participants, end up signifying little in terms of the amelioration of underlying problems. In line with this perspective, critics see the Harcourt initiatives as a 1990s-style relegitimation strategy. Because of the depth and breadth of public criticism of the industry, this strategy required more than the standard dose of symbolism. Some significant substantive concessions, and some deep bows in the direction of the ascendant biodiversity discourse, were needed. In the end, though, the industry was left in a stronger position to pursue the remaining stages of the liquidation project. In Michael M’Gonigle’s terms, the Harcourt reforms represented ‘a classic instance of repackaging a stale product ... Because the environmental movement accepted incremental reforms within the dominant paradigm of continued industrial forestry, rather than insisting on structural reforms to the whole model of production and regulation, the movement is now tangled within a model of forestry that is clearly unecological, and is disempowered as a force for piercing the curtain of green rhetoric ... The development of the reform framework has ... made challenges to the corporate/bureaucratic structure of power more difficult.’

For environmentalists, there are, needless to say, more sanguine ways of viewing the NDP’s initiatives. Judged against what came before (and against how little governments of the 1980s were prepared to concede), the Harcourt reforms represented significant progress for the movement. For example, we should not overlook the resistance met in the 1970s and 1980s by the proponents of such wilderness areas as the Stein Valley or South Moresby. Nor should we forget that as late as 1988, the Social Credit minister of environment was still proclaiming the goal of increasing the proportion of the province protected to 6 percent by the year 2011. Similarly, to give the Harcourt government its due, we should bear in mind the difficulties governments - even majority governments in strong cabinet systems - often have in implementing reform programs, and remember that in pursuing its regulatory and forest reconstruction programs, the NDP was bucking global tides that pushed other governments of the 1990s to downsize and deregulate.

Taking into account these different perspectives, it seems fair to conclude that after over three decades of concerted effort, the BC wilderness movement has ‘won some important battles, but not the war.’ Many of the concerns that motivated the movement’s political efforts during the 1970s and 1980s have been addressed, but the ecosystem model of forestry has made little headway against the status quo, industrial forestry model. This mixed outcome confirms our preconceptions about the structures of constraints and opportunities shaping developments within the forest policy sector.

From the outset, the potential for environmental advances was restricted by certain fundamental realities. Most of these could be linked to policy legacies, and particularly to the accumulated momentum of what we have called the liquidation-conversion project. As Robert Putnam reminds us, institutions and policies have historical trajectories: ‘History matters because it is “path dependent”: what comes first (even if it was in some sense “accidental”) conditions what comes later. Individuals may “choose” their institutions, but they do not choose them under circumstances of their own making, and their choices in turn influence the rules within which their successors choose.’ The liquidation-conversion project gathered momentum as more and more workers, investors, suppliers, and government officials acquired a stake in maintaining or increasing timber harvesting rates. This momentum increased as workers set down roots, as businesses designed to serve forest companies and workers sprouted in forest-dependent communities across the province, as logging contractors mortgaged their futures to purchase rigs, as investors poured dollars into expanding logging and milling capacity, and as government bureaucracies set themselves up to monitor and facilitate the whole operation. The resulting patterns of dependency, and the associated political pressures, structured the policy space, establishing the boundaries between the politically feasible and unfeasible.

These boundaries, of course, remained elastic, their exact definition at any given time a matter delineated by an ongoing contest between a development coalition dedicated to protecting its core prerogatives and an environmental movement determined to challenge the precepts underlying the liquidation-conversion project. Both sides brought considerable resources and skills to this contest.

For its part, the movement did a good job of mobilizing the political energies of British Columbians and of changing the agenda. During a period when a growing assortment of public anxieties and frustrations seemed to generate little more than grumbling and hand-wringing, the movement managed to galvanize powerful citizen support. It directed this support effectively and continually illustrated how diversity, intensity, and resourcefulness can compensate for limited financial resources. It maintained a focus on cabinet, recognizing that in this system, governments are checked by political factors, by constraints given form by a cabinet’s perception of the prevailing political winds and its calculations about what these mean for its chances of reelection. The movement wisely chose to invest heavily in indirect lobbying, in approaches aimed at encouraging supporters to express their views to government. Increasingly, it augmented activities aimed at British Columbians with campaigns designed to shape the perceptions and responses of national and international audiences.

The movement’s accomplishments in the areas of agenda setting and issue definition were founded on effective criticism and imaginative promotion of alternative visions. By plugging the new ideas and knowledge claims that arrived with each shift in the discourse, the movement contributed significantly to the pressure for forest policy change. Each shift brought new constraints on forest exploitation, forcing the development coalition to reconsider how best to legitimate its control over the resource. Since new ideas meant new tests, the development coalition was forced to grapple with specific versions of the legitimacy trap sketched in Chapter 1. Unfortunately for environmentalists, though, the tests remained flexible and the escape routes plentiful. Different constraints on development were introduced as the discourse shifted, but each successive set of constraints became the object of political negotiations. At issue always was the choice between tough enforcement of rigidly interpreted rules and relaxed enforcement of loosely interpreted ones.

The forest industry’s success in these negotiations reminds us not only of its structural advantages but also of the importance of some of the fundamental ‘givens’ inherent in the nature of this policy sector. The technical complexity of forest issues has helped insulate the policy field from intensive public scrutiny. The province’s size and relatively small population have combined to ensure that the bureaucracy lacks the capacity to enforce the rules. The extensiveness of the industry’s reach has discouraged close public scrutiny of its operations, thus opening ripe possibilities for governments and companies wanting to assuage the public with symbolic gestures. The scope of such possibilities declined somewhat as the environmental movement acquired the resources needed to surmount obstacles to effective oversight; critical scrutiny of industry operations has indeed become fairly intensive in certain parts of the province (such as on southern Vancouver Island). For the most part, however, forest land use policy continues to be implemented in the shadows. In some regions, loggers can still operate for entire seasons without worrying about having environmentalists check on what they are up to.

The development coalition’s success in defining the boundary between the politically feasible and unfeasible owes most directly to the structural advantages enumerated in Chapter 2. While it required no great strategic acumen to capitalize on the society’s dependence on the forest economy, company leaders did recognize in the mid-1980s that the time had come for workers and timber-dependent communities to step forward and aggressively resist the wilderness movement’s demands. This countermobilization of timber workers and their neighbours was critical in demarcating the political space within which governments of the 1990s operated. At the end of our story it is clear that intense worker resistance is at the centre of the constellation of factors limiting the wilderness movement’s future prospects.

Beleaguered and at times bewildered, the forest industry pushed forward through the turbulence churned up by the movement. The history of the industry’s response features a fair number of concessions and expressions of contrition. After 1986, the disintegration of the industry’s close relationships with Social Credit and the Ministry of Forests forced it into a difficult internal evaluation of the continued worth of the organization that had been its main political vehicle, the Council of Forest Industries. In the midst of trying to sort out how to revise its political approaches, it had to adjust to a reform-oriented NDP government.

Despite these difficulties, the industry lurches onwards. It retains its grip on the forest land base. Neither of the major political parties appears to have any appetite for fundamental tenure system change. While it would have preferred to see the NDP defeated, the industry has reason to expect that the Glen Clark government will respond to its concerns. Indeed, the prospects for another cycle of sympathetic administration seemed good as Clark settled into office. Comforted by signs that a sizable portion of the public believes the industry’s environmental performance has improved, and anxious to succeed with its Jobs and Timber Accord pledge to create over 20,000 new forest sector jobs by 2001, the aggressively pro-growth Clark team made it clear from the outset that it would listen sympathetically to company-IWA complaints that the Harcourt initiatives had gone too far. The onset of the new regime was most apparent at the Environment Ministry where, by 1997, a new round of staff cuts and the arrival of a rookie minister had sent morale plummeting.

The Wilderness Movement’s Prospects

As these chapters of BC wilderness politics draw to a close, the movement finds itself reflecting on the unpleasant possibility that it has reached the outer limits of what can be accomplished in the current political space. Confronted by a political-economic-media elite that has closed ranks around the view that the Harcourt reforms represent a full and effective response to the concerns raised by environmentalists in the 1970s and 1980s, the movement faces the challenge of shattering this complacency and mobilizing support for a new wave of reform. Its premillennial soul-searching over goals and strategies must encompass a long and varied list of questions.

Is it time to turn away from forest wilderness issues to put more emphasis on wetlands and other ecosystems? Taking cognizance of the extent to which BC’s recent economic growth has been driven by immigration (and taking note of discouraging signs such as those contained in statistics on booming sales of sport utility and all terrain vehicles), should environmentalists prepare for a new era in which the greatest threats to biodiversity may derive not from the provincial economy’s dependence on resource extraction, but from its dependence on population growth and the promotion of environmentally destructive high-consumption lifestyles? Do the limits being encountered by the wilderness movement trace back to its neglect of issues such as economic growth, to its failure to bring about societal value changes of the sort required to transform the way British Columbians relate to the environment? How can the movement reach new Canadians who have values and priorities different from the North American-born baby boomers who have been its core supporters during the last thirty years? What will happen to the movement as generations of Canadians who grew up playing in the ravines and other semiwild places that used to be part of even urban childhood environments are succeeded by generations much less likely to have had those formative experiences? Having been sucked into the vortex created by the Harcourt government’s aggressive pursuit of its moderate reform agenda, can the movement now reorient itself and return to a focus on the more fundamental reforms vetted in pre-1991 proposals for tenure change and decentralized management structures? What can be done about the dilemmas associated with the continuing pull of area-specific wilderness campaigns? The movement attracts domestic and international support by focusing on areas such as Clayoquot Sound, but by so doing, does it not render itself more vulnerable to containment strategies embodied in area-specific concessions such as the Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel? Having so wholeheartedly embraced the 12 percent goal when it still seemed a pie-in-the-sky dream, can the movement now credibly contend that this target is inadequate? Has the boycott threat lost its efficacy, and if so, can its potency be restored? Has the movement put too much emphasis on international public opinion and in the process lost sight of the fundamental importance of controlling a block of BC voters large enough to make or break a government’s prospects of reelection? Why has it lost influence within the NDP, and can anything short of a large-scale migration of voters to the Green Party force the NDP to stop taking environmentalists for granted? And what is to be done about the failure to build bridges to timber workers and timber-dependent communities?

This final question brings us to perhaps the most important factors limiting the wilderness movement’s immediate prospects. If it is going to move beyond the gains made in the early 1990s and pursue the goal of ecosystem management, the movement must confront the issues raised by its failure to counter the political power of timber workers and their supporters. The movement has devoted considerable effort to convincing these workers and the general public that the jobs-versus-environment construction rests on a false dichotomy. Workers’ problems, it has argued, have much more to do with technology and company job-shedding strategies than with new protected areas or environmental constraints. Workers and environmentalists should make common cause in pushing for more value-added manufacturing and other measures to increase the number of jobs generated by the wood that is harvested.

These efforts have borne little fruit. Despite the Harcourt NDP’s efforts to patch together a détente, the relationship has continued to be marked by mutual suspicion and frequent expressions of animosity. In fact, rather than diminishing, hostilities seem to have grown. By the summer of 1997, the development coalition’s countermobilization efforts appeared to have reached the apogee of their success. Urged on by Premier Clark and the rest of the province’s political establishment (and watched delightedly by the company brass), timber workers were flexing their muscles. One group of loggers and their supporters blockaded access to a WCWC research station in the Stoltmann wilderness area. Other timber workers mobilized counterprotests against Slocan Valley residents trying to stop logging in community watersheds, while the IWA mounted legal actions and dockside blockades in an attempt to force Greenpeace to compensate loggers for wages lost as a result of the environmental group’s protests on the central Coast.

Some environmentalists will argue in the years ahead that events like these prove the futility of accommodative strategies, and the need to sharpen the cleavage between the movement and timber workers. A more confrontational tack, it will perhaps be argued, would precipitate a kind of urban-rural showdown in which the greater electoral weight of urban areas would eventually prevail. Others will no doubt counter that such a strategy is too risky, and that the movement has no alternative but to continue searching for a basis for détente.

Whether or not they see tenure change and decentralization as providing such a basis, many environmentalists will likely seek to rekindle interest in fundamental structural reform. Proposals for community-controlled, ecosystem-based forestry such as those elaborated by Herb Hammond, Michael M’Gonigle, and their colleagues seem certain to be at the centre of future efforts to build the ‘rainbow coalition’ of citizens needed to challenge the industrial forestry orthodoxy.13 In the words of Jim Cooperman, ‘All of the problems with forest management in B.C., including overcutting, loss of biodiversity, damage to water supplies, and job loss are directly related to a tenure system that benefits big industry and big unions at the expense of forest communities and the B.C. public.’

The movement’s diversity will, of course, continue to be reflected in multidimensional approaches. While some environmentalists pursue tenure change, for example, others will carry on efforts to achieve strong provincial (and federal) endangered species legislation. Others will push arguments paralleling those Thomas Michael Power draws from his analysis of the way communities in western states are successfully making the transition away from timber dependence; they will challenge politicians hypnotized by ‘rearview mirror’ economics to accept the inevitability of such transitions and recognize that the sky does not fall when local economies are forced to adjust to sharply reduced timber harvests. Other corners of the movement will focus on boycott strategies or on achieving strong ecocertification standards, while still others will pursue the difficult task of trying to change public and government thinking about the adequacy of the 12 percent protected areas goal.

As the movement ponders its priorities and tactics, and as its adversaries contemplate their countermoves, both sides will frequently be reminded that policy choices made in the province are only one of the factors affecting the future of BC forests and workers. British Columbia will continue to be buffeted by global forces, most of which can be only partially blunted or diverted by government policy. Policy making, we will be reminded, is mostly about expediting or delaying the way immutable forces unfold, or about nudging the resultant change trajectories a few degrees to one side or the other.

Both sides can cook up pessimistic stews from the assortment of forces that could conceivably influence future developments. For environmentalists, gloomy scenarios generally hinge on projected supply/demand curves for softwood fibre. According to the Simons Consulting Group, global demand for softwood will exceed supply by more than 5 percent in the year 2020. If this sort of projection is borne out, environmentalists will have trouble repelling pressure to log BC’s remaining accessible old growth. It goes without saying that capital will seek rights to log in BC as long there are profits to be made. As we have seen, there is ample reason to expect that the industry will keep on finding ways to justify old growth liquidation and exert enough political pressure to ensure BC’s cost structures do not get wildly out of line with those of the competition. As suggested at the close of the previous chapter, a long-term vision of a forest industry even more extensively involved in engineering the BC landscape is plausible.

It is conceivable, though, that broad economic and social forces will reduce the industry’s impacts. For example, external factors may alter the economics of the forest industry, forcing companies to abandon plans to log significant areas of old growth currently deemed accessible. Demand growth may fall short of expectations like those cited above; continued American countervail pressure may hinder government attempts to subsidize logging; Russia and other competitor jurisdictions may bring on capacity more quickly than expected; or technological innovations may further improve the quality of pulp produced by lower-cost competitors like Indonesia or the US Southeast. Broader forces may also produce other changes favourable to the interests of environmentalists. For instance, immigration and internal migration patterns will likely reduce the population share of forest-dependent regions, with possible implications for their political clout. The arrival of more immigrants and tourists attracted by BC’s relatively high environmental quality will bolster the environmental coalition and help additional hinterland communities follow the lead of Nelson, Tofino, and others in making a transition from dependence on resource extraction. Popular resistance to the power of transnational corporations may grow, increasing support for alternative economic visions. Although the present pace of negotiations may support the cynical view that the province’s First Nations will likely gain control over their traditional territories at about the same time the forest industry finishes logging them, land claims processes and/or judicial decisions may transfer control over significant areas of old growth to authorities with priorities different from those of the present government-company managers.

How these currents affect forest land use policy will depend on the performance of BC’s political institutions, and particularly on their ability to promote a robust debate about alternative futures.

BC Political Institutions and the Health of BC Democracy

In his evaluation of American natural resource policy processes, Steven Yaffee emphasizes their fragmentation, short-term orientation, reactivity, and lack of creativity. The real world of American resource decision making, he says, diverges disappointingly from the sort of processes we would hope to find in the good political society. Ideally, societies would have mechanisms for making collective choices that would generate necessary information, including data about the current issue and future manifestations, and provide a forum for informed discussion and debate that focused on the real issues of concern. Debate would be substantive and productive, and would consider the merits of alternative arguments ... Government agencies with claims to expertise would base their advice on scientific or technical knowledge and be honest about what they know and what they do not know. The ideal decision making process would prompt a search for creative solutions that address the real interests of the disputing parties, and would assist in finding a solution that is as good as possible for all stakeholders, and that considers future generations and the needs of nonhuman lifeforms as well.

An evaluation of BC resource policy institutions must acknowledge important enduring strengths, and emphasize the improvements that have been made. Unfortunately, however, the final scorecard ends up paralleling Yaffee’s on important counts.

The cabinet government system is, in its own way, every bit as much a system of checks and balances as its congressional counterpart; in BC, as elsewhere, governments favourably disposed to policy change often find it difficult to assemble the requisite combination of information, bureaucratic backing, political support, and implementation capacity. Nonetheless, as the Harcourt regime illustrated, the fusion of legislative and executive power inherent in BC’s strong cabinet-weak legislature system does create considerable potential for decisive and coordinated action. Concentrated cabinet power translates into structural flexibility, allowing ministers considerable latitude to explore alternative ways to manage conflict, cope with deficiencies in analytic capacity, and expand opportunities for public input. Where powerful and diverse societal forces push from opposite directions, such cabinets enjoy substantial autonomy to shape issue networks and assemble the support coalitions needed to legitimate preferred policies.

These and other strengths of the BC system unfortunately do not ensure robust policy debate. A decade ago, I characterized forest policy debate in the province as barren. I argued that the important forest policy choices of the postwar years had been preceded by too little debate over costs, benefits, risks, and alternatives. An updated evaluation would be somewhat more positive. Thanks in considerable part to the efforts of environmentalists and allied critics, BC political institutions now do a better job of illuminating the implications of forest policy options. Environmental externalities are more transparent than they were two or three decades ago. Despite the presence of some well-irrigated pockets of lively discourse, however, sizable expanses of aridity remain. The boundaries of debate continue to be effectively patrolled by the exploitation axis. Critical assumptions go unexamined, significant policy alternatives unexposed, and crucial ‘who wins - who loses’ questions undebated.

All these problems were apparent during the Harcourt years. Anyone who looked carefully had to conclude that significant but unknown costs were being deferred to uncertain future dates, and that new and even more impenetrable complexities were being added to the long-standing debate over how (and how much) the owner of the resource subsidizes companies and workers. Such issues, despite their importance, were consigned to the margins of debate. We are still in the dark about many of the cost implications of the NDP changes, as well as about the way these will be allocated across sectors of society, and across present and future generations. After transfers in and out of Forest Renewal’s pockets are considered, for example, is the landlord likely to receive a return from any logging done under the terms of the Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel guidelines? What does a hard look at this experiment and industry operations in general suggest about the economic viability of a forest industry that observes high environmental standards? If a strong version of the code were to be implemented, would future forest industry jobs have to be even more extensively subsidized by the owner of the resource? Are there cheaper and less environmentally damaging ways of generating jobs for rural British Columbians? Would other policy paradigms - such as those advanced in devolution and tenure reform proposals - provide a more optimal package of environmental and economic benefits? Who would win and lose if these ideas were put into practice?

The lack of discussion of questions like these reminds us that the perspectives of important ‘policy takers’ remain frozen out of the forest policy debate. Because most British Columbians seem disinclined to accept the responsibilities and rights attending their ownership of the resource, and because the provincial governments that serve as the resource owner’s agent continue to be pressured by those who most directly benefit from exploitation of the resource, the landlord’s perspective is still only weakly articulated. Not enough British Columbians know or care about ‘how the money tree is chopped up.’

Perhaps most importantly, the interests of future generations continue to be seriously devalued in forest policy debates. British Columbians of the 1990s seem smugly certain that future generations will thank them for setting aside some magnificent protected areas. Perhaps so, but the gratitude of British Columbians of the twenty-first century may be tempered when they realize the shallowness of this generation’s commitment to preserving future options.

A search for debate about our obligations to future generations once again turns up a pallid version of what we might hope for. For example, British Columbians of the future will be disappointed to find a gaping void when they look back to see whether their parents and grandparents debated the premise that has justified the past fifty years of forest policy, the assumption that the province will be able to operate a viable second growth forest industry in the twenty-first century. And likewise, they are likely to be disappointed when they investigate whether the governments of the middle and late twentieth century were asked to demonstrate that continued logging of old growth ecosystems would significantly feed a stream of benefits flowing towards the future.

If we do owe future generations an obligation to preserve options, this must include a genuine attempt to proceed cautiously in the face of uncertainty and ignorance. As the last chapter suggested, advances in the field of conservation biology have brought us to the point where we know enough to recognize that we are quite ignorant about forest ecosystems. It will take huge research efforts to complete even a sketchy inventory of the species that live in BC’s forests. It will take even greater efforts to assemble a rudimentary understanding of how these species function and relate, and then, to comprehend how timber operations affect these functions and interrelationships.

Ancillary clouds of uncertainty result when silvicultural scientists, economists, demographers, and other knowledge producers try to predict what lies ahead for British Columbia. Given all this ignorance, it seems clear that at the very least, an obligation to protect future options must include a serious commitment to research, experimentation, and caution. These attempts to chip away at our ignorance must be founded on principles of openness and diversity if they are to accomplish what they should - defining alternative visions of what our society and its economy might look like, identifying who and what will win and lose if we pursue the final stages of the liquidation-conversion project, and clarifying the possible benefits of doing things differently.

All this adds up to a rather poor report card on the health of BC democracy. While democratic well-being is a multidimensional concept, a central component does hinge on the notion that in vibrant political societies, important policy decisions and nondecisions are preceded by lively debate about the costs, risks, and benefits of a full range of options. In this and related respects, BC democracy continues to fall short of its potential. At least in the policy field considered here, those with the power to organize issues in and out of public debate must take much of the blame. The boundaries and texture of debate continue to be controlled by players with little interest in raising or responding to questions about the consequences of continuing along the status quo path. Environmentalists and others who contest this control deserve more support from institutions with responsibility for promoting informed debate, particularly the media and the education system. As well, like all British Columbians, they deserve a government courageous enough to question vigorously the assumptions that have guided the early and middle stages of the liquidation-conversion project. People of the twenty-first century are likely to deliver a negative verdict when they discover that one of the wealthiest societies of the late twentieth century aggressively pushed policies threatening forest ecosystems, all in the face of varied and compelling doubts about long-term consequences. They are likely to be particularly scathing in their judgment of the fact that this society refused to stop long enough to debate its obligations to future generations.