Wood pellets have been at a premium over the last two years because of back-to-back severe winters. Local retailers had to place a limit on the number of bags anyone can purchase in order to be able to provide some pellet supplies to as many customers as possible. One of Atlantic Canada’s main producers of…
A new Northern Policy Institute report entitled Diversify, Innovate, Invest…and Grow identifies the Kenora district among five of the 11 Northern Ontario census districts to experience population growth from 2001 to 2013. The report’s author Julien Bonin attributes the decline in population in the six districts to a lack of economic diversification and reliance on…
The man tapped by the U.S. Forest Service to come up with a better fire shelter once had to get inside one on the side of a burning mountain and listen to flames roar past sounding like a jet airplane taking off. “Everybody trains with it, but nobody ever thinks that you’ll ever need to use it,”…
Planting a tree in an urban environment is like placing it on death row. In the wild, ash and linden trees can live anywhere from 80 years to more than 200, says Martin Neumann, manager of the City of Guelph’s forestry department. But once that same type of tree is planted along a street in…
The deadline for a final agreement on the Great Bear Rainforest – a precedent-setting pact between the B.C. coastal forest industry, First Nations and environmentalists – is expected to be missed because the provincial government has not yet finalized its commitments. The agreement that ended the “war in the woods” in British Columbia would preserve…
With a 6% increase in sales revenue to a total of around CAD1.037bn, Canadian Western Forest Products (WFP) succeeded in surpassing the CAD1bn mark last year for the first time in its history but its EBITDA and net result remained well short of the previous year’s figures at CAD108.5m and CAD68.4m respectively. The company believes…
A Halifax-area lumber producer hopes to have its sawmill running again within six weeks after a recent flash freeze led to the collapse of one of its main buildings. Hefler Lumber co-owner Floyd Gaetz says the failure happened about three weeks ago, and initially threw 14 people employed in the Middle Sackville mill and sorting line out of…
Right now there is a window of opportunity to change forest management planning north of Kenora. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry is looking at the possibility of establishing an Enhanced Sustainable Forest Licence (ESFL) for the Whiskey Jack Forest. Gaining local community input into how the forest is managed, one of the benefits…
Five years ago Norm Goodell cut down trees he wasn’t supposed to. It was a mistake a hundred years in the making. McBride’s community forest contracted with Walter Jervis, who contracted with Goodell, to log a block of forest about 20km up Hwy 16. The community forest gave straightforward instructions to log the young wood…
How much subsidy is too much? Two American pulp and paper mill owners are alleging that Nova Scotia has unfairly subsidizedPort Hawkesbury Paper Corp. In documents filed with the United States International Trade Commission, they state that the subsidies have allowed the mill to dump supercalendered paper on the American market at prices far below…