Jim Stanford is an adviser to Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector trade union, and Harold Innis Industry Professor of Economics at McMaster University in Hamilton. By any definition, 2015 was a lousy year for Canada’s economy, complete with a technical recession, plunging oil prices and big stock market losses. Lurking in the statistics, however, is an…
Government subsidies for the Cape Breton paper mill have embroiled the province in another trade dispute. A previous dispute that came to a head in December led to hefty duties on U.S. imports of supercalendered paper from Canadian mills. In that case, complaints of unfair competition came from the other side of the border. Now…
The early 1990s was a pivotal time for the forest industry and for forest activism in British Columbia. Massive demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience resulted in hundreds of arrests in Clayoquot Sound in response to large-scale clear-cutting on the west coast of B.C. and Vancouver Island. International protests and market campaigns forced the government…
One little-known legacy of the now-expiring softwood lumber agreement: it spawned a massive, Canadian-funded humanitarian effort in the United States that people north of the border have never heard of. Funds dispersed with little fanfare under the decade-old Canada-U.S. deal built hundreds of houses in places like this once-underwater neighbourhood in New Orleans, affecting lives…
We are excited to announce that registration for the 2016 Forests Ontario Annual Conference is open! The conference will take place on Friday, February 5th at the Nottawasaga Inn, Alliston. This year we will be exploring the theme of Regeneration – looking at engaging future generations of environmental leaders to help face the challenges ahead…
If you had to sexually attract a brown spruce longhorn beetle, would you know what to do? Jon Sweeney knows. Start with a deep whiff of male beetle sex pheromone. “By itself, it’s not very attractive, but if it’s emitted along with odours that smell like a stressed spruce tree …it increases the attraction five…
The Forest Stewardship Council is launching a mediation process to try and bring peace to Quebec’s woodlands. The organization that oversees the world’s most recognized forest certification standard said Thursday that the process will bring together Resolute Forest Products, First Nations, unions, environmental groups and others to find “common ground” over contentious issues raised about…
The Budworm Tracker program, which involved field reports from ‘citizen scientists,’ received an “unheard of” 90 per cent return rate on the data, says Rob Johns, a forest insect ecologist with Canadian Forest Service in Fredericton. “To put it in perspective, if you can get 20-40 per cent back from a citizen scientist program you’re…
Cameco announced today that its board appointed Don Kayne as a director effective January 1, 2016 until the next annual general shareholders’ meeting where he will stand for election by the shareholders with the rest of the board. Kayne is president and CEO of Canfor Corporation, as well as CEO of Canfor Pulp Products Inc….
It starts as fluff on the side of a beech tree’s smooth grey bark. Pinpricks of white wax dot the tree; sometimes sparsely, other times it nearly covers the trunk. That’s the scale insect, digging in – opening up the tree’s bark – and is the first step to beech bark disease. Next comes the…