The Legault government continues to maintain uncertainty about how it will assess the job losses that would result from the federal emergency decree imposing protective measures for the three endangered caribou herds in Charlevoix, Val-d’Or and the Pipmuacan reservoir.
The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forests (MRNF) invited the media on Friday to a technical briefing “aimed at explaining the calculation method used to arrive at the loss of at least 2,000 jobs” during which it did not reveal the mathematical formulas used.
“It’s only the results that matter to you [sont] “presented,” an official told reporters, saying the reduction in the volume of wood shipped to mills would range from 1% to 50%.
This estimate, the calculation method of which has not been disclosed, was then used to calculate job losses based on the “intersectoral model”, a statistical model widely used by economists.
“A model is only as reliable as the quality of the data that goes into it,” said Nancy Gélinas, dean of the faculty of forestry, geography and geomatics at Université Laval and specialist in forest economics, who chaired the Independent Commission on Forest and Mountain Caribou.
This Commission had recommended that the government “do a much more detailed analysis by region, to understand the real impact” of caribou protection, rather than sticking to “the rule of thumb,” she recalls.
Such an analysis would serve as a basis for “rebalancing the impact” to avoid some industry players being affected more than others.
A plan, not a ‘war,’ say workers
Forestry workers are calling on Quebec to “break away from the paradigm of cutting 2 by 4s” and adopt an integrated vision of forestry, as is the case for the battery industry.
“We are aware that we must protect the caribou, but let’s take the initiative to transform our industry, to be visionary” by doing secondary and tertiary processing, says Nicolas Lapierre, assistant to the Quebec director of the Metalworkers’ union, which represents some 1,500 workers in the forestry sector.
“It is difficult to assess the veracity of the figures” presented by Quebec, he said, calling on the government to sit at the table rather than making ” statements [déclarations] policies”.
“Inevitably, there will be job losses,” he said. “We need to have government planning, [pas] a federal-provincial war.”
Quebec’s Chief Forester calculated in mid-July that the ban on logging in the protection zones under study by Ottawa would reduce the “forest potential”, or the volume of wood made available to the industry, by nearly 1.4 million cubic metres, which corresponds to a decrease of 4.1%.
This is equivalent to “28,500 vans “of wood that would not be intended for processing plants,” illustrated a MRNF official on Friday, reiterating that 1,990 direct and indirect jobs would consequently be lost, more than half of which would be in the Pipmuacan sector alone.