Former agriculture minister Pierre Paradis once said that Monsanto is stronger than the government. The forestry lobby is also much stronger, and has been for much longer. Philemon Wright was the first, in 1806, to drive a square log raft from Hull to Quebec. Elected Member of Parliament for Quebec, he was granted the Gatineau Privilege from 1832 to 1843.
In 1848, the settlers of Gracefield complained, in a letter to the Bishop of Ottawa, of the fact that the companies cut down even the kindling of six to eight inches, leaving them no trees large enough to build on. Quebec granted several years to the companies to cut the wood from the lots granted to the settlers. This privilege would not be limited until 1886, after the parish priest of Montcerf, Charles-Alfred-Marie Paradis, was prosecuted and imprisoned for having authorized the settlers of range 6 of the township of Egan to cut the little wood left by the Gilmour company, which had been logging there for 10 years.
Its founder, Allan Gilmour, one of the lumber barons, who left, upon his death, the largest fortune in Canada, created another injustice: private clubs. This privilege, which exists nowhere else in America, is still a cause of injustice, 175 years later. Scottish, he had the salmon reserved by Quebec on the Godbout River at the expense of the Montagnais who had been fishing there for 6,000 years. Like the Gracefield settlers, the Montagnais complained by letter in 1845.
Even today, a signature in the capital can get you resources: wood, minerals, hunting and fishing grounds, and subsidies to exploit them…
In 1995, Pierre Dubois published The true masters of the Quebec forest.
The forestry industry formed its first association in 1924. In 2003, three associations merged under the name of the Conseil de l’industrie forêt du Québec (CIFQ). If this lobby is so influential, it is because regional politicians can hardly oppose it, because of the jobs involved. Regional elected officials have even created a pro-industry lobby, the Boreal Forest Alliance, a name similar to that of Action Boreal, this well-known non-profit organization founded in 2000 to promote the preservation of boreal forests.
The pressure for jobs is the same for politicians in Quebec and Ottawa, in addition to their own desire to accelerate the exploitation of all resources without regard to future generations. Former Prime Minister Philippe Couillard summed up the position of the political world well by saying that no job will be lost to save a caribou.
All the First Nations people, the 100,000 private owners who show that trees can be harvested without destroying the forest, the forestry workers who have been denouncing bad practices for generations, weigh very little compared to the experienced lobbyists, often ex-politicians, such as the Chevrettes, Lebels, Blackburns, etc.
Many attempts at regulation have been abandoned or not enforced. Quebec does not apply its own regulation which protects all regeneration from 12 cm up to 40 cm. Ditto for the hammering, not respected at 50%, from 1986 to 2001 according to Z. Majcen, the initiator of this method.
Quebec and Ottawa themselves cause a lot of damage to regeneration and to the soil during the preparation of the soil preceding the plantations which are 100% subsidized. Nearly half of the two hundred thousand hectares cut in Quebec are reforested in softwood monoculture after being combed, scarified and sometimes completely stripped.
Even if all the stakeholders know that much more wood could be produced near the mills, without disturbing the caribou, no one dares to denounce the harvesting and remuneration methods that reduce the possibility of forestry and wildlife by destroying regeneration and impoverishing the grounds.
The caribou saga shows, as with other resources, that exploitation weighs much more heavily than conservation.