It was with great interest and low expectations that I attended a public consultation session for the Ontario Forest Tenure and Pricing Review in Pembroke on the evening of October 14th, hosted by the Ministry of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry (MNDMF). Unfortunately, my low expectations were met.
In my long experience as an advocate for property rights and free enterprise, and more recently in my capacity as a Member of the Ontario Legislature and Critic for MNDMF, I have seen many of these workshops, and the common thread that runs through them all is deception. Without failure these workshops are contrived and manipulated meetings that insure a predetermined outcome, where stakeholders are herded through chutes like cattle to the bureaucracies’ predetermined conclusion. The Clean Water Act and the Nutrient Management Act immediately come to mind, but there have been so many others. This workshop was no different- simply having the session fulfills the Liberal government’s expectation of transparency, public consultation, and democracy.
Unlike an honest and open discussion where individuals are free to raise their concerns and justify opinions with evidence and argument, the Ministry's workshop muted individual thought with a compartmentalized session of forced group-think, with the only subjects open to debate itemised on a worksheet. As critic for the Ministry, I was disturbed, but not surprised, that the items on the worksheet did not remotely reflect the real challenges the forestry industry in Ontario faces.
Ministry representatives informed the group that the 24 million cubic metres of public forest previously harvested has dropped to 15 cubic million metres this year and expected to drop further to 10 million cubic metres- a drop of greater than 50%, and a complete disaster for the forestry industry, making the auto industry collapse pale in comparison.
In Ontario, foresters harvest 0.6 cubic/metre per acre of Crown land. In Finland, the number is 6 cubic metres per acre of public land. That’s a ten-fold increase in harvesting, and the question at this session should have been, “What are the obstacles to our productivity in Ontario?”
Foresters who use private land in Ontario, on average, seem to more than double the harvest rate seen by foresters on Crown land. Why the magnified discrepancy?
Unlike the Pembroke workshop, the answer to our competitiveness and productivity problem is transparent: it is excessive government restrictions and over-regulation that diminish our productivity. In addition, the Crown's stranglehold on 88% of all land in Ontario, and its refusal to sell some of these Crown lands, stifles innovation, competition and ensures a growth of bureaucracy, not prosperity.
Throughout the developed world, countries use the marketplace to determine the value of "Crown” or “Public" resources, however in Ontario we use a convoluted bureaucratic administrator to determine value. Instead of allowing the marketplace determine price, bureaucracy determines the value using a matrix. A basic understanding of economics and supply and demand will tell you that this leaves our forestry unable to compete with other jurisdictions; instead our centralized planning and pricing returns bankrupt loggers and closed mills.
Workshops such as the Pembroke session leave a bitter taste in my mouth. They are deceptive manipulations of transparency with predetermined conclusions, meant to give the appearance of democratic process while ignoring the truth.
So long as we allow government to run rough-shod over reality by manipulating the process, and until we refuse to tolerate the deceptive practices demonstrated in the PembrokeOntario Forest Tenure and Pricing Review workshop, and so many others before it, we can only expect a continued and increasing decline in productivity and wealth in rural Ontario.
Randy Hillier, MPP Lanark Frontenac Lennox, is a co-founder of the Lanark Landowners Association, which was brought to life to address government imposition on the rights of private property owners, and to address the regressive regulatory impositions that government was bringing down upon farmers and business owners in rural Ontario.
In 2006, Randy resigned as President of the OLA in order to run as a candidate for the Progressive Conservatives. Randy was elected in the 2007 provincial election.
Randy a long-time resident of Lanark County, an electrician by trade and member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), continues to co-publish and edit rural Ontario’s successful magazine “The Landowner.”
