The war for the woods.

• Author: Robinson, Dave
• Position: ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING

Clark Binkley says forests are a very attractive financial asset these days. Binkley should know. He was once dean of the University of British Columbia's forestry faculty, and from 1998 to 2005 he ran the world's largest private timberlands investor. He told a Financial Post interviewer just last month that "there are literally billions of dollars available for investment in forest land."

No wonder the Financial Post ran five feature articles, 2007 making the case for selling off Crown forests to private buyers. The Post articles are a clear signal that the battle to privatize Northern Ontario's forests lands is heating up.

The Americans may claim that our public forests give Canadian producers an unfair advantage, and the forest companies may be asking for more secure property rights, but the players to watch are in the financial markets. They want a chance to buy Canadian forests.

For long term investors, timberlands are an even better asset than mineral deposits. The price of wood may go up and down, but the trees just keep growing. Combine this natural growth rate with the long term rise in the value of timber and you can see why financial interests are drooling.

Add to the equation the fact that forest management in Ontario produces perhaps half the yield of private forest lands in Finland or the U.S. and you can see why timberland investors are sure they can make more money than the province on forest lands.

So the war for the North has begun. On one side, embedded financial journalists like VanderKlippe and are reaching out to the southern decision makers. They are probably hoping for a new government that will move quickly and irreversibly to end the Crown forest era. It happened in New Zealand in the 1980s when a radical conservative government came to power. It could happen here.

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On the other side is a weak and scattered community forest movement. The tiny Northern Ontario Sustainable Community Partnership, for example, has been circulating a Community Forest Charter. The Charter invites Northerners to think about shifting power to the communities of Northern Ontario. It puts forward the view that forest communities should actually have some control of their forests.

The movement has been gaining ground in BC, but it has been resisted and undermined by the Ministry of Natural Resources in Ontario since the 1990s.

The war could be over before most...