If a tree falls in the woods where is the value?

• Author: Duchesne, Luc
• Position: OPINION

In January, the Ontario Power Generation and the Ministry of Natural Resources have created quite a stir in the business community by requesting expressions of interest to procure forest biofibre from Crown lands.

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The fibre would be turned into wood pellets to displace a portion of coal from generating stations to form a co-firing scenario which entails the burning of both the wood pellets and coal simultaneously.

My phone has been ringing off the hook. The media needs to understand what is going on. This all seems sudden to them, but in point of fact, the business sector has been waiting for this for quite some time and are poised to take action. The OPG announcement is a direct result of ministerial directives to support renewable energy in Ontario. In turn, this is supported by Ontario's clean air policies which aim at phasing out coal power generation.

In parallel, MNR submitted a request for expressions of interest for the purpose of creating a transparent biofibre allocation system, which I see as a positive step toward increasing the number of stakeholders in the forestry sector. Before delving deeper into the topic, we need to define biofibre.

Until last year I had no idea what it meant: I had never heard of it. However, in a context where we need to emphasize that OPG must not compete with the forest industry for resources there is a need to create a functional difference between fibre and biofibre. The definition of biofibre has been published by MNR and there is no need to revisit it. However, I would like to share some opinions from across the North.

If a tree falls in the forest and is used by the traditional forest industry, then it's fibre. If a tree falls and it is used for bioenergy, then it's biofibre. If the tree falls and it goes to neither fibre nor biofibre, then it doesn't really fall, unless of course it happens to fall on your head. Well, this third class of tree should be an immense concern to all of us.

Ontario's Annual Allowable Cut, that is the volume of wood that can be harvested sustainably year after year, is roughly 32 million square metres (m3) /annum. At the best of times, when the forest industry was thriving and the mills were humming day and night, we harvested 25 M m2/annum. Now we are harvesting about 14 M m2/annum. At the best of times, we have a resource at 18 M m3/annum that is used neither as fibre or biofibre. In practice, this means we are not supporting jobs with this...