178 



Canadian Foreslry Journal, April, 19/9 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OUR EASTERN FORESTS 



B\) Dr. D. E. Fernolv, Dean of the Faculty of Forestry, 

 University) of Toronto. 



There has been a mischievous story afloat 

 about the "unhmited" and "inexhaustible" tim- 

 ber supply of the Dominion of Canada, and 

 public men who ought to have known better 

 have repeated it. It is mischievous because it 

 inures wasteful use and delays the rational, con- 

 servative management of the forest resources 

 with regard to future needs. Our knowledge 

 of probable supplies, to be sure, is for much of 

 the forest area, still mere guess work, but it is 

 sufficiently well based to enable us to see that 

 an end is in sight. 



The easiest way to make one realize the ex- 

 haustibility of the timber ready for the axe in 

 Canada is to state that the present sawmill 

 capacity of the United States would suffice to 

 dispose of it in less than a decade, and that, 

 according to the best information, the timber 

 supply of the States is about four times that of 

 the Dominion. 



Since the forest resource is looked to, to 

 play a not insignificant role in the reconstruc- 

 tion of the Dominion's world trade, it is indicat- 

 ed to analyze the situation. 



The commercial timber of Canada is found 

 in two widely separated regions: the eastern 

 forest ard that of British Columbia. In the 

 case of the latter the merchantablbe stand has 

 been estimated recently by the Commission of 

 Conservation on the basis of an exhaustive sur- 

 vey at 360,000 million feet, and enough is 

 known to place the eastern stand at considerably 

 less. 



The Meaning to Canada of Wood Supplies. 



It is not usually recognized that the forests 

 stand second as a basis for our manufacturing 

 industries, that the annual value of our forest 

 products equals that of our wheat crop, and 

 that our forest industries supply around 15 per 

 cent of our foreign trade and an equal percent- 

 age of railway traffic. It is evident that the 

 handling of such a resource is a matter of high 

 economic importance. 



The sawmill lumber cut alone for the Do- 

 minion has reached as high as 5,000 million feet 

 annually, and for the last decade has averaged 

 over 4,000 million feet, worth around 60 million 

 dollars at the mill. An analysis of the figures 

 brings out the fact that spruce, white pine and 



Douglas fir make up three-fourths of the annual 

 lumber cut of the Dominion; this comes in the 

 sequence of their output from the forests of 

 Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and New 

 Brunswick, which provinces, indeed, furnish 

 some 90 per cent of all our lumber. Our in- 

 terest accordingly in general narrows down to a 

 consideration of the white pine forests of On- 

 tario and Quebec, the spruce forests of Quebec 

 and New Brunswick, and the Douglas fir forests 

 of British Columbia. 



Employment and Forest Production. 



Turning our attention to eastern Canada 

 alone, we may give a few figures to indicate the 

 place of its forests in the economic life of this 

 section. To begin with, there are some 30,000 

 men of the eastern provinces who gain a liveli- 

 hood in the operations between the tree and the 

 mill. There are over 3,000 mills engaged in 

 converting the logs into lath, lumber, shingles, 

 staves, etc. These mills, according to 191! 

 census, represented a capital of over $96,- 

 000,000, and employed over 58,000 men, whose 

 earnings amounted to around $18,000,000. 

 The wood-using industries in eastern Canada 

 number over 3,000 firms, which require, roughly, 

 2,000 million feet of raw material annually, and 

 since this is very largely of domestic origin, the 

 industries are doubly important. While these 

 industries could exist on imported wood material, 

 the logging and milling industries mentioned 

 above must pass with the exhaustion of the 

 forest. 



The pulpwood industry in the east has become 

 of growing importance of late years, due in some 

 measure to the waning supply in the north- 

 eastern states. The home consumption of pulp- 

 wood has risen from 480,000 cords in 1908, 

 valued at around $3,000,000, to 1,765,000 

 cords in 1916, valued at over $13,000,000. In 

 addition, in that year over 1 ,000,000 cords were 

 exported, valued at nearly $7,000,000. The 

 pulpwood manufactured into pulp in home mills 

 has been above 1,000,000 cords annually the 

 past six years, and has exceeded the cordage !| 

 exported in the raw state since 1913. Some 

 fifty mills are concerned, and over 85 per cent 

 of the consumption is in Ontario and Quebec. 



