316 Canadian Forestry Journal, July, 1919 



seek to specialize in the least crowded field, to carry to market those wares that are subject 

 to minimum competition. For instance, eighteen years ago, Canada's paper sales to the 

 United States were just $122. The pulp and paper exports in 1918 exceeded $60,000,000, 

 and the main reason for this phenomenal growth is that Eastern United States forests 

 have "pinched out", or water powers have failed or risen to excessive cost, whereas in 

 Canada, there remained that happy trinity for paper industries: wood, water powers, 

 and transportation. 



The industrial position of the pulp and newsprint paper mills in particular is not 

 surpassed by any achievement of the United States. The point of apprehension, therefore, 

 is not that the Canadian manufacturers of wood products need fear the ordinary tides of 

 competition but that the supplies of accessible forest materials may prove unequal to the 

 demand. This is no longer a mere sour speculation. Lumber companies have been 

 forced in many instances to face total depletion of timber supplies, particularly white 

 pine, while even some more recently developed pulp companies are not a little handi- 

 capped by a failing source of accessible spruce wood. Corroboration is found in the 

 constantly ascending price of timber limits, particularly in Eastern Canada, the advancing 

 of Government dues as fast as old agreements expire, the reduction of "estimated" 

 timber stands on much of the public and private lands as accurate cruises are applied. 

 This not only presages a dilema for many industries which cannot survive a greatly 

 increased cost for long hauls on their wood, but it materially restricts development of new 

 industries and curtails the country's advantages in foreign export. The latter is of ex- 

 ceeding importance, for our exports of forest products have overtopped every other 

 manufacture except the temporary output of munitions. To maintain and improve the 

 nation's export business is the most pressing concern of our financial statesmanship. Is 

 it too much to ask, therefore, that the examination of the various factors in export 

 trade of pulp and paper and lumber should show some penetration, and that our national 

 government taxing its brains over creating post-bellum exports might with profit give 

 some attention to the living forest that lays the largest of our export eggs? 



Canada's Great Tree Wealth. 



The vital importance of forests to Canada cannot well be overstated. This seems 

 so obvious that one would expect to find forest management a highly organized and 

 advanced function of all governments these many years. Two-thirds of the Dommion 

 is incapable of producing other than timber crops. Of the 163 million acres of Alberta, 

 for example, not more than thirty per cent are capable of cereal production, and in 1915 

 only 6,000,000 acres were actually tilled. Quebec had a hundred years start in agricul- 

 ture, and yet but nine out of 200 millions of her acres are under farm; nor can that 

 ratio ever be seriously reduced by agricultural expansion. Nearly seventy per cent of 

 New Brunswick is fitted by natural conditions for timber-growing, and for that alon'^. 

 But forests, however vital to national existence, are backward political advertisers, and 

 public policies in Canada have in a marked degree been formulated not primarily froin 

 scientific considerations but from respect for political consequences. Neglect of the forest 

 breeds no consequences of such a sort; dead timber lands tell no tales. 



Public Control of Forests. 



Notwithstanding all the unmatched lethargy in the rudiments of public forestry, it 

 is fortunate that no Canadian Government made the supreme blunder chargeable to the 

 people of the United States of parting with the control by outright alienation of four- 

 fifths of the republic's timber lands. Not more than five or ten per cent of the ground 

 title in the whole forested area of Canada has passed from the Crown. It is true that 

 more or less self-perpetuating leases of the most accessible timber growing on the Crown 

 lands have been granted to hundreds of private corporations, but the state still retains the 

 whip hand of a leasing system. This most fortunate restriction, from which no govern- 

 ment since the days of the French seigneurs has deviated except for railway grants, 

 reserves to the Canadian people ample power to impose whatever conservation require- 

 ments immediate or future public needs may dictate. The United States lacks this 

 weapon, except upon about one-quarter of the national forest domain, although on that 



