Canadian Forestry Journal, November, 1919 



453 



THE STATE AS BOSS OF ITS FOREST PROPERTIES 



By Robson Black, Secretary, 

 Canadian Forestry Association, Oltan>a. 



A Permanent Forest Asset Easily Within the 



Power of the Canadian People — The 



Lumberman's View 



Canada is a forest country, full of lumbering 

 and empty of forestry. Over sixty per cent of 

 our total area is unfitted for agriculture. Of 

 New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, for example, 

 fully seventy per cent will never pay a profit 

 to the plow. In Quebec, about nme million 

 acres are being tilled, out of more than 250 

 million acres of area. About two-thirds of 

 Manitoba is for timber-growing solely, and in 

 what is commonly called "treeless Alberta," not 

 more than 40 per cent of its 163 million acres 

 are fit for cereal production, and in 1915 only 

 6,000,000 of Alberta's acres were tilled. Can- 

 ada's most widely distributed crop therefore is 

 wood, the harvest of the timberland. 



THE DOWN HILL TENDENCY. 



Contrary to usual belief, forests are not a 

 self-perpetuating asset. If it were so, Cana- 

 dians would fear nothing from the bush-whack- 

 ing programme of armies of men. If pme fol- 

 lowed pine and spruce followed spruce, invar- 

 iably and without loss of a century or more of 

 time between crops, Ontario and Quebec would 

 have quite as much pine and spruce as stood 

 on the soil in 1850. But pine is a failing crop 

 and so short is the supply that Ontario's cut 

 is swiftly decreasing year by year. Spruce is 

 not repeating itself except at long inter- 

 vals — about 150 years in Central Quebec. The 

 two great pillars of the wood-using industries 

 of Eastern Canada are a pine log and a spruce 

 log. Human ingenuity can bring along no 

 substitutes. It is pine and spruce or disaster. 



WHICH DEFINITION? 



Right here we come upon the cross-roads of 

 Canadian forest policy. Lumbering, as com- 

 monly practised, means cutting timber for the 

 market. This is good as far as it goes. The 

 theory was quite sufficient for the days of super- 

 fluous forests and ill-developed machinery of 

 government. Our forests are no longer super- 

 fluous. They are no longer a synonym of "wil- 



derness," but take rank with the concrete na- 

 tional assets, to be charged up to governments 

 as a vital public trust. In the wake of threat- 

 ened exhaustion, we have sensibly asked for a 

 definition of forest resources. Aare they like 

 the coal mine, exhaustible and non-reproduct- 

 ive? Or are they like the corn-field — subject 

 to perpetual operation and perpetual harvests? 

 This has brought us as a people to at least a 

 sentime.-.tal alliance with the science of forest 

 perpetuation. Forestry, like lumbering, cuts 



'Pho tree in the iiiim ...m ai.li is an .lak ot about 

 iwi) foot ill (liaiiutcr ami some .>;ixty feet In heiplit 

 whicli was totally .Icinolishcil liurinp a very ."^overe 

 t'ioctiMcal storm. The sioiin ViroUe otT ihf main 

 .stem some lifteeii feet Horn tlie groiiml ami splitting 

 it up into small fragments, scattereil tlieiu over a 

 distaiiee of about :UH) feet. This tree may be seen 

 on the farm of Mr. Geo. O. Stroll, about one mile 

 east of ('oiiesto^o. iMitarlo. 



