1406 



Canadian Forestry Journal, November, 1917 



holocausts of North Ontario's Clay- 

 belt in 1916 when 220 men, women 

 and children were swallowed up in 

 flames. Last summer, settlers were 

 observed many times piling their 

 slash against standing timber and 

 setting the torch to the debris without 

 either knowledge or care of the con- 

 sequences. Nothing in New Bruns- 

 wick's fire laws prevents this criminal 

 conduct, except in two townships. 

 New Brunswick has travelled in good 

 luck, much as did Ontario's Clay belt 

 for many years. One never can mark 

 on the calendar, however, the day 

 when the good luck shall come to an 

 end. Modern forest protection sy- 

 stems are not built upon assumptions 

 of luck, but upon exactness. 



Jobbers and Cutting 



The problem of supervising the 

 cutting done by the jobbers calls 

 insistently for Government action. 

 This winter, a commencement is 

 being made, and the Chief Forester 

 has designated a number of his 

 technical men to supervise the cutting, 

 co-operating as far as possible with 

 the timber scalers whose duties have 

 always included inspection of cutting 

 to see that the regulations are pro- 

 perly carried out. The new force of 

 technical men will act in a supple- 

 mentary capacity and doubtless will 

 tune up the inspection considerably. 



One of the quarters where educa 

 tional work is very badly needed is in 

 putting a stop to the raids on spruce 

 lands by fake settlers. The Forestry 

 Journal understands that the Govern- 

 ment is opposing such efforts success- 

 fully, despite strong political pressure. 

 Reference was made to this situation 

 some months ago in the Journal, and 

 the argument offered that the settler 

 who, of his own free choice or as a 

 dummy for an organized group, ap- 

 plies for a homestead knowing it to be 

 non-agricultural land, filled with 

 spruce, is a malefactor and should be 

 treated without mercy. He is a bird- 

 of-passage at best. He never intends 

 to settle and could not on such land 

 if he would. He pays no taxes to the 

 public treasury. No sooner is he 

 located, with a dozen of his fellows, 

 than he besieges the Government for 



a 'colonization' road and in very many 

 instances forces upon the people that 

 useless expenditure. The "home- 

 steading" of non-agricultural lands 

 by spruce hunters is a patent and 

 dangerous fraud and no local member 

 of the legislature has any business re- 

 cognizing, let alone advocating, the 

 request of his constituent in such a 

 matter. 



Education from Within 



While the Canadian Forestry Asso- 

 ciation, through twenty public meet- 

 ings, the distribution of French and 

 English literature placed in the hands 

 of thousands of New Brunswick 

 citizens and teachers and children, 

 the supply of free lecture sets on 

 forest conservation to the schools and 

 churches, a steady campaign of news- 

 paper and magazine publicity, etc., 

 has endeavored to bring to the doors 

 of the people* the plain facts of their 

 present crisis, and to make the Forest 

 Survey better understood, and the 

 reasons for new reforms of forest 

 administration palpable, it might be 

 suggested that an educational branch 

 of the Forestry Division, operated 

 from Fredericton, would prove a 

 valuable accessory to the adminis- 

 trative work now being carried on. 



CLEARING NORTH COUNTRY 



Hon. G. Howard Ferguson, Min- 

 ister of Lands, Forests and Mines, is 

 advertising for tenders on pulp and 

 other timber in the townships of 

 Idington and Owens on the National 

 Transcontinental in Northern Ontario. 

 A new project is being instituted 

 under which it is proposed to cut 

 strips of four chains wide through the 

 townships, so that each farm ar quar- 

 ter section will have ten acres of 

 cleared land. The purpose of this 

 new plan of timber clearing is to 

 encourage subsequent "cleared farm" 

 settlement. 



Ontario's wood-working industries 

 use 54 difTerent kinds of wood. On- 

 tario is a great producer of railway 

 ties; more than 5,700,000 were taken 

 out of the forests last year. 



