44 CANADIAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION. 



respect to cutting merchantable timber on the part of the lessee, the lease of 

 the limits shall be renewed. British Columbia has had a Forestry Com- 

 mission and has investigated this question with very great care. 1ms Com- 

 mission has not yet reported to the Province of British Columbia, but the 

 Premier has made the statement, which we may take unquestionably as 

 embodying the conclusion at which the Commission has arrived, that it is 

 the intention to provide new regulations to the effect that timber leases in 

 British Columbia, when they expire, shall be renewed from time to time. 

 It appears to me that the regulations for the Provinces and the Dominion 

 ought to contain that specific provision, because while these regulations of a 

 contrary character may have been perfectly wise and considered good 

 policy in the minds of the men who adopted them some years ago, before 

 the question of preservation of the forests was regarded as important, it 

 seems to me that when the preservation of the forests is universally ad- 

 mitted to be important, it should hardly be necessary to argue^the fact that 

 a permanency of tenure is necessary. Otherwise, you make it to a man's 

 interests to take the lumber off with the least expense possible, and, there- 

 fore, you absolutely remove from him in every way possible any interest he 

 might have in the conservation of the forests or the propagation of the 

 timber. But give him a permanent lease, give him the knowledge that if he 

 cares for that forest, if he fosters it by proper Forestry methods, it will 

 be a permanent asset, that he can pass on the property to his children or 

 that it can be sold the same as any other property, then you will hold out 

 the very strongest possible inducement for proper forest conservation. So 

 it seems to me it is not arguable that any other policy ought permanently to 

 be adopted. 



Now, there are two other things in regard to which I wish to say a word 

 or two. In the first place, I am going to ask this Association to do some- 

 thing for the Conservation Comniission. At the last session of Parliament 

 a Commission upon Waterways and Forests, of which I have the honor of 

 being Chairman, made a report asking that the Government of the Domin- 

 ion bring in legislation to constitute a great forest reserve along the eastern 

 slope of the Rocky Mountains. I need not point out to you the necessities 

 of the great Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in this matter. The 

 nvers that water these provinces take their rise in the foothills of the 

 Rocky Mountains. If the forest is absolutely removed from these slopes 

 -as it will be m a very short time (less than a generation if not protected) 

 it goes without saying, and there are men in this room who have expert 

 knowledge of the fact, you will have nothing but destructive floods in the 

 spring and practically no water at all in the summer. The continued pro- 

 the great Provinces of Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan 

 absolutely, m my judgment and in that of any man who has given 



vh T att . cntlon ' U P" the preservation of these forests. And that 

 >nly be : by making the whole eastern slope a permanent reserva- 



t 



after seri 11 V^ tO ** ^ after in ^igating the subject and 

 the evidence we could upon it. Before Sur Conservation 



