Areas of intensive logging

(Saint-Félicien, Mashteuiatsh and Saguenay) On the edge of Boulevard Talbot, seated in a private room at Normandin, the Minister of Forests Maïté Blanchette Vézina presents her reform project to a few prefects. There is impatience in the air.

“I said it, I told my teams, it’s for yesterday,” said the minister, to reassure local elected officials.

“I looked yesterday, and it wasn’t out,” says the prefect of the MRC of Domaine-du-Roy, Yanick Baillargeon. He laughs as he makes his remark, but the organization he represents, Boreal Forest Alliance, stamps its foot.

M’s project^me Blanchette Vézina is to adopt on a large scale a new way of doing forestry: concentrate industrial activity on a smaller part of the territory, a “priority wood production zone”, delegate the management of reforestation to companies and let It is up to the Chief Forester of Quebec and his regional delegates to choose which sectors will be devoted to intensive exploitation. The details are not finalized, but a bill is planned for the spring.

The municipalities would like to take part in the decisions. “It is our responsibility to develop the territory,” says Luc Simard, prefect of the MRC Maria-Chapdelaine. The minister replies that with municipal elections every four years, it would be too unpredictable. An MRC could decide to prohibit the felling of trees, for example. “The public forest belongs to everyone,” she argues.

But beyond certain disagreements, they agree that the status quo is untenable.

Crisis

The forestry industry is in crisis. It is threatened by the trade war with the United States, is suffering the repercussions of the historic forest fires of 2023 and fears of having access to less wood with the adoption of measures to protect the woodland caribou or to protect 30% of the territory of Quebec.

We rarely hear this emergency in big cities. But in regions like Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, job losses are adding up. Unions estimate that 30,000 workers have lost their jobs over the past 20 years.

A factory that closes is often a bunch of small entrepreneurs all around who also lose their jobs, argues Mr. Baillargeon.

Minister Maïté Blanchette Vézina is not the most sought after by the media on Parliament Hill. In 2024, she passed a mining bill without much controversy. But when she sets foot in a forest region, she attracts attention.

In the morning, she is in Saint-Félicien to announce economic aid for projects to develop forest biomass. In the press scrum, a journalist pointed out to her that environmentalists, First Nations and unions were criticizing her consultation tour, conducted behind closed doors, and what she was proposing.

But Maïté Blanchette Vézina is certain: a new forest regime based on “triad” cultivation is the way to combine the protection of forest caribou, the creation of protected areas, and the capacity of Quebec to produce more wood intended for forestry industry, which must also modernize, she explains to The Press in interview.

Produce more, with less territory

It is based on the work of Christian Messier, professor at UQAM and renowned researcher in the field of forestry, who led a pilot project in Mauricie during the 2010s.

The concept? Separate the forest into three zones: protected areas; a mixed-use forest as we know it today; an area where intensive cultivation is carried out.

As part of this pilot project, 15% of the territory was under intensive cultivation. What might this forest look like? “At worst and at best,” summarizes Mr. Messier. Traditionally, it is a monoculture where all species, except the one we want to harvest, are eliminated. “But today, we know that by diversifying plantations, we improve the harvest and make the forest more resilient to disease,” he explains. However, he recognizes that there is no consensus on this vision and that some of his colleagues fear intensive cultivation.

But this, he argues, can produce up to four times more wood per hectare than the forest in its natural state. This would therefore reduce the pressure on the rest of the territory, in particular to achieve the target of 30% protected areas by 2030, said Minister Maïté Blanchette Vézina, who met Mr. Messier on numerous occasions during the last year.

The reform does not please everyone. The unions believe that the Legault government must do more to ensure that the forestry industry leaves the “paper and two-by-four” niche, says Daniel Cloutier, Quebec director of UNIFOR, which notably represents workers at the lumber giant Domtar. .

The First Nations point of view

And on the First Nations side, criticism comes from all sides. - reported last week that a letter signed by several indigenous nations deplored the “biased vision” of Mr.^me Blanchette Vézina, for the benefit of the industry.

In Mashteuiatsh, an Innu community located on the shores of Lake Saint-Jean, not far from Roberval, vice-chief Jonathan Gill-Verreault claims that the Legault government did not respect its constitutional obligation to consult the First Nations. If he tries to impose intensive forest areas on his territory, he will be exposed to prosecution. But he did not sign the letter.

“We are not against the industry. We live surrounded by people who depend on the industry. We have families here who make a living from it, hundreds of workers. We stand in solidarity with the villages when a sawmill closes. But it takes a balance. If, in the region, we continue to harvest the forest at this level, we will hit a wall in 15, 20 years,” he says.

Mr. Gill-Verreault is thirty years old. He is too young to have hunted caribou on his territory, even though a moratorium on the hunting of this animal sacred to the Innu was decreed nearly 20 years ago by his community due to the decline of the species. This has an impact on the transmission of culture, even if an understanding has been established with the Crees.

“It’s not a sacrifice as much as it is up to us to protect the caribou. If we exploit our entire territory, all of our biodiversity risks dying out. And it’s not because of the caribou that the industry is in difficulty,” he emphasizes.

But Minister Maïté Blanchette Vézina believes in her plan. The new forest regime will make it possible to protect more territory, for the benefit of woodland caribou and other forest users. And the “perfect storm” that the industry is going through will, she believes, allow market diversification. She feels that a “tipping point” will be reached: and Quebec will have to turn massively to industrial wooden infrastructures to create an “internal market”.