ONTARIO REPORT:
by William F. Murphy, RPF General Manager

The Canadian dollar seems to be on the decline along with energy rates in Ontario. These are positives for our forest industry and should lead into more profitable times. Unfortunately, our losses will never be recovered. One of the superintendents that I worked with in the forest industry always commented that the cord of wood that you don’t get cut today is a cord of wood left for the future, but it is a loss for the company. This is still relevant today. However, there is more to this than simply the loss of a cord of wood. 
The trend for the past couple of years has been to reduce losses, and in some cases very drastically reduce the renewal trust commitment to the forest by some companies. The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources has allowed (in some cases with no documentation that we can find from the District Managers) a constant yearly reduction of the companies’ commitments to put in the renewal trust dollars that are going to allow for intensive forest management. They are in most cases meeting their commitment to regenerating the hectares promised, but they are reducing the effectiveness of this regeneration effort by allowing much more natural seeding to occur.
The new format for the Forest Management Plan has been increased to ten years from five, and although there are commitments within the process to review and account for progress within the plan, companies still have until the end of the tenth year to declare all the non-planted depletions to natural to bring the Crown’s land to renewal status. 
Within the mandatory Ministry compliance system, there are categories for auditing water crossings, roads, areas of concern, cut sizes, and suspended operations. All of these are audited against a specific area of the Forest Management Plan. There can be a significant amount of paper work and follow-up for any harvesting operation with respect to the accuracy and the completeness of a harvesting compliance report. For each block there can be more than one of the above compliance reports made up to a maximum of 500 ha, depending on the requirements within the five or ten-year compliance plan. 
Where does renewal compliance fit into this system? By law one report is required to be submitted for each of the following - planting, scarification, thinning, and aerial spraying. There can be 5 million seedlings planted and one report submitted for the whole operation by the forest company involved. There is no physical measurement required within the compliance system to reflect the success or failure of the Silviculture Ground Rules or the Forest Operations Prescriptions for the individual blocks. There is no compliance report required at the end of the management term to reflect the success or failure of the reporting of natural regeneration. Yet we are depending on this to promote the success of our future forests. The OMNR is spending too much time and money on the past, after an area is harvested, and very little time and effort in promoting the future regeneration success of our Crown lands.