New Rules for Saskatchewan’s Forests

The provincial government is in the process of creating new standards for forestry companies to operate in the province. Until now, there have been no regulated standards in place within Saskatchewan, which means that forestry operations are ad hoc with little consistency. For example, while forestry “Company A” may be able to cut in sensitive zones (such as riparian areas), forestry “Company B” would not be able to harvest wood from these areas, even though both companies are operating in the same type of forest, right next to each other. The provincial government hopes that the creation of these legislative manuals will lead to standardization of operations across the forest land base.

Four new legislative manuals being developed by the provincial government will provide the guidelines for forest management activities in Saskatchewan into the future. Each of the four manuals: Forest Planning, Forest Operations, Compliance, and Scaling will contain details on objectives, procedures, standards and guidelines to be followed by forestry companies when undertaking their operations.

SES intends to provide meaningful input into this legislative assessment in order to further our goals of boreal conservation, as these guidelines will dictate the nature of all forestry operations in the province for at least the next decade. We also hope that by providing our input to this process, good standards will be created that echo the standards developed by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). For more information on the FSC, see the SES website factsheet on boreal forest certification: http://www.environmentalsociety.ca/issues/forests/certification.html.

As this process unfolds over the next two years, SES will continue to participate. To date, SES has provided comments on the province’s Dwarf Mistletoe Management, a review of the Forest Management Planning and a Review of the Regeneration Assessment Standards Document.

Standards | Deforestation | Climate change | Forest certification | Sustainable economic development | Prince Albert National Park | North Central Land Use Planning