Dear editor,
On March 28, 2022, Greg Rickford, Minister of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources and Forestry, announced the Ontario government’s first Forest Biomas Action Plan. According to the announcement, the plan was a way to promote economic opportunities, drive economic growth and help secure, for future generations, a strong forestry sector in the north.
At the time of the announcement, Fort Frances had a biomass facility, originally funded with lots of your hard earned tax dollars. Perfect for the Town to take advantage of this program.
From my perspective, Council took no initiative to take advantage of this program. By late 2022 the biomass was demolished and it was recently revealed that Thunder Bay received funding for a new biomass facility.
I feel this was just another failure by this and the last council to do anything to make sure Fort Frances continues to benefit from the forest around it.
In my opinion, it’s clear that Council is okay with Fort Frances being locked out of any benefit from the wood – okay with trucks loaded with wood just driving through Ton, with no forestry facility of any kind at or near Town to use the wood in any way.
Why does this pattern of failure continue?
Look at what happened before this.
In May, 2014, Resolute announced the permanent closure of its Fort Frances Mill.
Then, in February 2018, even though the mill was permanently shut down, the Minister extended Resolute Forest Product Canada Inc.’s license “to harvest and utilize the full available harvest…for the Crossroute Forest…to provide a supply of forest resources to the existing forest resource processing facility of the Company located at Fort Frances, Ontario” (set to expire on March 31, 2022), for am additional 10 years to March 31, 2032.
How would it make any sense that you would extend – to 2032 – wood rights to a company to supply wood for a mill that had been shut down four years earlier? If the company no longer wanted to operate a “forest resource processing facility” in Fort Frances, it didn’t have to do so – but then the license should not have been extended to let Resolute keep the wood rights monopoly.
And it is not as if the Town didn’t know about this. On May 13, 2019, the Town’s consultant and advisor delivered a copy of the extended Crossroutes SFL attached to an e-mail to members of Council.
A lot of union people in the town worked in the mill and related forest jobs before the mill was shut down. Had they and other townspeople been told Resolute’s access to the Crossroute fibre been extended to 2032, maybe they could have pushed to change it and made sure the Town would still benefit from the forest (a public resource) in the future.
Why did Council keep this information secret?
Why didn’t Council try to save the biomass, especially when the Province was calling for host biomass communities for over two years? Why do we keep allowing ourselves to be locked out, or keep getting locked out of the forestry industry on our doorstep? Who is looking for the Town and its future?
Fred Laverdure
