This is the fourth in a series of four articles resulting from a months-long investigation into Paper Excellence, a B.C.-headquartered pulp and paper company that has quickly grown to control large tracts of Canadian forests and become the largest company of its kind in North America. The stories are part of Deforestation Inc., an investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists involving 140 journalists from 27 countries.
“We’ve known since the 1970s that the pace and scale of the logging is impacting the caribou,” Petryshen said. “We knew and we let it happen.”Amid record deforestation, an ‘unprecedented’ corporate takeover Since 2000, Canada has lost more than 19.6 million hectares of primary forest, the third highest rate of intact forest loss in the world after Brazil and Russia. B.C. saw by far the biggest decline in tree cover of any province, losing more than 8.5 million hectares.
In this last of a four-part series, Glacier Media and its ICIJ partners examined Paper Excellence’s impact on local forests, and how its claims of sustainable production match with evidence on the ground. “That is a huge amount,” said Ben Parfitt, a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. “They are chipping an enormous number of logs.”
Scientists and policymakers interviewed for this story said pushing to log more of B.C.’s forests is not sustainable, especially at a time when the federal government is attempting to boost the number of trees in Canada to ward off the worst effects of climate change. “Despite what the B.C. and the Canadian forest industry will put out on their brochures, we are not managing Canada's forests responsibly or sustainably,” said the sustainable supply chain expert.
“In an ideal world,” governments would protect old-growth forests, added an FSC spokesperson. “We believe it is better to manage them under a top-level management standard like FSC than to leave them open for business as usual or even illegal approaches.” Paper Excellence currently controls very little forest tenure in B.C., instead relying on deals with suppliers or buying fibre on the open market.
Elsewhere in the province, a 2018 FSC audit of the Skookumchuck mill found several non-conformities, including mislabelling pulp as “100% FSC Wood” and failing to have a due diligence system in place that ensured the mill wasn’t sourcing wood from critical caribou habitat and supply areas known to contain old-growth trees. The mill kept its FSC controlled wood certificate after taking corrective action.
At Paper’s Excellence’s French operations, at least one major case appears to have slipped through the cracks. Reporting from ICIJ partners at Radio France found a Spanish firm was supplying one of Paper Excellence's French mills when it illegally cut hundreds of ancient oaks, ash and pine. On Feb. 23, 2023, a French court of appeal sentenced Manuel Bautista to a two-year suspended prison sentence and a fine of 80,000 euros cutting and stealing trees on 21 lots.
West Kootenay-based forester Herb Hammond, however, is not so sure. As one of the early outfits certified to audit FSC standards in Canada, Hammond says its own policies have been watered down since the FSC first got started in 1994. Paper Excellence now controls forest lands seven times the size of Vancouver Island As Paper Excellence expands east into Ontario and Quebec, some Métis groups and First Nations have raised concerns around Paper Excellence takeover of Resolute Forest.
APP on verge of sustainable re-certification Critics have said the sustainable certification industry — which has ballooned into over a dozen parallel systems — started with good intentions but has become a tool for forestry companies to falsely claim green credentials. APP denied it buys pulp from Paper Excellence, while Paper Excellence said it’s “no surprise” its pulp would end up feeding APP. The Asian pulp and paper giant “is known to require significant volumes of pulp,” a Paper Excellence spokesperson added.
The other, say insiders, is environmental, and relates directly to certifying wood products as sustainable at a time more customers demand a green alternative. For decades, Canada has fostered a public image as being a renewable source of pulp backed with some of the best sustainability schemes in the world. Some, however, have recently thrown that image into question.