Consuming Canada's Boreal Forest: The chain of ... - Greenpeace

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Decreasing Forestsector
Employment
Greenpeace
There is no doubt that the forestry industry in Quebec and Ontario is a large employer,
though this has diminished considerably in recent years. The decline in employment has
no single root cause but is due to a myriad of factors, including: the recent Canada-US
softwood lumber dispute; the rising value of the Canadian dollar, which affects exports to
the US market; drops in the rate of new home building in the US; the low price of lumber;
decreased demand and low prices for newsprint; increased fuel and electricity costs; the
low productivity of mills and processing facilities; and increasing foreign competition. 1
Many of the internal reasons for the decline in jobs in the Canadian forest industry could
have been avoided if forests, and the many communities that depend on them, had been
managed in a more sustainable fashion. Now, major investments are needed in research
and development to help the industry become more innovative and to support improvements
in forest management approaches. There is also a need to develop value-added
forest products, encourage secondary and tertiary processing of pulp and lumber,
increase the FSC certification of forests to capture growing green markets, and increase
the amount and scale of protected areas.
Consuming Canada's Boreal Forest: The chain of destruction from logging companies to consumers