Excising the common wealth? A study of public sector intervention in the British Columbia forest sector, 1980--1996

British Columbia brought a tremendous natural forest endowment into the Canadian Confederation in the 1870s. The Fulton Commission estimated there to be between 200 and 240 billion board feet of accessible timber in the province at the time. Total volume by 1937 was estimated to be 254.5 billion board feet. When British Columbia's Land Act of 1896 carefully defined Crown timberland and reserved more than 91% of such lands from sale, a public-sector model had been adopted for the development of this resource.; The dissertation uses a historic approach to examine the magnitude and tempo of change in public forest policy development in the province. It proposes that the magnitude of change---especially with respect to economic value of the resource---along with a narrow focus by the public landowner on exploitation, discouraged the development of links between forest exploitation and the standard of living of the province's residents especially in rural resource based communities. This study also contends that the evolution of a scientific and technical foundation for the development of coastal forests and forest resources may also have suffered because of the focus of the public-land owner.; The impact of government interventions and further changes in forest policy intensified in the 1990s. Measures like the Timber Supply Review from 1992--1996; changes in the target rate of timber pricing to finance the creation of Forest Renewal BC; and the implementation of the Forest Practice Code in 1994, were serious public sector interventions in the forest economy. They resulted in severe economic shocks to the provincial forest economy.; The structure of the coastal forest responded. Companies like Weldwood left the coast, the shareholders of MacMillan Bloedel Ltd. divided and sold the company to Weyerhaeuser Canada and Pacifica Papers while Fletcher Challenge Canada was purchased by Norse Skog after it had spun off solid wood operations to a new company named TimberWest. TimberWest subsequently bought Pacific Forest Products. With the consent of the Minister of Forests, Pacific's Crown tenures were transferred to Western Forest Products.; These changes negatively impacted many coastal communities. Especially vulnerable were the "instant" resource-dependent towns like Ucluelet, Gold River, Port Alice and Port McNeill on Vancouver Island. These towns had been created during the late 1960s through the early 1970s and are tied, in an economic sense, very closely to the health of the company or companies controlling the timber tenures in their area. As the financial fortunes of many coastal companies declined, so did socio-economic conditions in these forest dependent communities.; Using a case study of the Kingcome Timber Supply Area, the dissertation examines the flow of economic forest values associated with the depletion of the mature forest. An outflow of resource values from the sub-regional to the provincial and national economies linked directly forest tenure, pricing and tax policy is identified. To compensate the sub-region for forest depletion, the idea of a timber income stabilization fund is developed. It is suggested that the present value of the timber income stabilization fund be used as a basis for capitalizing a regional community model forest.