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Forest Certification when it first came out was primarily an activity that was being pursued by large-scale industry and governments
more in northern regions of Canada, and there was really little attention being paid to how this might apply to private land forests
that were located in more southerly areas of the province, say of Ontario.
And one of the concerns was, as certification advanced and became more of a requirement,
that a lot of these areas would be left behind and the private woodlot sector would not have an opportunity to be part of the certification efforts in Canada.
So as a result, people in the Eastern Ontario Model Forest began talking about this
and decided that they needed to do some exploratory work and experiment with the concept, see if it would even work on private land,
learn more about it, and work with a variety of groups to try and come up with a program that could be implemented across the region.
As a result they built relationships, just the way the Model Forest has built relationships around other tasks and other issues it has tried to address over the years,
and made sure they had the right people sitting around the table that could help to design the program.
So they had representatives of industry, of community, of woodlot owners, First Nations, government, both provincial and federal,
and also eventually other consumers of the wood - mill operators.
And that group was the group that came up with a lot of the approaches that
eventually evolved into becoming the forest certification program that’s been implemented in Eastern Ontario.
The work that’s been done on certification in the Eastern Ontario Model Forest has been quite important nationally
because it has demonstrated to other Model Forests, in other jurisdictions, exactly how certification could be developed in their areas.
It has provided a template for them and I know staff from the Eastern Ontario Model Forest have spoken right across Canada to other groups,
explaining the program, describing it literally as a case study that others are able to learn from and can borrow those ideas.
And in fact Eastern Ontario I know has shared a lot of the work it has done – even its technical manuals and procedural guidelines have been shared with other groups
which have saved them thousands of dollars of not having to go and create these things from scratch
but rather adopt something calibrated for their own area, make a few adjustments, and are able to get on with their program.
Canada is a world-leader in certification as a result of all this work.
We’ve lived on this property since 1984. My folks bought the property in 1969 and immediately started planting trees on it.
And once they introduced the certification program,
four or five years ago, that’s something that we wanted to take part of.
We recently undertook a very small harvest in order to liberate some maple trees that were growing up on the north side of our red pine plantation.
It amounted to like a truckload, one truckload of wood, and we thought – ok well this is FSC certified –
and that truckload went off to the mill as a load of FSC certified wood.
Certification has helped us to gain some footholds in Europe, overseas, and even now in North America.
If a customer has an option between certified or non-certified, at the same price, they’re going to take the certified, it’s just because then it opens more doors for them
further down the line to move their product to more places. So, it’s about market access.
Certification provides us with a baseline to measure our activities against and it provides third-party assessment of what we’re doing,
so, it provides assurance to our Board of Directors, the municipalities that we deal with, and the general public, it provides them with assurances that the forest is being well-managed.