by Cameron Smith

Premier Dalton McGuinty’s promise to set aside half of Ontario’s northern boreal forest for permanent protection, an area almost the size of the United Kingdom, may not mean very much. It’s hard to say, because the promise is so vague.

For instance, he could protect only the Hudson Bay Lowlands, which make up more than half of the northern boreal. Logging is unlikely to occur there in any event, so if that’s what he’s promising, it wouldn’t restrict logging, because it would leave the more desirable western half of the region wide open to forestry companies.

The forest in the Lowlands — the area that wraps around James Bay and stretches inland 100 to 350 kilometres — is transitional: it covers no more than half the land, and the entire area is fragile. Trees are small and can take 250 to 350 years to mature, and replanting has a high failure rate.

Nevertheless, protection in the Lowlands would still be useful in restricting access roads for mining, and in controlling corridors for power lines.

The western half of the northern boreal is continuous forest. If McGuinty had promised the protected area would include at least half of it, it would have meant that, for practical purposes, no logging would occur over 75 per cent of the northern boreal, but protection would be assured where it is needed.

In any event, the public will have to wait 10 to 15 years to get details on what will be protected. McGuinty expects research and the planning process will take that long.

Not everything is off in the future, however. The Premier has promised no new mining or logging projects will be allowed until local land use plans have been implemented with full support from First Nation communities. This sounds a lot like the imposition of a moratorium until negotiations result in agreement, which is what First Nations have been seeking.

This should put a brake on development while the protected areas are being earmarked, and give the public the chance to see to see how the Premier follows through on this promise to require land use plans. McGuinty made a similar promise five years ago , but never kept it.

A footnote on a different issue

China now holds a veto over Canada’s domestic policy on global warming. So do India, Brazil, and tiny Singapore — in fact, so does every nation that has what Prime Minister Stephen Harper calls an “emerging economy.”

His position at the recent meeting of G8 leaders in Japan was that Canada would not agree to tough, mandatory targets for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide unless countries with “emerging economies” did the same. In other words, if they don’t, Canada won’t. That, in anyone’s language, amounts to giving them a veto.

The meeting set a 2050 goal for limiting emissions that was little more than window dressing. It had gaping loopholes and no short-term targets. Harper said realism motivated him, and as an aide explained, what the Prime Minister meant was it would be wrong to set goals that are too challenging.

That puts Harper’s realism on a collision course with that of Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Last November he said global warming is proceeding at such a pace that, “What we do in the next two or three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

Or how about realism as expressed by James Hansen, chief climate change scientist for NASA? In a speech at Washington’s National Press Club three weeks ago, he said, “We have reached a point of planetary emergency.” Already the world’s safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been exceeded, he added.

Take your pick. I know whose realism I choose.