FUNDS KEY TO BEETLE FIGHT
One problem — among the many — with mountain pine beetles is they don’t respect borders. The interprovincial boundary didn’t matter 11 years ago when a plague of the pests was devouring swaths of British Columbia’s forest thanks to a laggardly response in that province from industry and government to an infestation starting in the mid-’90s.
In 2006, swarms of wind-borne beetles flew eastward into west-central Alberta.
Since that initial invasion, Alberta’s government, along with forestry companies, have engaged in an aggressive counterattack. Alberta has become Canada’s beetle battleground as the province tries to do what B.C. failed to do and stop the beetles from marching into fresh territory. One estimate puts the cost of the fight from 2004 to 2016 in Alberta at $484 million.
The stakes are high; Alberta’s forestry sector directly employs 19,600 people and contributes up to $6 billion annually to the provincial economy. Beetle-killed forests also put Alberta at considerably greater risk for wildfire and flooding. Making matters worse, however, is yet another incursion of the bark beetles into Alberta from one more jurisdiction which some observers suggest didn’t take the problem seriously enough.
According to University of Alberta researcher Janice Cook, a small cluster of beetle-infested trees at the west gate of Jasper National Park has exploded in a few years to more than 10,000 infected trees with the number set to spike even higher. Beetle-attacked trees are now found beyond the park’s eastern border, encroaching on commercially valuable timber and the forest-industry town of Hinton.
There are assertions that Parks Canada failed to do enough to control the infestation when it appeared a few years ago. “They decided to consider the pine beetle a ‘native disturbance agent,’ ” longtime beetle scientist Allan Carroll told The Canadian Press. “In other words, Jasper was not intending to do much about it.”
The agency said it has had a beetle management plan for the park since 2015, including prescribed burns and tree removal but it appears to be too little, too late. If so, letting the beetles turn the park into a ravaged beachhead for a renewed onslaught on Alberta is irresponsible and unforgivable. Parks Canada must do much more to remediate the infestation.
The province’s forest industry association also wants the province to treat the infestation as a disaster and allocate enough funding to stop the insects’ spread, estimated at $85 million.
Given that the latest onslaught of beetles is swarming in from parkland it oversees, it’s incumbent on the federal government to shoulder much of the cost.