Quebec-Ontario Relations: A Shared Destiny?

10. Parallel Policies

10. PARALLEL PoLICIEs Convergence and Divergence in forestry management and governance in ontario and Quebec guy ChIAsson, éDITh LECLERC, and CATALInA gonzALEz hILARIon The forestry industry has long been an important driver of economic development in Ontario and Quebec, as in the rest of Canada (Drushka 2003; Howlett 2001; Thorpe and Sandberg 2007) . Yet despite the historic importance of forestry in Canada, relatively few studies have examined forestry policy in these two provinces . Moreover, the issue of interprovincial relations as related to forestry —and particularly Ontario–Quebec relations—is absent from the literature . This chapter aims to take some first steps to rectify this situation . Recent changes in federal and provincial jurisdictions have had a noticeable influence on modes of forestry governance in Canada (Chiasson, Blais, and Boucher 2006), raising the issue of how these changes affect interprovincial relations . Forestry management in Canada is largely decentralized; control over forests has been vested overwhelmingly with the provinces ever since it was enshrined as a provincial jurisdiction in the Canadian constitution. The federal government’s role has historically been a small one, limited primarily to research support and international trade (Tree Canada 2010; Howlett and Rayner 2005) . The provinces thus benefit from ownership of the vast majority of public forest lands and thus hold the critical power to allocate timber quotas . In Ontario and Quebec nearly 80% of forests are under direct provincial control, compared to less than 1% under federal 214 Quebec–ontario Relations –A shared Destiny? control (Ontario 2009; Quebec 2010) . Of course, federal initiatives are not always limited in scope to federal land, but the provinces remain much more powerful than Ottawa with respect to forest issues . Yet as Michael Howlett has noted, despite this decentralization, the provinces have followed strikingly similar forestry policy paths: As befits a national policy regime characterized by provincial jurisdiction and variations in regional and local forest resources, there are differences between jurisdictions in terms of both the length of time each policy regime was left in place and the specific point in time at which a new regime was instituted . Different governments in the various jurisdictions adopted similar forestry policies, usually in the same order of sequence, but not at the same times (2001: 29) . In other words, the Canadian provinces have historically opted for convergent forestry management models . This convergence is rather surprising given the near-total absence of readily apparent or formalized mechanisms . Thus, we propose the term policy parallelism for this unplanned and uncoordinated convergence between the provinces . This chapter will focus on present-day Ontario–Quebec interprovincial relations . Several forestry governance researchers have noted that the 1990s were a time of key forestry policy changes in Canada (Blais and Chiasson 2005; Hayter 2003) . The end of the 20th century, then, could mark the end of postwar forestry policy and the beginning of a shift to a new forestry regime (Blais and Boucher 2008; Howlett 2001) . These changes have largely taken the form of a shift in forestry policy objectives . Scholars such as Luc Bouthilier (2001) argue that regimes focused on timber management—which aim to maximize timber supply to the forestry industry—are gradually giving way to regimes based on sustainable forestry management (SFM) . Other scholars contend that this change in public forest use reflects the declining importance of natural resource extraction as part of Canada’s transition to a post-staples economy (Hayter 2000; Thorpe and Sandberg 2007) .1 1 . Harold Innis developed the “staples” thesis in the 1930s to describe an economy dependent on massive exports . Innis’s work (1930) showed how regional Canadian economies were based around the extraction of natural resources . More recent work (Thorpe and Sandberg 2007) has used the term “post-staples” to describe the transition away from a resource-based economy and new ways to use the natural environment for economic development . 10 . Parallel Policies 215 Either way, this shift in forestry objectives has been accompanied by major changes in decision-making mechanisms . Whereas decision making in a supply management paradigm was essentially confined to the government and major industry players (Howlett and Rayner 2001, 2005, 2006), new stakeholders have since been invited to the table (Appelstrand 2002; Chiasson, Andrew, and Perron 2006; Hayter 2003) . What is more, since 1990 sustainable forestry management has become a prominent concern of the international community, which increasingly demands that sustainable development practices be followed . This concern has been formalized in a number of...