Old growth forest from B.C. is still being burned in Britain

And Prince George city councillors say they don't own any short-term rentals. Plus, Mr. PG's true name, revealed

Mar 05, 2024

Corrected link from Friday: MLA Shirley Bond honoured the life of Chuck Chin in the B.C. Legislature.

Happy Tuesday!

Not sure if March is in like a lion or a lamb but personally I’m happy to have some winter weather extend into the month given how long it took us to get any. I was able to enjoy some of better conditions out at Otway that we’ve had all year and finally take a few laps at the outdoor oval, giving myself the skate-your-age challenge (it gets harder every year). I also caught the Cougars literal last minute comeback Saturday night which was truly astounding to witness.

Here’s today’s newsletter.

Old growth forest from B.C. is still being burned in Britain

In 2022, both CBC’s the 5th Estate and BBC’s Panorama conducted investigations of the source of “green” fuel being exported to Britain from British Columbia — specifically the Prince George region. From the CBC report:

From the highway just south of Prince George, B.C., you can see the logs, thousands of them, piled neatly in rows.
They were cut from trees in old growth and primary forests in the province's Interior.
This timber won't be used to build homes or furniture, or even to make paper. These logs will be ground and compressed into tiny pellets, shipped to Europe and Asia and burned to produce fuel for electricity.
Britain's largest power plant, Drax Power Station, controls most of B.C.'s pellet production and has ambitious plans to expand operations in Canada.

From the BBC:

Panorama discovered Drax bought logging licences to cut down two areas of environmentally-important forest in British Columbia.
One of the Drax forests is a square mile, including large areas that have been identified as rare, old-growth forest.

That was the tail-end of 2022. Has anything changed? Here’s a follow-up from BBC published last week:

Papers obtained by Panorama show Drax took timber from rare forests in Canada it had claimed were "no-go areas"…
Panorama has obtained documents from British Columbia's Ministry of Forests that show the company took more than 40,000 tonnes of wood from so-called "old-growth" forests in 2023…
One example is an 87-hectare (215-acre) "cut block" called EM807M - located 180 miles west of the logging city of Prince George - which was all classified as old growth. Although a timber company held the licence to cut down the site, logging records show that Drax took 26% of all the harvested wood.
In total, Drax received 130 lorry-loads of whole logs from the site last winter. The wood was turned into pellets and some were burned at its Yorkshire power plant.
Ninety per cent of the cut block had the even higher classification of "priority deferral area". This category is for old-growth forests that are "rare, at risk and irreplaceable", according to an independent panel of experts in British Columbia.

Much of this information was first reported by a partnership between the UK-based Biofuel Watch and B.C’s Conservation North who published their findings here. You can also listen to an interview with Conservation North’s Michelle Connolly here in which she points out that Drax is just one small part of an overall system, made up of many different companies and under the supervision of the B.C. government, which is allowing this to happen (as a note, though: the former chief forester for B.C., a public service position, now works for Drax).

Prince George city councillors say they don’t own short-term rentals

In the aftermath of Prince George city council seeking to opt-out of the province’s forthcoming short-term rental rules a question I received multiple times — and one that I saw cropping up elsewhere — was whether any councillors have a financial stake in their own short-term rental properties. So I decided to ask (for clarity, I did this through my CBC work, and posed the same question to councillors in other cities seeking the opt-out for potential use elsewhere, with the information being shared to the relevant reporting groups). The answer has been a resounding no, with councillors Garth Frizzell, Cori Ramsay, Kyle Sampson, Trudy Klassen, Susan Scott, Ron Polillo and Tim Bennett all responding within 24 hours. I have not received a response from Brian Skakun, though he was previously asked this question during an interview about short-term rentals, and he said he did not have one. I have also not received a response from Mayor Simon Yu but will update when/if I do. Worth noting, however, is that a couple of councillors inidcated that if they did own short-term rentals they would have disclosed it under conflict-of-interest guidelines, which is exactly what happened in Kelowna.

In other short-term rental news, councillor Cori Ramsay wrote a blog post detailing how she came to be in favour of seeking an exemption which is worth reading in full no matter which side you’re on as it’s nice to have a detailed explanation of a voting decision offered up. Aside from her previously cited concerns about a lack of statistically reliable data in some areas and the needs of people visiting the city for medical reasons, Ramsay also says she’s not convinced eliminating short-term rentals, as they exist in Prince George, will have much, if any, impact on overall affordability:

Based on the information from PG Realtors, there are 259 active Airbnb’s in Prince George. Searching actively on Airbnb and removing principle residences, about another hundred residents are excluded meaning overall, we are looking at roughly 150 STR properties likely being impacted. 150 of 31,793 dwellings according to the most recent Statistics Canada Census data. This is 0.4% of our total dwelling count. Long term rentals are still an attractive investment option and eliminating the 0.4 STRs in our community converting them to long term rentals is not going to influence the market enough to change market rental rates and immediately make things more affordable.

This is an interesting answer and hits on something I’ve been thinking about amidst this entire debate which is: What if this were framed differently? Imagine, for example, that council were presented with a request to tear down 150 single-family homes or apartments and replace them with a really nice resort community catering to people visiting for a few days or weeks: Would they be eager to allow it to happen? Conversely, if given the ability to add 150 new dwellings to the city, distributed in various desireable neighbourhoods, without any capital costs, is it something they would embrace? And if they did embrace it, is it likely to be something they would trumpet as an example of the work being done to improve housing needs and affordability in the city? Basically, do we need 150 new homes, or not? A question worth asking the next time a developer wants to construct a new subdivision, I think.

I concur, by the way. Here’s the link.

News roundup:

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Mike

Mar 5, 2024

I think a question council needs to answer is whether they have any rental properties at all. Not just STR. A landlord renting to long-term tenants would still benefit from STRs as those could be LTR options, increasing supply, more competition and lower rents.

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