Report calls on Manitoba to end logging in Duck Mountain Provincial Park, protect biodiversity

Environmental advocates say it's time for Manitoba to stop allowing logging in a western Manitoba provincial park or risk biodiversity losses and damage to hiking trails.

The Wilderness Committee released a report on Wednesday that characterizes logging activities in and around Duck Mountain Provincial Park as excessive and calls on the province to add the 1,424-square-kilometre park to the list of others where commercial logging is prohibited.

"This is the place and the time where we end park logging in Manitoba," Eric Reder with the Wilderness Committee said during a Wednesday news conference in Winnipeg. "A majority of Manitobans have said they don't want to see logging in a provincial park."

The latest report from the Wilderness Committee comes as Louisiana-Pacific Corporation seeks approval for a 20-year logging and forest management extension in and around the park, Reder said. The current licence expires at the end of this year.

The report raises 41 concerns and points to practices such as all-weather logging roads disrupting wild habitats, logging operations impacting waterways and associated risks to threatened wildlife that call the park home. 

Its findings come from 25 visits to logging sites in the park and Duck Mountain Provincial Forest over the course of 11 days in 2021 and 2022.

The report also states Glove Lake and Line Lake trails in the park could be destroyed next year with continued activity.

Reder acknowledged the province is spending money on building up recreational trail systems, but said further logging threatens trail potential in Duck Mountain at a time of growing interest.

"The growth in hiking, the growth of mountain biking is huge," said Reder. "These trails exist. They're not on the map and they are going to be bulldozed for logging."

The Wilderness Committee has been calling for an end to industrial activity in Manitoba parks for years.

Resource use changes brought in through amendments to the Forest Act in 2009 prohibited commercial logging in all current or future provincial parks in Manitoba, save for Duck Mountain, states the January 2023 provincial report "A system plan for Manitoba's provincial parks."

That decision came after campaigning in 2007-08 for an end to logging in parks, said Reder, where 23,000 Manitobans wrote letters of support to government. 

That endorsement for the rationale behind ending logging in parks also squared with a a stance from the Clean Environment Commission decades earlier.

In 1992, the arms-length provincial agency recommended that commercial forestry activity in all provincial parks should be phased out.

"That swell of support, which is what we see every single time that we talk about park logging, resulted in the Manitoba government banning logging in 12 out of 13 parks," said Reder.

"We have the public, we have the government and we have the highest environmental voice in the land saying we need to end this."

Reder said the province has granted licence extensions for logging in Duck Mountain several times since then. 

Harvest supports business: province

Manitoba Minister of Natural Resources and Northern Development Greg Nesbitt's office is reviewing the report.

A spokesperson said Duck Mountain Provincial Park has been managed for several uses for about 60 years and includes a 47,000-hectare backcountry area where development isn't allowed.

In zones where a "small amount of timber harvesting" is permitted, it is to be done responsibly and adherence to "strict provincial standards" is monitored, the spokesperson said.

"This harvest supports small and medium businesses and provides significant economic benefits to rural communities surrounding the park, including First Nations," the spokesperson said.

"NRND continues to work with Manitoba Parks, industry and stakeholders to ensure that resource activities align with permit conditions and that park landscapes are being managed and conserved sustainably."

Reder said people in Swan River are interested in protecting wild spaces and that it's not a "one-industry town that is beholden to the mill."

"It can easily be seen that people in the Swan River region … would support more protection and more destinations an tourism dollars rather than logging devastation," he said.

In 2021, Canada, Britain, the European Union and others committed to protecting 30 per cent of lands and waters by 2030 to stop catastrophic biodiversity loss. 

Reder said that would entail protecting another 1,000-square-kilometres in Duck Mountain.

Long-term economic repercussions

Dan Soprovich of Bluestem Wildlife was among those who worked on the new report.

Soprovich said there are people in the area interested in both caring for wild spaces and economic opportunities. 

He suggested there is a need for more education around the potential long-term economic repercussions to logging, equating those to some of the negative impacts wrought by climate change.

"I think really in large part there needs to be the appropriate information given [to locals] … because it's not getting there," he said.

"We have Louisiana-Pacific and a forestry branch that pushes logging ... and I think that we really need to give people the opportunity to understand ... what some of the scale of the impacts are."

CBC News has requested a response from Louisiana-Pacific Corporation but did not immediately hear back.