Canada’s Forestry PR: A Game of Deception

It’s been almost a year since Canada’s Online News Act was passed, and in response Meta blocked links to Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram. This has created a void of fact checked articles that meet journalistic standards and ethics on those platforms. As a result, information about wildfires, forestry and forests from respected media sources is not shareable via social media.

We sit down with Joan Baxter from the Halifax Examiner about her recent article on the growing problem of greenwashing in an age of digital information sharing.  We discuss the Forest Products Association’s (FPAC) ‘Forestry for the Future’ advertising campaign that’s been proliferating across social media. Joan breaks down how this could be problematic in the absence of independent journalism on Canada’s forests available on those platforms. How can those concerned about Canada’s forests and climate become better at identifying industry public relations materials?

Read Joan's article in the Halifax Examiner.

Make sure to check out the show notes on the podcast webpage for more links and helpful resources.

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Transcript

Jan Sumner: 0:00

Welcome to T the Clear Cut. Hi, I'm Janet Sumner, Executive Director at Wildlands League.

Kaya Adleman: 0:08

And I'm Kaya Adleman, Carbon Manager at Wildlands League.

Jan Sumner: 0:14

Wildlands League is a Canadian conservation organization working on protecting the natural world.

Kaya Adleman: 0:21

The Clear Cut is bringing to you the much-needed conversation on Canadian forest management and how we can better protect one of Canada's most important ecosystems, as our forests are reaching a tipping point.

Jan Sumner: 0:41

Well, Kaya, it's another Monday. I know when you're hearing this, it probably won't be a Monday, but today for Kaya and I it is a Monday. It's rather foggy here in Scarborough and I don't know what's the weather like in your part of the country, kaya.

Kaya Adleman: 0:59

Sweltering. It's very sunny and hot.

Jan Sumner: 1:02

Oh, really Well. I was just out in Alberta. We were in Canmore, which is a beautiful town and all around you could see mountains, and it would say it was 18 degrees. But because it's higher elevation, you're closer to God or the sun or something, and therefore it feels like you can get a burn just about any time, and the air is thinner and I had a bit of altitude sickness when.

Jan Sumner: 1:28

I yeah, when we were, we were out for a hike and just I was finding it hard to breathe and I hadn't actually put two and four together and got sick. So it was a bit of a shock when I couldn't, couldn't make out all the way in the hike, whereas on Saturday I was out. Well, as you know, I do some refereeing for soccer and I was out as a soccer referee and did the 5K and the whole game and no problem. But those mountains were kicking my butt.

Kaya Adleman: 1:58

Yeah, it's people who are able to adapt to that quickly. All the respect in the world to you guys, yeah.

Jan Sumner: 2:05

Anyway, I was out spending time with some of our friends within the CPAS family, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, meeting with folks across the country, and we actually ended up talking a little bit about forestry on the podcast and that means I believe we're going to try and get in a couple of episodes before summer break, so we'll see how that goes. But it was good conversations and I'm happy to be home and even if it is foggy and a little bit overcast here, but I was also encouraged to see that we might get to see some Northern Lights later this week as well. Yeah, so there you go. Anyway, we're going to be doing some of the recording for the Joan Baxter episode, and that episode is with a reporter who has reported all over the world on forestry, has written books and was working with a large project last year called Deforestation Inc. Um, called Deforestation Inc and, uh, it was over 300 journalists, and these are all good reasons to interview Joan Baxter. That being said, uh, she's also, uh, beyond just being a great writer for the Halifax paper, um, she's also very well-spoken. So I think you're going to enjoy this episode.

Jan Sumner: 3:19

I know we enjoyed the conversation with her and she's got a lot to say, enjoyed the conversation with her and she's got a lot to say, and I'll just remind people from our perspective that the clear cut, the podcast, is about bringing all kinds of voices to the table that don't normally get heard or only get heard, you know, for 15 minutes of fame. Or maybe it's a book that gets published or it's an online piece, but you don't get a chance to dive into the issues like we do on a two-part episode where you really get the freedom to just allow the person to speak about what those issues are. Everything from, you know, the Honorable Harvest with David Flood to a conversation that we had early on with François Dufresne, the head of FSC for Canada, and now we're getting a chance to talk to Joan Baxter, who's worked on forestry issues for over 30 years, and so it's a true treat to be able to step into that world with her. Kai, what did you think of all of this?

Kaya Adleman: 4:17

Yeah, I mean I was just going to say, while we're on the subject of news media and that we're bringing together voices that may not be heard, we will talk a little bit about journalism forest journalism more specifically, and its presence in the information age of today. So I think one thing that might be important for people that we don't fully flesh out in the interview is that last year, canada enacted a law Bill C-18, also referred to as Canada's Online News Act which requires big tech companies to compensate media outlets if they want to continue to host Canadian news content on those platforms. So, in response to this law, google and Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram, have stated that they were going to block Canadian news content from their platforms. And while Google has since reached a deal with the Canadian government, links to news are still blocked on Facebook and Instagram in Canada actually a lot, because I have lots of family in the States who love to share links to articles for things that are happening down there or things that are happening up here that they hear about, and I can't see them if it's on Facebook Messenger. So my dad will send me a link and I'll try to open it, and it says you can't see this.

Kaya Adleman: 5:41

So that means you can't see any news media sources on Facebook platforms about Canada's forests, anything that comes from like the Globe and Mail or the Halifax Examiner, which Joan writes for and I think this is just some additional context. Especially in today's information age, what does this mean that you can't see news on social media platforms? These are statistics from Statistics Canada. In 2023, the majority of Canadians got their news slash information from the internet, television or social media, and the majority of young people aged 15 to 34 reported getting news or information from social media or the internet, and a significant proportion of the population aged 34 to 54 also preferred to get information through the internet and social media. So if you can't get news on social media from sources that follow, you know journalistic standards and ethics. What does that mean? What are the implications? So it's important context to have for this.

Jan Sumner: 6:47

Yeah, I'm really glad that you raised all of that, because journalistic standards mean that you have to fact check it.

Jan Sumner: 6:56

So you can't just take something and publish it because somebody sent you a nice news release, you actually have to fact check and make sure that it's true. And so Joan talks about this and gets into this. What happens in a world where you don't get to see the media that is using ethical journalism standards and fact checkingchecking their articles? And that goes for all the traditional media, like you said, like the Global Mail, toronto Star, vancouver Sun, whoever it is out there writing about forestry and forest issues, and other forms of media like the National Observer and other papers, the Narwhal, et cetera. It's a big challenge, I guess, in terms of this, and so I wonder what happens in that. And Joan talks about this, because then the other piece that you've got coming is you have everybody else out there writing public relations material which can be shared, and we speak very specifically about one of those.

Jan Sumner: 7:59

And when we talk about you can't share media, journalistic, fact-check media. You can't share media, journalistic, fact-check media around forestry and forest issues. That has a significant impact when you're talking about wildfires, so people wanting to stay safe or understand what the risk is or understand what the challenges are can't make decisions If you're in a community you can't access that you can't see it on the traditional social media channels like Instagram or Facebook, and that is a problem. It's a significant risk. So I hope they get that sorted out, because it's creating this void of information and increasing risk. So I would like to see how that gets resolved. But anyway, maybe we should cut to the conversation with Joan, because she lays out the issues much better than I do just rambling on about them. Okay, good morning, kaya, good morning.

Jan Sumner: 8:56

Looking forward to this conversation with Joan. Joan, can you give us a little bit about yourself so the audience knows who you are and maybe even why we're talking to?

Joan Baxter: 9:06

you? Okay, well, let's see Short version. I am a Nova Scotia journalist and author. I am now back living in northern Nova Scotia and I actually am surrounded by what remains of our forests after Fiona and 50 years of industrial logging. And I have been contributing, mostly since I've come back to Canada, to the Halifax Examiner. I have had a couple of items also, so there was one in the National Observer and the Narwhal and the Energy Mix, but I was out of the country for a long time.

Joan Baxter: 9:46

I was reporting for the BBC from West Africa for many, many years and a host of other international media for international NGOs focused on environmental, social justice issues, land grabbing, extractive industries, people's rights on land and wrote reports on those things.

Joan Baxter: 10:14

And in addition to that I have also worked as a science writer for international research organizations, most recently the International Center for Research in Agroforestry, which recently joined up with the Center for International Forestry Research.

Joan Baxter: 10:30

Both of those are called CG centers. They're part of an international network of mostly agricultural resource research centers scattered around the world. So for that I was based in Kenya and it gave me the chance over many years to do a lot of traveling and learning from farmers, agroforesters, people who live in and around forests in Asia and in Africa, and that was a very long learning experience and it was also very sad to watch how much their forest resources have been decimated over the years by large extractive industries, big logging operations, both for Europe and for Asia. And yeah, before that, I guess I started out in the tropical forests of Guatemala where I did a master's in physical anthropology studying spider monkeys, and then graduated to a tropical research institute in Mexico where I was looking at howler monkeys and part of the big ecosystem there. So yeah, over the years my writing and career has taken me into a lot of forests and it's become increasingly distressing to see what's happening to forests and woodlands around the world and to the people who depend on them.

Jan Sumner: 12:36

So to say that you know a little bit about trees and forestry is kind of an understatement.

Joan Baxter: 12:42

Yeah, but it's amazing how much there is to know. The more you learn, the more you realize how complex it is and how we've underestimated the complexity and diversity of the systems and how fragile actually they can be, shouldn't be, but what we're doing to them makes them more fragile. Yeah.

Jan Sumner: 13:02

It's interesting. We had a similar thread come through in our conversation with Michelle Connelly from Conservation North, talking about the complexifying agents in a forest and how complex the systems are. It was very interesting just to hear about how fire and insects are actually complexifying agents in a boreal ecosystem. So, yeah, interesting to hear that repeated. We now have qualified to be able to run commercials on our podcast.

Jan Sumner: 13:40

This may not seem like a good thing for some people, but for us at the Clear Cut it's a very good thing. It means that you, our public, are now downloading over a thousand copies of each episode a month, which is fantastic, and it puts us into a new bracket where people want to actually advertise on the podcast. We are going to do our very best to make sure that the ads that run on the podcast are something that may be, do our very best to make sure that the ads that run on the podcast are something that may be of relevance or of interest to you, and hope that you can listen to these ads and see them as a marker of success and your faith in the podcast. So thank you so much for listening to the Clear Cut. I know that, kaya and I appreciate it so very, very much. Thank you, kaya. Did you want to start in or?

Kaya Adleman: 14:25

I mean, I was thinking we could maybe get into why we're interviewing Joan in the first place, how we came to this, and that was because Joan wrote a very interesting article that grabbed our eye in the Halifax Examiner, of which she has written many, which she has written many, but this one specifically centers around the Forest Products Association Forestry for the Future campaign. Maybe do you want to talk a little bit about that.

Jan Sumner: 14:52

Yeah, jill take it away.

Joan Baxter: 14:53

Well, I tried to avoid it for a very long time and it popped up. I mean basically it popped up. I mean basically I have. It's led to a lot of spread of misinformation which and there are no fact checked articles basically on Canadian meta sites anymore. So I've been boycotting it. However, I confess I do lurk there because there are really good local groups, including here in Nova Scotia, some people trying to save old growth forest who've been camping out in an area with endangered lichen for the last 50 days. So I lurk there to see what's going on and also to kind of get a sense of what's happening out there on the political front.

Joan Baxter: 15:56

And, as a result, the second post every day, every time I looked for the last few months has been this Forestry for the Future campaign and, as I said, I tried to avoid it. I didn't want to look, and then one day I thought I really better have a look to see what this is all about. And the more I looked, the more distressing it was and the more annoyed I was. So eventually I decided perhaps it's time to write about it, because one of the things that I have been focusing on in my writing over the last few years is also corporate capture of our governments by large extractive industries and associations and PR campaigns that the rapidly diminishing state of our forests being duped into thinking that this campaign, forestry for the Future, which is a creation of the Forest Products Association of Canada and some very smart PR people, was on the right side of things and they were sharing it and filling out the survey and congratulating the people behind this campaign for being on the right side of history.

Joan Baxter: 17:43

And indeed that was even a couple of friends of mine and I said why would you fill out that survey? And they said oh well, it's really important that they know that we really care. I said, yes, but what do you really care about? And they said climate change and the forests. And I said have you looked closely at the messaging in there? It's very, very slick messaging and it is easy for busy people who are just scrolling through social media to think that this really is a well-intentioned, selfless campaign. And it's not. It's just PR. Or in the, I'll quote one of our forest champions in Nova Scotia, nina Newington, who's one of those camped out in the woods in Nova Scotia trying to stop cutting in an area with endangered species. It's bullshit.

Jan Sumner: 18:36

Well, that was the starting point for us to initiate this conversation with Joan. I must confess that I had been. The survey kept coming up on my social channels as well and, for lack of you know, maybe I was scrolling and eating lunch or doing multiple things. I thought, well, I'll fill it in, because surely they'll like to hear if it's a survey and they're seeking opinion. I'm happy to provide my opinion and would like to do that. And after seeing it for the 10th or 11th time, I thought, okay, I'm going to go in and fill it out.

Jan Sumner: 19:12

But a very shortly, maybe into question two or three, started to abandon the idea because it didn't give any ability to provide an alternate opinion. It was like it was already preordained. Having hooked you on the climate change and the forestry angle, I didn't seem to be able to get in there and explain. Now, I'm not saying all forestry is bad or anything like that. I actually wanted to talk about some of the issues and put some of that forward, and it seemed to box me in and didn't allow that. So when I saw Joan's article, I thought, oh, my goodness, there's something larger here to have a conversation about. And again, I kept seeing the message, even though I had abandoned trying to fill out this survey, and I think I tried it one more time and then I thought, no, I just there's no room there to provide any nuance of opinion.

Jan Sumner: 20:05

So I thought, well, what better way to have than the conversation with Joan and hear what she had to say about it in terms of thinking through the lens of, especially when we're seeing not a shutdown, but that we aren't able to share stories from traditional fact-checked media or even some of the other media that's emerged that is still using fact-checking and is good journalism.

Jan Sumner: 20:32

We're not able to share that on Meta and these social channels, and it's very, very frustrating, especially when we've had some natural disasters or things like that, and we need to share that information for people to stay safe, and we can't do that where Facebook, for example, is very much part of the social fabric, especially in northern communities that need to share this data, and we can't. And so this is frustrating. And yet, at the same time, we're seeing advertisements like the FPAC survey being able to be abundantly shared and, as Joe was saying, coming up second in your feed. So maybe we could walk through some of the questions just to get a sense of where I'm going, which is this idea that you can't divert from the path that it's intended to take you on.

Joan Baxter: 21:32

I do have the survey printed out.

Joan Baxter: 21:34

I haven't been able to find it again online in the last week or so. I have not been getting that campaign on my social media feed. But I was into about the fourth question when I thought this is not a survey, this is a push-pull, and I've seen industry do a lot of these recently when they need to get answers, to pretend that they really have a lot of public support and they need to go to the policymakers on this. But the first thing that happens with this survey is that they ask you to share your email so that they can share the results of the survey, and then you can make sure you're the first to hear about new opportunities to support Canada's net zero future. So you know right away. They're obviously trying to get a mailing list and a list of contacts and I'm sure there's a lot of demographic research that will go into that.

Joan Baxter: 22:26

Question two on a scale of one to 10, with being no knowledge at all and 10 being an expert how familiar would you say you are with sustainable forestry practices in Canada? Well, first of all, nowhere is sustainable forestry practices even defined in the survey. So that seems like a rather ludicrous question. What do you mean by that? So people can choose between one and 10. I'm being an expert. Question three would you say you have a positive opinion of forestry practices in Canada, a negative opinion, or that you don't know enough about the sector to have an opinion there you go from positive to negative on a scale of five. So again you wonder what they're going to do with this. If people say they don't know anything about anything, are they going to discount their opinions? We don't know what's going to happen with the results of this. It's being done for an industry association. Over time, would you say, your opinion of the sector has been getting better, worse or hasn't really changed. You can choose between getting better and not really changing, getting worse, and I note that there's never any room for any comments on any of these questions. So now we're up to question four on any of these questions. So now we're up to question four.

Joan Baxter: 23:52

Question five is where I apparently gave the wrong answer. It's compared with other countries that produce a lot of wood and forest products, like Canada. Would you say Canada is a world leader about average or below average when it comes to sustainably managing our forests? About average or below average when it comes to sustainably managing our forests. So you can choose A world leader, b about average or C below average. And I clicked below average. And then I got a lecture, the next page. Now I'm not sure if I had clicked it is a world leader, if I would have got the same correction or not, because I couldn't go back. I got a correction telling me did you know? Canada is actually recognized as a global leader in sustainable management of our forests. So apparently I had the wrong answer, which is not the way surveys are done or serious surveys are done.

Joan Baxter: 24:43

And then there's a long PR paragraph explaining how wonderful Canadian forestry is, and this particular line I found interesting. We have the toughest and most, some of the toughest and well-enforced regulatory frameworks in the world, but Canadian foresters operating on public land, where 90% of Canada's forests are located, must submit a comprehensive 150 to 200 year forest management plan for approval by provincial governments before a single tree is harvested. Now I cannot speak for what's happening on Crown land in other provinces, but I can tell you that I have my computer full of photographs of massive clear cuts on Crown land in Nova Scotia. And Nova Scotia is unique, except for Prince Edward Island in Canada, in that only 30% of the province. Less than 30% of the province is crown owned, so that land is extremely precious. We've given a huge chunk of it to a consortium of mills and forestry companies to manage companies to manage, and we don't know how much they're paying to harvest the trees, but they are definitely clear cutting although we don't use that word anymore in Nova Scotia we call it variable retention. So 10% variable retention and then you have to leave that famous clump of 30 trees. That's representative of what you cut down, which is, I guess, where moose are supposed to go and hang out and bears and things. So if they have to submit a 150 to 200-year forest management plan in Nova Scotia, I can assure you that nobody's looking at it and maybe in 150 to 200 years, if they left the forest alone, it might grow back. It might.

Joan Baxter: 26:41

So then we come to there's only seven questions. We come to question six. When thinking about what matters most to you, how would you rank the following priorities of Canada's forest sector? Now, this is where it gets really into the push-pull business, where they give you no options except their selected answers. So you're supposed to drag and drop to rank the options. There are quite a few of them.

Joan Baxter: 27:10

Sustainably managing our forests is one partnering with Indigenous peoples, producing more environmentally friendly alternatives to everyday products, minimizing the impacts of natural disturbances, such as wildfires, to our forests. Providing green job opportunities for Canadians. That's an interesting one, because I'm not quite sure which the green jobs are. They're talking about Converting wood waste to biofuels to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Another very contentious one Maximize the carbon capture potential of our forests or strengthening our forests against climate change. Nowhere in there is a mention of, in fact, biodiversity is never mentioned once in the survey, but never mentioned in. There is one option to suggest that maybe we should leave the forests alone a little bit to recover. So that was question six.

Joan Baxter: 28:03

Question seven To what extent do you think forestry can support a net zero carbon future and our collective fight against climate change? And there are five options for this one. Sustainable forestry is critical in our climate change fight. Again, sustainable forestry is a very loosey-goosey term and there's been a lot of greenwashing being done with that term. Sustainable the sustainable forestry is somewhat important to fighting climate change. Sustainable forestry has a small role to play in fighting climate change. Forestry is not a factor in fighting climate change. Forestry is negatively impacting our fight against climate change.

Joan Baxter: 28:47

Now I think I might have thought it would be really interesting to see forests are critical in our climate change fight, not forestry. But that wasn't an option and that's it. The survey is over and you have joined. The last page tells you you've joined thousands of Canadians coming together to support Canada's sustainable forest sector Once again, we're not sure where or what that is and learn more about what we're doing to support a net zero carbon future. And there they ask you for your name, email address, postal code and you can join to receive email updates about the campaign and issues. So that is the survey, which now I haven't found on my feed for the last few days, but that's only one of the posts that were showing up on the social media feeds. There was another one that urged you to send a letter to your MP a pre-written letter to your MP to support sustainable forestry.

Jan Sumner: 30:31

I didn't get that one. I did go through the survey again and was able to navigate all the way to the last question where, if you said that forestry was not part of the climate solution or was negatively impacting things, you again got a lecture on did you know that United Nations has judged this to be yeah. So, depending on how you answered those questions, you've got a corrective message coming back to you. But, I guess, to my point, I wasn't able, like you just said, I wasn't able to say that forests are an important part of the equation, but not necessarily forestry, and so it didn't allow you to, it didn't give you an array of options, it was just it was all speaking through the lens of forestry, and so even the definitions weren't clear. So, for example, things like sustainable forestry I mean we've had many people on the podcast talking about whether sustainable forestry means sustained yield, whether sustainable forestry means sustained yield, which is very different than what, I would hazard to say, many Canadians think of sustainable forestry as being.

Jan Sumner: 31:44

We're sustaining the forest and having a healthy ecosystem, and that's not necessarily what it means. It means that you can still predict that you will have trees to harvest in a hundred years. So it's a. It's a very different not to say that companies are not required to manage for other elements in the forest, like pine, marten or certain bird species or endangered species. Many of these are requirements in a forestry plan, but if you don't get it right and if your management tools don't work and you can just look at caribou we still can see caribou ranges collapsing across canada, yet canada has yet to step up and say hang on a second. The management prescriptions are not working and we're still seeing a decline. So it would. It would suggest that our forestry's uh not happening at a sustainable level for all the species, for example.

Joan Baxter: 32:41

Yeah, yeah and, as I say, the take action post which I received about it was about 50 50 whether I got the survey or the take action email your mp post uh gave you a form letter which I actually wrote this.

Joan Baxter: 32:55

It's a masterpiece of deception because it talks about, it prescribes adjusting harvesting schedules to favor older, insect damaged and high risk stands, and there are phrases like they ask them to help push the government to get rid of regulatory barriers. So when you talk about regulations as regulatory barriers, I find that a red flag because basically it means they're trying to get access to things that they haven't had before. Get access to things that they haven't had before and in fact, their prescription of what they want to do to the forest is exactly the opposite of what many real forest experts say should be done, which is to actually maintain more on-site biomass after harvest, reduce harvest schedules and levels and decrease the production of short-lived forest products, which is exactly what, at least I can say here in Nova Scotia, is what industrial forestry is all about and that they're calling sustainable forestry because they are certified in mainland Nova Scotia under something called the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, mainland Nova Scotia under something called the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, which is from this whole campaign wasn't but they're being very clever about it.

Kaya Adleman: 34:46

It's a lot of coded language I find it very interesting that in the survey they're saying that Canadian forestry is sustainable because it's subject to all of these regulations and rules and it has the strongest, most robust laws for forestry in the world, and then in the letter to that they're asking people who see that social media advertising. They're asking for these people to ask their politicians to remove those same barriers. So it doesn't really make any sense to me.

Jan Sumner: 35:29

Well, having rules doesn't make something sustainable. It means that you have to, you're required to do some things. It doesn't necessarily mean it results in sustainability, and I would be hard pressed to find a company that had lost their license because they didn't meet the requirements. I mean, maybe that's happened, I'm not sure. If somebody knows of one, I'd be delighted to hear about that. I know that doesn't tend to happen, and so, unless you're seeing, well, I'll even step outside of forestry.

Jan Sumner: 36:00

As I said, in terms of endangered species, we're not seeing a lot of enforcement around caribou prescriptions across the country. Yet we know that caribou are being decimated by the disturbance levels going up, and forestry is part of that disturbance regime. And so if we were truly managing sustainably, we wouldn't have hairbrush ranges collapsing. And even if you said it's not all due to forestry, you would still have to take a much more precautionary approach, because if you have other disturbances happening in that forest management unit, then you need to back off on the disturbance from forestry Because you can't let it get over that 35% threshold. So, to my mind, the evidence is clear. We're not actually harvesting sustainably, otherwise we wouldn't have all of these endangered species, especially caribou, and so we need to find a way. If we're going to argue that we have the world's best forestry, then let's step up and do that job. And so I think that we've got this very big question for us, and especially in light of climate change, I think you flag a few things there.

Jan Sumner: 37:07

In terms of their language, they're arguing for more access to fiber, and that was certainly one of the messages I saw very clearly come out last year. When we had all the forest fires across Canada was like oh see, this is the very reason we need to get out there and harvest and harvest more and faster. And we saw the same thing with all of the insect infestations and the surges in those, and what was happening? It was like, oh, the solution is harvest more. And, as I said, michelle Connolly disabuses us of that notion and why that is not the answer. So those would be some of my thoughts on why this message is skewed. It seems to be skewed and I think there are ways to make forestry more sustainable. I'm not sure if it can be considered sustainable in an intact ecosystem, because you've taken down trees and you regrew trees, but you didn't necessarily regrow a forest. Those are just some of my off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts.

Joan Baxter: 38:14

I mean especially when I'm looking at eastern North America where we have the Wabanaki Acadian forest system, the indigenous forest system that stretches from Maine through parts ofifer, multi-aged conifer and hardwood forest ecosystem, which was very fire resistant, very fire resistant. It was multi-aged, it always had the mixture of trees in there. So we have had forest fires in the past but we tended to have forest fires where there's been a lot of logging done and they've replanted or they have allowed the regrowth of conifers and then sprayed with herbicides to kill off the hardwoods and the broadleaf trees which are good in the spring to kind of counter the forest fires. So now that they've kind of borealized the forests in eastern north america, made them less fire resistant, now they're claiming that they should do more of the same to make them more fire resistant. It just doesn't logically, it just doesn't make sense.

Joan Baxter: 39:31

But having spent a lot of my the last few years looking at PR as opposed to, which is propaganda, I'm very concerned about PR and propaganda. In fact I'm just reading a fabulous book, which I highly recommend, called Manipulating the Message by Cecil Rosner, who used to be head of Fifth Estate, looking at how journalism has been overtaken by PR and so PR and communications people now outnumber journalists like eight or nine no, it's higher 120,000. Far, far by a factor of about 10 or 12 outnumber journalists in Canada and at the same time we're having these right-wing politicians come along and undermine everybody's faith in the media. So it's increasingly difficult for us to counter these kinds of slick and expensive industry-funded campaigns and I think it's it's a really dangerous trend. So this PR campaign also means they're directly reaching the audience through Facebook. They don't even need to answer journalists, which is why Forest Products Association of Canada didn't bother responding to me. I sent them questions. Nor did they respond to the National Observer journalist, max Fawcett Atkinson, who also wrote about this campaign. They don't need to because they've got their audience direct through social media and I think that's a really worrisome trend, not just for the future of democracy but also for the future of the environment, because there's just so much disinformation out there and I think this kind of campaign really needs to be.

Joan Baxter: 41:20

I mean, you look, there were Halifax Examiner and the National Observer called it out. Meanwhile, their media partners they're boasting on their website, the Forestry for the Future website, about how many main big Canadian publications have published Forestry for the future. Articles, and it's dozens of articles, have been published and documentaries and so on that have been done. Plus, they have their own podcast called this was my favorite Canadian forestry can save the world, and it's into season two, and they also have their own documentary. Well, I don't. Propaganda, in my opinion, should not be defined as a documentary. But this is what's happening. Is this blurring of the lines, of the source of the information, which is why I reacted so strongly to this campaign, because it's very indicative of what's going on in the oil and gas sector, in the precious metals mining sector. They're just going directly to the public with their PR and it works.

Kaya Adleman: 42:27

Unfortunately, I'm curious if maybe you could speak to, like you mentioned, the survey, for instance, was a tool to show policymakers the public sentiment about Canadian forestry. Do you know what are the other goals of the campaign? Or maybe you could speak to the presentation that FPAC gave to the Maritime Lumber Bureau that you mentioned in your article.

Joan Baxter: 42:58

Yes, fortunately, that is online. So in June 2023, derek Nyborg, who's head of the Forest Products Association of Canada, spoke to the Maritime Lumber Bureau yeah, and he described the program and tactics. So we're in warfare territory here and I'll just list them, if that's okay, because they're too wordy for me to remember. So there will be cross-platform digital advertising, earned and paid media relations, which is really worrisome. Of course, the media are in trouble, so they take any money they can get from anything and any content they can take Out of home advertising which is in transit, shelters and airports. They have money, obviously.

Joan Baxter: 43:48

Multi-medium flagship content the Capturing Carbon documentary, canadian Forestry Can Save the World podcast, animated video shorts and creative asset production, tiktok and Instagram, influencer partnerships, indigenous partnerships, community development and real-time knowledge building Let me see Saturate target audiences and increase public opinion of the sector, and to create a more amenable environment to advance the sector's policy priorities. Well, any industry's policy priorities are going to take precedence over other priorities for me, which would be the health of the forests. So it was a deliberate and very well thought out and no doubt, very, very expensive campaign designed to help the industry get exactly what it wants, which is more access to the forest and to be able to do more of what they want in what's left of the forests.

Kaya Adleman: 44:54

Do you know how much money they've spent on this?

Joan Baxter: 44:59

forests. Do you know how much money they've spent on this? I wasn't, because that was one of my questions that I had asked. I didn't get that back, but I believe in the National Observer article he also gave some figures in the hundred. I think was in the hundreds of thousands, but he also was able to get some figures that show it, described it as a very expensive campaign. Some figures that show it describe it as a very expensive campaign. No-transcript.

Jan Sumner: 45:26

I think they also received some funding from Natural Resources Canada to promote Canadian forestry. I don't know how that is spent. I mean, we don't have a line of sight into that, but I don't know if Natural Resources Canada can provide that information or if they have no-transcript.

Jan Sumner: 46:24

Yeah, we've talked about that on the podcast a few times. Actually, I think for Canadians it's very hard to know how our forests are being managed when the governments that are there to that are, that are actually supposed to be monitoring and making sure the forest is healthy, are not able to enforce or aren't enforcing and not holding accountable companies. I know they, as I said, I know they have a lot of requirements and I know they have to jump through hoops, and I've sat at forestry tables where they are being required to do some things, and sometimes they're being required to do things that I think are uh, you know, not really very productive, but there's a lot of times that things are uh, there's not an enforcement of the, of the the things that would actually measure sustainability.

Joan Baxter: 47:08

so, yeah, well, I think. I think another one of the issues in Canada with almost all environmental regulations is monitoring. Our government departments are tiny compared with the reach of industry and I know here in Nova Scotia the Department of Environment is tiny. Natural resources and renewables is much bigger, but they do almost all of it's almost all self-reporting from industry and they have very few resources to go out and actually inspect and it's usually because of annoying citizen scientists who make it their business to go and try to find the endangered species when an area is slated for cutting and then, when it is slated for cutting, sit there and camp out in the winter and get arrested, that you see any publicity over some of these issues. So in other words, the regulations are there, may be there, but the monitoring is very, very weak, very weak, and enforcement is very weak.

Jan Sumner: 48:14

Yeah, I think that's true. I think the monitoring dollars are not there. The federal government, I think, just got an increase in being able to do some analysis at a more macro scale. Right now they look at a 30-meter scale to assess whether or not there's been disturbance. And I've been advocating for a long time and Wildlands League has been advocating for a long time that we get somewhere down at a 4-10-meter resolution so that we can actually see some of these roads and the disturbance footprint, because roads can be like 3 meters across and so if you're at 30 meters you just don't see it. So, finding a way to actually get that data and have canadians be able to see it I mean you can see it on google if we could start to train some folks on google on how that might happen, um, you know, that would be maybe a good outcome. So, joan, you keep keep mentioning this protest that's going on in your neck of the woods.

Joan Baxter: 49:16

It's just the most recent one. I mean, it's an area they're really pushing to get it as a protected area and it's just a group of really engaged people. There's the Healthy Forest Coalition here in Nova Scotia. Really engaged people there's the Healthy Forest Coalition here in Nova Scotia. That's a very loose assembly of a lot of different groups that know a lot about forests actually and forestry and who have been really trying very hard in recent years to get the government to pay attention to the dire state of forests in Nova Scotia.

Joan Baxter: 49:52

And you don't. We were talking about monitoring and being able to see what's really going on. If you don't spend a lot of time on Google, you don't know what's going on unless you take a plane. And when you take a plane across Canada it can be quite startling what you see. Anybody who tells you that we've been doing it sustainably. And you know there's so much forest. There's more trees now than there were, you know, 100 years ago. Yes, but what trees and in what state are those trees? And if you fly over Nova Scotia, it's absolutely shocking how the province has been just basically scalped. It's really quite shocking. So I mean in parts of the province where I was writing about new gold mines, open pit gold mines. They said to me well, they've already clear-cut it, they might as well mine it now. You know, it's just kind of reached a state of despair. And we don't have caribou, we have the mainland moose, our endangered species, and of course the forestry lobbyists will say, well, that's because of the deer bringing a parasite that kills the moose, but there's also very little habitat left. It's been so carved up.

Joan Baxter: 51:15

And then what's happened more recently here, speaking of disaster capitalism, well, okay, forest Products Association here is really playing on the climate change and wildfires. In Nova Scotia we had Fiona, which decimated. I'm looking out my window right now at what happened to my woodlot. It was flattened. So what's happened since then is that the forestry industry in Nova Scotia has gone around and told everybody that they should absolutely clear everything that's left and get it out of there, Because if not, there'll be a forest fire risk for them. So they're using this opportunity to dupe landowners into just clear cutting whatever was left, instead of leaving some of that for habitat and letting it regrow. So it's really been disaster capitalism around here. So this is how climate change just feeds climate change, coming in and pretending that they're the big champions of the climate, when in fact we know from recent calculations that Canada's forests are now bigger emitters than they are sequesters of carbon.

Jan Sumner: 52:19

When you speak to those calculations, are you referencing the Federal Auditor General report?

Joan Baxter: 52:27

No, I'm actually referencing the recent peer-reviewed study.

Joan Baxter: 52:33

By Julie Bowen and others, yeah, and also I'm looking at the 2023 analysis by Barry Saxefrag from the National Observer. He said we've so weakened our forests through decades of business-as-usual industrial logging and fossil-fueled climate shifts that it switched to hemorrhaging carbon dioxide instead of absorbing it. And there was a peer yeah, the January 2024 peer-reviewed study about the forest-related emissions are being underreported in Canada, about the forest related emissions are being underreported in Canada. Between 2005 and 2021, forestry in Canada represented a net source of carbon and not, as the government and industry would claim, a net carbon sink. So those are the things that I was referencing. And again, in the whole FPAT campaign and all of the articles that have been written because I've made myself read them I haven't listened to the podcast, but I read some of the summaries I don't see any of those issues being addressed. So there's no nuance. There's none of the other side of the story is coming out, which is why you need journalism and not PR.

Jan Sumner: 54:01

So one of the reasons we wanted to have Joan on the podcast was definitely to speak with her about this void that we have in the landscape, that it's getting almost, maybe even accidentally, but it's. It's being filled by public relations materials that are not fact-checked, not like the publications that follow journalistic standards and fact-check their stories before they get released and so what happens in that. But the other reason was because she brings a solid credentials in terms of forestry and Nova Scotia and we have not yet had anybody on the podcast talking about the issues around forestry in Nova Scotia. So this was a fantastic opportunity to meet with her and talk with her, and she speaks very eloquently about the forestry and the protests that are ongoing in Nova Scotia because she wrote a book on it. Kaya, what did you think of that first session with her?

Kaya Adleman: 54:52

Yeah, I mean, I don't know, this is like so up my alley in terms of like information, and so I really found it. I just found the whole concept really fascinating, especially as a young person, because I do consume a lot of content and I do get a lot of my information from social media. I mean, of course I consume information on social media, of course with a critical lens. I like to. If I see something, I like to fact check it with an article or a paper that follows journalistic standards and journalistic practices and ethics.

Kaya Adleman: 55:25

But yeah, I think one thing though that stands out to me is, especially because we're talking about this void of that kind of information on social media platforms, is, if you actually look at that presentation that Joan talks about and then it's also linked in her article% like 50% of people either don't know the industry enough to have an opinion or don't know the industry at all of these people that they surveyed.

Kaya Adleman: 55:59

So that's definitely interesting to me, especially now we're seeing this, you know, one sidedness of PR materials being the only information you're receiving about Canadian forestry. You know, could this be creating an opinion among those 40 to 50% of people about Canadian forestry? That's missing a lot of the context that those sources that are now blocked from meta platforms provide. I think it definitely sets the case for Canada to revise its Online News Act, for meta to compensate journalists accordingly, because they do do a lot of very hard work and they do, you know, doing that research. They deserve to be compensated fairly for that work. And they do, you know, doing that research. They deserve to be compensated fairly for that. But yeah, I think it just speaks to a growing, a growing problem in today's society and I would like to see some, some resolution to that, as we discussed earlier.

Jan Sumner: 57:05

Yeah, it would be great if they could reach an agreement, like Google did, because I mean, I don't know if it's an increase in PR. I know this is a newish campaign for the Forest Products Association of Canada. Maybe there have been other campaigns et cetera but when it's happening against a backdrop, where you don't have media who are reporting on forest and forestry issues, then it can seem like it's the only voice out there, and that is that's dangerous. So it would be great to have the voices of good journalism reporting again on forest and forestry issues. Yeah, yeah.

Jan Sumner: 57:43

And I will also share it.

Kaya Adleman: 57:45

Yeah, and I will also just add as an aside I loved going through the survey with Joan and I do think it's funny how she makes that comment. Like this is not any survey that follows rigorous research standards, and I just couldn't help but think of when I was doing my own honors thesis work at McGill University. I used a survey for my qualitative research methods and I had to go through an ethics review board. I had to submit my survey to an ethics review board, I had to go back and revise it multiple times and it would be interesting to see if that survey went through, you know, a university academic review board to see if it would, if it would pass through.

Jan Sumner: 58:32

Yeah, I was one of the things because I took the survey at least I tried to a couple of times and I was hoping that, you know, a lot of times they'll say if you want to say something else or you want to write something in, because it didn't give me some of the options that I thought could be there.

Jan Sumner: 58:48

And again, I'm not a no forestry at all kind of person. I'm like how do we do forestry, where do we do it and how much of it do we do and how do we conduct our forestry operations? And so I think those are valid questions to try and answer and I was hoping to participate with that kind of a mindset, not just answer how great is forestry and how great could it be and how much greater, you know. It just felt so skewed and I was really looking forward to being able to answer some of the questions, because I do think that there are some great ways that forestry can be aiding us in climate change and wildfires, et cetera. But this survey quote unquote didn't allow me to engage in that kind of way, so it was a bit of a frustrating exercise.

Kaya Adleman: 59:35

Yeah, I agree.

Jan Sumner: 59:36

Anyway, we've got part two coming up with Joan, so goodbye for now.

Kaya Adleman: 59:41

Yeah, see you next week.

Jan Sumner: 59:45

If you like listening to the clear cut and want to keep the content coming, support the show. It would mean a lot to Kai and I. The link to do so will be in the episode description below.

Kaya Adleman: 59:56

You can also become a supporter by going to our website at wwwwildlandsleagueorg. Slash the clear cut and also make sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming platform. It would really help the podcast and stay tuned for new episodes by following us on social media.

Jan Sumner: 1:00:17

That's at Wildlands League on Instagram, twitter and Facebook or LinkedIn, of course.

Kaya Adleman: 1:00:23

See you next time.