Truce disintegrates between environmental groups and Canada’s forest industry

The truce between the environmental movement and Canada's forest industry appears to be breaking down.

The Vancouver-based group Canopy announced Tuesday it was pulling out of the three-year-old Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement, complaining "not one hectare of Canada's boreal forest has been protected."

The boreal forest that runs coast to coast across northern Canada below the tree line encompasses about one-third of all the boreal-forest ring around the globe's northern hemisphere.

The agreement originally between nine environmental groups and the Canadian Forest Products Association, representing 21 companies, was intended to protect almost 76 million hectares of boreal forest.

“This collaboration with the logging industry was supposed to be a game-changer for the protection of species and conservation in Canada’s threatened Boreal forest,” Canopy founder and executive director Nicole Rycroft said, according to the Globe and Mail.

“The disappointing reality is that not one hectare of forest has been protected and species and ecosystems are still at risk.”

[ Related: Greenpeace says allegations it made about Resolute Forest Products were wrong ]

Canopy's pull-out follows the withdrawal of Greenpeace last December.

Greenpeace spokeswoman Stephanie Goodwin said it had evidence one of the corporate signatories, Resolute Forest Products, was not following the agreement aimed at setting aside swaths of boreal forest from logging.

"This is a deal breaker for us," Goodwin told CBC News at the time. "There is no agreement left to uphold."

Greenpeace has since back-pedalled on its allegations against Resolute, issuing a statement last month to say the information it had received about the company's activities were inaccurate.

But it's not rejoining the agreement. Greenpeace had grown increasingly frustrated about the pace of implementation of the agreement, Goodwin said.

"We are 2½ years into the three-year agreement and of the five conservation plans we have only one completed," she told CBC News. "With the boreal forest under threat, the only responsible decision for Greenpeace is to pursue other pathways to obtain results in the forest."

The agreement was heralded as an end to the long-running war in the woods between environmentalists and loggers, most noticeable in British Columbia in the 1980s and '90s where blockaders clashed with police.

Environmental groups mounted successful campaigns urging the industries customers not to buy wood and paper products made from old-growth forests subject to clear-cut logging practices.

Dialogue raised the prospect of compromise, with companies modifying their logging strategies in return for a reduction in protests and boycott campaigns. The two groups' withdrawal from the deal suggests a return to harder-edged tactics.

"In nearly three years of difficult work, the participating groups have been unable to agree on one joint recommendation for protection, while virtually all conservation milestones in the agreement have been missed and target dates for the completion of agreed objectives have been repeatedly shifted," Canopy said in its news release.

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“Canopy works with over 700 large corporate consumers of forest products and we will be informing them about the logging reality in Canada,” Rycroft said, though he added the group remains "committed to collaborative solutions building ... "

A forest products association spokesman told the Globe its members remain committed to the agreement.

“We’re committed to developing approaches that would achieve improved conservation while supporting a vibrant forest industry, one on which Canadians depend, and we haven’t wavered from that commitment. It’s that simple,” said Mark Hubert, vice-president of environmental leadership.

In its response to Greenpeace's withdrawal last December, the association noted 29 million hectares of caribou range in northeastern Ontario were closed to logging and that efforts were underway to strike similar agreements in other regions.

“We all wish things would move faster, but we’re committed to doing it together,” Hubert told the Globe.