FORESTS OF CANADA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19453, 8 October 1926, Page 10

FORESTS OF CANADA.

A New Zealander who has been studying the timber industry of Canada has told an Australian interviewer that the forests are being cut out, but the cabled summary of his remarks makes him imply that natural regeneration is meeting the position. An official estimate of timber consumption, prepared by the Canadian Bureau of Statistics, states that the total primary forest production of Canada in 1924 involved the cutting of 2,808,506,000 cubic feet of standing timber. This constituted only the consumption for use, Expert opinion, adding to it the volume of material destroyed by fire, insects, fungi, wind and other destructive agencies, placed the total depletion at more than 5,000,000,000 cubic feet for the year. That is to say the wastage is believed to be more than equal Ho the consumption of timber. It would need a rate of natural regeneration unknown to forestry science for more than an insignificant moiety of this depletion to be met. How the position is viewed by instructed Canadians can be gathered from an address delivered recently by Dr. C. D. Howe, Dean of the Faculty of Forestry, Toronto University. Dr. Howe expressed the belief that the position of timber supplies in Canada was critical. "I am afraid," he said, "that it may be allowed to drift into an industrial tragedy, and this is another way of saying a national tragedy in the case of an industry that, as a whole, stands second to agriculture as. a wealth-producer in this country." There is a great and growing volume of evidence tending to show that Canada cannot be relied upon indefinitely as a source of forest products, a fact worth noting by New Zealand, which -at present draws such considerable supplies from the Pacific coast of North America.