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Article Excerpt
THIS PAPER EXAMINES the evolution of Ontario's tree planting industry and the segmentation of its labour force since the end of World War II. To do so, it draws upon Jamie Peck's causal emphases of labour market segmentation: labour demand, labour supply, and the state. Concomitantly, it seeks to better conceptualize tree planting amongst other forestry and seasonal natural resource occupations, such as loggers and agricultural workers. The paper is organized around four distinct time periods, all of which are marked by significant changes to the structure and political economy of the forest products industry and legislation governing forest tenure and management. It also examines mechanization in the logging and tree planting industries, the shift from public to private service delivery, the role of unions, remuneration systems, the potential for the use of migrant guest workers, and the ensuing effects on the segmentation, marginalization, and stigmatization of tree planters in Ontario since the mid-1940s.
CET ARTICLE EXAMINE l'evolution de l'industrie de la plantation d'arbres de l'Ontario et la segmentation de sa main-d'oeuvre depuis la fin de la Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale. Pour ce faire, il se base sur la mise en evidence non prescrite de Jamie Peck a l'egard de la segmentation du marche du travail : la demande de la main-d'oeuvre, la disponibilite de la main-d'oeuvre, et l'Etat. En meme temps, il cherche a mieux conceptualiser la plantation d'arbres parmi d'autres occupations saisonnieres forestieres et de ressources naturelles, telles que les bucherons et les travailleurs agricoles. L'article est organise autour de quatre periodes de temps distinctes, dont toutes sont marquees par des changements importants a la structure et a l'economie politique des produits forestiers et a la legislation regissant la tenure et la gestion des forets. Il examine aussi la mecanisation dans les industries forestiere et de plantation d'arbres, le passage du service de livraison du secteur public au secteur prive, le role des syndicats, les systemes de remuneration, la possibilite de l'embauche des travailleurs migrants, et les effets consecutifs sur la segmentation, la marginalisation, et la stigmatisation des travailleurs de l'industrie de la plantation d'arbres en Ontario depuis le milieu des annees 1940.
Introduction
TREE PLANTING IS THE FIRST and last step in the process of industrial forestry, and a critical component of the forest products industry in North America. Despite the large body of technical and policy-based literature related to tree planting and silviculture, researchers have all but ignored the workers who plant the trees. In the past decade, however, a growing body of work that examines socio-economic and socio-cultural aspects of tree planting and other reforestation work in North America has emerged. Some studies focus directly on tree planting and reforestation, (1) while others are broader in scope and include tree planting as a peripheral component of the broader forest products industry. (2) Although these works address a number of important issues, theoretical and empirical gaps remain.
This paper helps address these lacunae by examining the evolution of northern Ontario's tree planting industry and labour force since the inception of reforestation programmes following World War II. (3) It is organized around four time periods: pre-1962, 1962-1979, 1980-1994, and 1994-present. Each period is marked by major changes to the political economy of the forest products industry and legislation affecting land tenure, licensing, funding, and service delivery in Ontario's forests. In a conceptual sense, the paper situates work in Ontario's tree planting industry amongst other seasonally based natural resource occupations, such as logging and agricultural work. Comparisons are made throughout the paper in order to capture the historically specific context of each industry, but a brief analytical summary of tree planting amongst logging and agricultural work appears in the conclusion.
Throughout North America, tree planters face acute marginalization and stigmatization. This occurs for a number of reasons, and not surprisingly, has major implications on the structure and organization of the industry and its labour force. Tree planting is seasonal, offers little financial security, and in particular economic contexts, is culturally inappropriate for residents of resource-dependent communities. (4) Additionally, and in the case of northern Ontario, the inception of tree planting programmes occurred during an era of nearly full (male) employment, and work was carried out primarily by marginalized local persons or persons from outside the region. Other factors contributing to this stigma were a long-held reliance on natural regeneration and use of workers with little forestry expertise. Tree planting contractors also tend to be much smaller than the often multinational and vertically-integrated forest products firms for whom they carry out work. This, coupled with their seasonality, renders tree planting contractors and their labour force less visible and influential, and results in active forms of sectoral and workplace exclusion. (5)
While some authors examine the marginalization and stigmatization of tree planters using a primary/secondary approach to labour markets, (6) argue that this only begins to account for the myriad factors influencing labour market segmentation. Therefore, I draw upon Jamie Peck's causal emphases of segmentation theory to examine the role of labour demand, labour supply, and the state in shaping the labour markets of Ontario's tree planting industry. (7) Segmentation by demand occurs primarily through power relationships and technology. Examples include the effects of technological requirements, market stability, labour control strategies, and industrial structure. Segmentation by supply is a product of the mutually dependent relationship of capital and labour and the fact that labour markets are socially produced (and reproduced). Examples include the gendering of work, occupational socialization, the stigmatization of certain social or ethnic groups, the influence of unions in restricting supply, and household divisions of labour. The state is also an active agent in the segmentation of labour markets through the structure of governance and institutions. Examples of segmentation by state means include education and training regimes, industrial relations and employment legislation, and social welfare systems. Peck's approach is useful because it moves beyond dualistic and overly rigid approaches to segmentation and recognizes the constellation of economic, political, and socio-cultural factors shaping and segmenting labour markets.
The lack of research on Ontario's tree planting industry presents problems and limitations when writing its history. Bodner notes that tree planting in Ontario is "an industry without a printed history" and those who have previously written popular pieces relied "more on a consensus of the historical trends in the industry than on any careful collection of oral histories or an investigation using the textual records available from companies, industry, and government." (8) Although the provincial (and federal) government(s) maintain some records of the amount of land harvested, planted, tended, and scarified, no comprehensive socio-economic database for tree planting or other reforestation work exists. There are two significant barriers to the compilation of such a database. First, Statistics Canada includes tree planters in the "forestry services" group, which, due to confidentiality regulations, cannot be broken down into individual job descriptions. (9) Second, tree planters work on a seasonal basis, and the majority are post-secondary students who are classified as such in census data. Additionally, tree planters were drawn from other marginal labour pools on short-term and quasi-legal bases before the widespread use of post-secondary students. These groups are unlikely to have been represented in past employment statistics concerning tree planting. The lack of employment statistics therefore limits tangible data concerning the annual number of tree planters in Ontario. References to the approximate number of tree planters working in Ontario in any given year is thus inferred by merging anecdotal estimates and any available statistics concerning the number of trees planted that year.
The Early Years: 1900-1962
At the turn of the 20th century, tree planting was carried out primarily on arid or semi-arid farmland to prevent soil damage or act as windbreaks. Little information is available regarding the tree planting labour force of this era, but we can assume that the majority of work was performed by farmers and their kin. To meet the demand for seedlings and improve planting and tending methods, a number of nurseries and research stations were built in southern and eastern Ontario, including a field station in Norfolk County for use by the newly-formed faculty of forestry at the University of Toronto. (10) However, most projects ground to a halt at the outset of World War I.
The forest products industry expanded rapidly in northern Ontario during the years previous to World War I. In an effort to encourage development, the provincial government approved "generous concessions to pulp and paper companies, and placed few restrictions on logging practices." (11) One of the few stipulations was that timber would be processed in the province in order to strengthen regional economies. Additionally, "in their eagerness to promote development, policy-makers passed up an opportunity to insist on tight regulations for logging operations. Instead, for decades operators were granted a virtual free hand to proceed as they wish." (12) Unplanned natural regeneration was the primary means of reforestation of this era. (13)
The first efforts at artificial reforestation qua tree planting in northern Ontario were led by industry towards the end of World War I. The Abitibi Power and Paper Company built nurseries adjacent to their newsprint mill in Iroquois Falls and grew over four million seedlings. However, most died, and only 455,000 were planted. (14) The only other evidence of reforestation efforts in northern Ontario during this era involved the Spanish River Pulp and Paper Company. (15) Despite emerging practical and theoretical bodies of knowledge concerning reforestation, foresters continued to rely on the convenience of natural regeneration. This, alongside the effects of the Great Depression and the reorganization of the Department of Lands and Forests in 1941, stalled reforestation programmes once more until the end of World War II. (16)
In the decade and a half following World War II, the nature of the forest products industry in Ontario, and Canada for that matter, changed dramatically. In order to meet growing North American domestic and American demand, Ontario's pulp and paper capacity grew by 49 per cent between 1950 and 1959. (17) This prompted a new system of legislation that commodified Ontario's forests by guaranteeing large corporations access to timber in exchange for investment. (18) Large-scale manufacturing projects and growth in timber harvests required significant changes to forest tenure, an increase in forest management, and the reorganization of work in the woods.
After a number of Royal Commissions throughout Canada, including the influential Kennedy Commission of 1947, the Canada Forestry Act was passed in 1949. This, along with amendments made in Ontario to the Crown Timber Act in 1952 and 1954 that (respectively) required licensees to submit forest management plans with applications for harvesting permits and made them responsible for regeneration, led to a shift from a policy of liquidation to policies of sustained-yield forestry. (19) The primary principles of sustained-yield forestry required "forests to be managed as to ensure supplies of wood in perpetuity, making sure the resource was not only preserved, bur also renewable," (20) or essentially "cutting annually no more than the yearly growth of commercially valuable species so that the forest industry could have a timber supply in perpetuity." (21) Concomitantly, the Canada Forestry Act led to an era of provincial-federal cost-sharing, where the federal government could enter into agreements with provinces for "everything and anything related to forestry." (22) These agreements included reforestation, silvicultural research, infrastructural development, and forest inventory calculation. Funding often prioritized the latter, (23) and what was directed to reforestation went largely to nursery development in the boreal communities of Dryden, Chapleau, Gogama, White River, and Engelhart. (24) In 1952 three nurseries existed in northern Ontario, but by 1960 there were nine. However, many produced stock of a poor quality, and even when seedlings initially survived in the bush, they were often choked out by competing vegetation. (25)
The lacklustre record of early post-war reforestation programmes cannot be attributed only to poor seedling quality. Adapting nursery and reforestation programmes developed in Carolinian and Laurentian forest regions to boreal conditions proved problematic, as did recruiting, retaining, and managing workers who planted trees. Labour supply was tight in the 1950s due to rapid urban and industrial growth, and high demand in the urban centres of the south and the mining and paper- and lumber-producing communities of the north led to critical labour shortages in the logging sector. (26) These shortages, in conjunction with the expansion of processing capacity in the forest products industry, gave way to new systems of logging which are reviewed to contextualize the evolution of Ontario's tree planting industry and labour force alongside the broader forest products industry.
Prior to World War II, Ontario's logging industry was organized on the premises of "agri-forestry." (27) Timber was harvested in the winter and logs were driven on rivers to lumber mills in the spring. Loggers were drawn from three pools: general labourers who would otherwise be unemployed during the winter months, agriculturalists from marginal farms in Ontario and the prairies, and professional forest products workers who split their rime between the forest and the lumber mills. (28) Living conditions in logging camps were rudimentary and pay was low. Work was labour-intensive, and trees were felled and bucked by hand and yarded by horses and oxen.
As the demand for timber increased alongside the growth of steady, better-paying, and less arduous work in urban industries, labour shortages in logging camps mounted. In order to maintain...
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