Part 3: Nova Scotia Gov. correction – Goldsmith Lake is NOT under consideration as a Wilderness Area

By Nina Newington
June 20 2025. Part 3 is the third in a series on A Letter Worth Reading

CONTENTS
– CBC investigates
– The obvious question, and others
– Justifying
– Compliant
– Current
– What Now?
– Relevant Freedom of Information Docs

CBC investigates
On June 12th, CBC’s Phlis McGregor reported:

Earlier this spring Annapolis county MLA David Bowlby wrote letters to several of his constituents and at that time he said, quote, Goldsmith Lake remains under active evaluation for permanent protection by the province. I’ve tried to follow up on that and what that means and eventually I got an e-mail from Jordan Croucher, Director of Communications for the Progressive Conservative caucus. The e-mail includes a statement from MLA Bowlby, admitting he had made a mistake and that he wanted to correct the record: Goldsmith Lake is not under consideration for designation as a Wilderness Area.

The obvious question, and others
The obvious question is, ‘Well, why isn’t it under consideration for permanent protection, given all the evidence demonstrating the conservation value of the area?” But there are other questions raised by this odd episode.

The letter Mr. Bowlby sent out to multiple constituents in April displayed detailed knowledge of the formal evaluation process for designating areas for permanent protection, as well as current forestry practices on crown land. Having previously met in person with Mr. Bowlby, who is my MLA, I can say that he is an affable guy who presented himself during his campaign as ‘Farmer Dave’. As befits his background, he was given the job of ministerial assistant to the Minister of Agriculture. He is not familiar with conservation criteria, or the forestry speak employed by DNR. I very much doubt that he wrote the core text of the letter he sent out to his constituents on April 23rd. It has DNR’s fingerprints all over it.

The letter was drafted as a response to the flood of mail Bowlby received when news broke that logging had begun within the proposed Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area. It fed angry constituents a sop of good news – the area is being evaluated for permanent protection – along with a large serving of justification.

Now someone in DNR or, more likely, the Premier’s office, has decided to scrap the good news. Why? Because anyone with a modicum of intelligence can see that it makes no sense to log an area at the same time that it is being evaluated for protection? Or is it because WestFor doesn’t want the area protected, and these days, what WestFor wants, WestFor gets?

There is a certain show trial quality to an MLA being required to renounce a statement he almost certainly did not write in the first place. It seems a very long time ago now that Houston was promising transparency.

After hearing the interview, I called Bowlby’s office, both to express my dismay and to ask for clarification. I was not able to talk to my MLA but I did get his assistant.

The assistant assured me that old growth forest and lichen buffers were all being protected but that the 350 hectares that had been clearcut in 1972 would, quote, “never be protected.” It had been managed for forestry and that’s how it would stay.

He couldn’t tell me where these 350 hectares were within the proposed wilderness area, but he repeated many times that the 32 ha currently being cut were part of the 350 hectares. He couldn’t find the fact sheet with the other talking points, so he pretty much kept repeating this one.

Minus the strident assertion that the 350 ha will never be protected, this talking point is perfectly aligned with the letter Bowlby sent out. The good news part of Bowlby’s letter is the only part that has been retracted. The rest is still a source of insight into how DNR is handling citizen-proposed protected areas. It would, of course be better to be able to ask DNR and Environment directly what they are doing to protect 15% of the province by the end of next year, but neither department has answered requests for information lately, even when that information is far more limited in scope. So back to reading the tea leaves.

Justifying
After empathizing with people’s frustration with Log Now, Protect Later, the letter proceeded to justify it in the name of:

● DNR’s attentive stewardship of crown land forests
● their responsiveness to all the reports of species at risk occurrences (that they themselves had entirely failed to identify during their ‘rigorous review’ process)
● their policy of not cutting old-growth forest (once identified)
● the fact that the forest they just started logging had been clearcut 50 years ago and managed since then.

This last got quite a bit of detail in the letter:

(T)he approved harvest near Goldsmith Lake involves a 32-hectare thinning operation within a 350-hectare area that was originally clearcut in 1972, replanted, and subsequently managed through herbicide treatments in the early 1980s and pre-commercial thinning (PCT) in the late 1980s. This stand is now 53 years old…

DNR and WestFor have been beating this drum since our efforts to protect the Goldsmith area first drew media attention, back in November 2022. At that time Breck Stuart, General Manager of WestFor, penned an op-ed for the Chronicle Herald which began:

The area around Goldsmith Lake in Annapolis County has caught the eye of anti-forestry perspectives here in Nova Scotia. These 10,000 acres of Crown Land have been painted in the media as old, untouched pieces of forest that should be protected because of these qualities. We thought it would be important for the public to know this is just not true. This area was previously owned by the Bowater Mersey forestry company and used extensively for forestry. This area was clearcut in 1975-76 and sprayed with herbicide and had several silviculture treatments applied in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

While DNR’s claims have not been as sweeping, they too have stressed in successive briefing notes to the Minister of Natural Resources that the Goldsmith area was extensively managed. I examined these claims in Stories Maps Tell. My focus then was on an old Bowater map DNR used to bolster their claim that the area was already managed forest. That map showed three stands of old-growth as having been clearcut in 1971.

DNR’s main narrative rather fell apart in February when they finally added 14 recently identified stands of old growth-forest to the 7 known ones. Goldsmith Lake is now visibly ringed with stands of old-growth on DNR’s own map. Clearly it is not all managed forest. The citizen scientists have supplied a list of another 19 stands with a request that they be assessed.

 

Compliant

Whatever the proportion of forest in the Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area that was clearcut and managed after Bowater acquired the land in 1970, the implicit argument is that a previously clearcut 50-year-old forest is not worth protecting. Having already been ravaged, it should go on being managed.

Bowlby’s letter states: “Let me assure you that the current harvesting activity is confined to areas already assessed as ecologically compliant, with stringent safeguards in place for species at risk and old-growth stands.”

‘Ecologically compliant’ is not a familiar term in forestry-speak. It seems to mean a forest that is judged not to deserve protection. Why? Because it has been clearcut in the past and managed?

The ‘current harvesting activity’ is in 50-year-old forest so relax, everyone. Wishful thinking could lead one to believe that WestFor will only be cutting 50-year-old forest in the proposed protected area. But the letter does not actually say that. Anytime one sees that weasel word, ‘current’, warning lights should flash.

First, though, let’s look more closely at the dichotomy between ‘ecologically compliant’ areas, which are available for logging, and areas that are protected from logging by those stringent safeguards, namely old-growth forest and the buffer zones around certain species at risk.

I can’t resist pointing out how tidily that word ‘compliant’ (repeated later in the letter) fits into a patriarchal purity narrative: Old-growth forest, unspoiled by the hand of man, is deserving of protection. A fallen – logged – forest, on the other hand, is available — even willing — to be used and used again. The language WestFor employed’ in its Op-Ed fits right in: ‘old, untouched pieces of forest that should be protected’ versus area ‘used extensively for forestry’. It’s the good old virgin/slut dichotomy.

Nowadays it is understood that the notion of virgin forest is a colonial construct that erases the presence of the L’nu, the people who lived within and harvested food and materials from the forest for millenia here in Mi’kma’ki. There is almost no forest unaffected by humans. But settlers have had a very different and devastating impact on the Wabenaki forest. Making the commitment to put 20% of our province off limits to logging, development and other industrial activities is one small but essential step towards repairing the damage that has been done to this land.

This cannot be done by protecting individual buffer zones and stands of old-growth. Conservationists have long warned of this trap: too much focus on the elements that have some legal protection — old-growth stands and species at risk lichen, for example – can be used by industry and government to legitimize logging everywhere else. Indeed, that is exactly what Mr. Bowlby’s assistant seemed to think, that it was good enough to protect 3 ha buffer zones around rare lichens and the fragments of old-growth forest that have somehow survived. Simple math should rule this idea out. We need to protect another 330,000 ha (6% of the province) to reach 20%. Best estimates suggest there is at most 55,000 ha (1%) of old-growth so that’s not going to do it. Nor are 3 ha lichen buffers. So what are we going to protect?

It is true that 50-year-old clearcut forest that was subsequently sprayed to kill off the naturally occurring hardwood species in order to create a softwood monoculture is not at the top of the conservation priority list. But protected areas, to function well ecologically, need to be big. Too small and they are all edge and no interior. Given how heavily cut our forests have been, any decent-sized protected area will inevitably include some forest that was cut in the last 50 years. A standing 50-year-old forest may be ‘early mature’ in forestry speak, but it is still far more valuable, ecologically, than one that been logged more recently. It stores carbon, provides forest cover and shelters adjoining forest.

The conservation gold, though, is old forest, especially old forest made up of long-lived species and an array of different aged trees. These old – ‘mature climax’ – forests will become old-growth in a few decades, so long as they are not logged. To become old-growth, the trees need to stay in the forest, feeding the soil and creating ever more complex habitat as they grow old and die. Harvesting trees, even with partial harvests, disrupts this ecological continuity. This is why Nova Scotia’s own Old-Growth Forest Policy states:

Because old-growth forest areas are best considered as characterized by relatively little recent human disturbance (Hunter and Schmiegelow, 2011), no forest areas that have received a silvicultural treatment since 1990 will be considered as old-growth forest areas, provided there is documentation of the treatment. (DNR, 2022 p.6)

The policy makes no exceptions for “ecological” harvest “prescriptions”.

Current
Getting back to Goldsmith and that weasel word, current: the letter assures us that the ‘current harvesting activity’ is in an area of forest that was clearcut in 1972.

Bowlby’s assistant stressed the same point repeatedly.

Does that mean DNR is going to leave the old forests alone until the proposed wilderness area has been assessed for protection, whenever that may be?

Well no, as it turns out. DNR’s plan for this spring was for WestFor to go straight from cutting the 50-year-old forest around last year’s Lichen Camp to cutting the peninsula between Corbett and Dalhousie Lakes, an area they know full well contains old forest.

How do we know this was the plan? It’s in documents received as part of a Freedom of Information request on May 23rd. These include a DNR Decision Request on the subject of “Forestry Operations in Goldsmith Lake”, dated April 15, 2025.

The Department is seeking permission to proceed with recommended actions to enable authorized forestry activity to proceed in the Goldsmith Lake and Corbett Lake areas (Annapolis County)

Under ‘Context/Current Situation’, the second paragraph states:

Current forestry operations are planned off a secondary forest access road in Goldsmith Lake area, this work is estimated to occur over 6 weeks. Then WestFor would commence operations off a different secondary forest access road in Corbett Lake area.

Maps were attached that make the locations clear. If things had gone according to that schedule, WestFor’s contractor would have started logging the Corbett peninsula at the beginning of June.

DNR ensured that everything was in place to do this. On March 13, they approved yet another set of amendments to a pair of harvest plans covering much of the peninsula, AP068637 and AP157007. These plans have a long and chequered history (see Post on NSFM Jan 16, 2025). Suffice for now to say that the Freedom of Information documents show that WestFor has been pushing DNR to prioritize their approval for over a year.

DNR knows  that these harvest plans involve logging old forest. In August 2019, after protests in June of that year halted logging on the peninsula (see NSFN post June 15, 2019) , the head of the Old-Growth team in DNR, Peter Bush, asked one of the department’s foresters to survey the cutblocks. The survey did not identify any old-growth, but it did identify four stands of “mature climax” forest, in other words, old forest with long-lived tree species that is well on its way to becoming old- growth. These stands covered 31 hectares out of the 54 hectare total for the two cutblocks.

Oddly enough, given that the 2019 survey found no old-growth stands in either of these cutblocks, part of the amendment to the harvest plans approved in March 2025 involves the removal of a stand of old-growth from the cutblock. It’s not clear when this 2.1 ha stand was assessed as old-growth but that is how the stand is described.

Clearly, the Corbett peninsula is not a previously clearcut, managed 50-year-old forest. The old Bowater map does not show any of the harvest plan area as having been cut during their tenure. Rather, it is more old forest than not, with a patchwork of other ages, including a stand of recognized old-growth. It is good that DNR has put the 2 ha old-growth stand off-limits for logging but, from an ecological point of view, the 31 ha of “mature climax” forest in the cutblocks are even more valuable.

The only way we can rebuild the stock of old-growth is to protect old forests like this. This is not rocket science. You can’t manufacture the ecological continuity that makes old-growth able to support such a variety of life, but you can screw it up in a hurry.

What Now?
Let’s be perfectly clear. If DNR and the forestry industry had had their way, these 54 ha on the Corbett peninsula would have been logged in 2019. Failing that, they would be being logged right now. When we agreed on April 15th to move Lichen Camp out of the way of the 32 ha logging operation that Bowlby’s letter justifies, we did not know about the Decision Request that the Deputy-Minister and top bureaucrats at DNR had signed that day, the one that laid out a timeline for finishing that cut by the end of May and moving right on down to cut the Corbett Lake peninsula. We set up camp at the head of the peninsula because we knew that this area would repay further study.

We knew what we had seen with our own eyes – huge old maples and yellow birch; pit and mound topography that indicates that an area has been forest for a very long time; rich forested wetlands. In 2024 we had identified 9 species at risk lichens in the area and documented two species at risk birds. We knew too that, in 2019, when people gathered to stop the attempt to log the peninsula, people had documented chimney swifts and an endangered brown bat.

We knew all this – and so did DNR, because we reported what we found. We didn’t know, until the Freedom of Information documents arrived on May 23rd, that DNR had identified stands of old forest and a stand of old-growth on the peninsula. But they knew. And yet there they are, on April 15th of this year, working out how to ensure the peninsula gets logged. Why? Even if you buy their justification for logging the 32 ha around the old Lichen Camp site – it was clearcut, it was already ruined, it’s managed forest – why would they not put a hold on harvesting this peninsula until a decision has been made about whether or not to protect the entire area?

Whether or not the Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area is currently being formally evaluated, it meets all the criteria for protection laid out by this government in its Collaborative Protected Area Strategy less than two years ago. What happened to the urgency, transparency and collaboration promised in that document? In their rush to turn our natural resources into cash, the government now seems completely subservient to industry and eager to believe their accounting, whether for mining or forestry. They don’t count the cost of climate change and biodiversity loss. They don’t even count the expense of repairing roads damaged repeatedly by ever more intense rainfall. They don’t remember all the ecosystem services that forests, and especially old forests, perform for free, including slowing and storing water flows. Nor do they count the jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities created in rural Nova Scotia by increased tourism. An easily accessible Wilderness Area like Goldsmith can be a year-round draw. There is room on public land for both conservation and forestry.

This government committed in law to protecting 20% of our province by 2030. Almost every country in the world, including Canada, the US, Russia and China, committed to protecting 30% of their lands and waters by 2030. The Global Biodiversity Framework was signed two years ago, in Montreal. But here in Nova Scotia, DNR is not just blocking Environment from formally evaluating areas for protection, it is labouring mightily to help WestFor log as much of the Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area as they can as soon as they can. Three hectare buffers for species at risk lichens don’t provide enough fig leaf to cover DNR’s participation in the pillage of our public forests.

Relevant Freedom of Information Docs

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