Trade, Environment and Competitiveness:

Sustaining Canada’s Prosperity technology transfer, education, training and public information. More important, however, is the greater emphasis on longer term perspectives that has resulted in moreintegratedandintensivemanagementregimes. These are the principle components of the agreements and, together, they represent a shift from sustained yield to sustainable development, and a corresponding shift from forest management to forest ecosystem management.

Funds spent on improving the health ofcanadianforests through these agreements and other government programs, whether provincial or federal, provide incalculable long term benefits.

As their knowledge and depth of understanding of environmental issues grows, more and more Canadians are reaching the middle ground of the debate. While there are still “tree spikers” and “develop at any cost” advocates, there is steady progress in the public debate toward an equilibrium.

Sustainable development not only imposes obligations on those in the public and private sector who would profit from Canadian forests, but it also confers rights. Among the obligations is the requirement to manage prudently not only the traditional commercial aspects ofthe resource, but also its less tangible, non-timber values. These latter values are important but it is only recently that they have begun to get the recognition they deserve and a start has been made in accounting for them.

In regard to acquired rights, providing a forest manager has complied with the obligations of sustainable development - of putting back more than was taken out he or she should have right of tenure, the right to harvest, and the right to manufacture and market forest products from sustainably-managed stands, without risk of arbitrary barriers erected by unfair or uninformed prejudice within Canada or abroad.

When Marshall McLuhan spoke of the “global village” so many years ago, he was referring to the way modern communications have shrunk the world. That shrinkage means that what is done in Canada does not escape 85