The federal government promised to plant two billion trees. How’s that going?
Just off a country road in rural Ontario, a short drive from Barrie, Kerry McLaven’s decades-old machinery is revving up for the summer.
The “machines” are trees — rows of white pines, cut and grafted from the best trees McLaven and her predecessors could find, now put to work in this eight hectare plot near Lisle, Ont.
“They are beautiful and they provide a habitat … but their real role is to produce seed and so they are seed machines,” said McLaven, CEO of Forest Gene Conservation Association of Ontario, which manages this seed orchard.
The trees produce high-quality seed for a Canadian forestry sector that can’t get enough. Forestry in Canada is big business and commercial foresters plant hundreds of millions of trees each year.
Now the federal government wants to get in on the act. Ottawa has promised to plant two billion trees by 2031 by providing funding to provinces, territories, cities, Indigenous groups and non-profits.
