The Globe and Mail

When Bob Rae took office as Ontario’s first NDP premier in 1990, the people of the province were planting trees at the rate of 30 million a year on privately owned land in Southern Ontario – the inhabitable part – alone. When he left office almost five years later, they were planting trees at the rate of a mere four million a year – a downward trajectory that would finally end, a decade later, with essentially no tree-planting whatsoever.

In ending the remarkable public-private partnership that had reforested Southern Ontario for 100 years, Mr. Rae caused an abrupt time warp in woodland and wasteland reclamation – critical then as much for flood control as now for C0{-2}{- }sequestration. Seventeen years later in 2007, Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, much to his credit, reversed Mr. Rae’s error, though it will take decades, and perhaps centuries, to make up the lost ground.

Take the Humber River watershed, which covers 900 square kilometres west of Toronto, as an example. Environment Canada says watersheds require minimum forest cover of 30 per cent. Southern Ontario has 17 per cent. It would require one billion trees to take the Humber River watershed to this national standard – and 175 years at the present rate of planting. Mr. McGuinty aims for 10 million trees a year, a goal the province first exceeded in 1935. Ontario Environment Commissioner Gordon Miller says that the province’s minimum goal should be 100 million trees every year.

Mr. Rae’s term did coincide with a nasty recession but this fact doesn’t explain his perverse priorities. He borrowed money prodigiously, and spent it foolishly, setting a series of record-setting Keynesian deficits in the process. In retrospect, it’s hard to tell what Mr. Rae, now a federal MP and Liberal foreign affairs critic, had against trees. Whatever the reason, it had consequences – perhaps billions of them. Were the historic upward trend line still intact, Southern Ontario could well be planting more than 60 million trees a year.

People haven’t stopped planting trees altogether in Southern Ontario. A number of provincial organizations – municipal governments, conservation authorities, the Ontario Forestry Association, the Wetland Habitat Fund, individuals – are active in tree-planting. With Queen’s Park assistance, Trees Ontario, a Toronto-based NGO, plans to plant 3.5 million trees annually. Taken together, however, these programs fall far short of the plantings that benign trusteeship requires.

The Grand River Conservation Authority last year planted 15,000 native trees – black walnuts, silver maples and sugar maples, white oaks and burr oaks, white cedars and white pines – on nine hectares of flood plain in Kitchener: a perfect example of the farsighted planting of woodlots in urban-suburban environments. In doing so, through, it planted roughly 0.002 per cent of what the province needs to meet Environment Canada’s minimum standard for adequate forest cover in Southern Ontario watersheds.

The Ontario government has been encouraging its citizens to plant trees since 1871 – when it passed a law encouraging their planting along the province’s highways – in part, for flood control, in part for “snow fences.” We forget these practical obligations at our peril. Hundreds of motorists got stranded Dec. 13 in a vicious snowstorm on Highway 402, with needlessly lethal consequences: Farm fields stretch for miles along either side of this snowdrift-prone road between London and Sarnia, scandalously bereft of the natural “snow-fencing” that a solid line of conifers could provide. Why not plant them, belatedly, this spring?

Between 1905 and 1995, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources supplied landowners with almost 800 million seedlings, almost all of them distributed at a nominal charge. Yes, there was a subsidy in this government program. Think of it, though, in its proper historic context – as a tithe.

It’s not that government subsidies are necessarily required for successful tree-planting programs. They aren’t. But Ontario’s beautiful old country roads didn’t acquire all those majestic oaks, elms and maples by happenstance. In passing its first tree-planting act 140 years ago, the legislature gave farmers a property right in the saplings they planted: legal ownership of the trees themselves – though not of the public soil in which they were planted. Creative incentives almost always work. Sometimes they save lives, too.