Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve managing director Malcolm Cockwell told a roomful of County leaders Oct. 2 that invasive species pose more of a threat to his operations – and the wider Highlands environment – than climate change.
Speaking at Haliburton County Development Corporation’s (HCDC) annual general meeting earlier this month, Cockwell was asked about the major obstacles facing his business, which employs about 100 County residents fulltime.
While he name-dropped forest fires, tariffs and climate change as the perceived threeheaded dog, Cockwell said none have been a major concern.
“Wildfires have not affected our forestry operations much at all… there were a few small fires in the region, but the forests around here, fundamentally, have not evolved to burn. The natural catastrophic fire interval (referring to the average time between major fires impacting ecosystems) in this region is one every 1,000 years,” Cockwell said.
He believes the heat Haliburton Forest and other local tourist operators feel from fires is entirely preventable.
“People read articles on CBC or wherever, which suggests Haliburton County is a chartered hellscape due to forest fires, but we don’t feel or see that whatsoever, certainly not in our forest management business,” Cockwell said. “It’s the tourism side that gets hit, people not wanting to come here because of the things they’re reading, when maybe those things aren’t always accurate.”’
After U.S. president Donald Trump imposed an additional 10 per cent tariff on imported Canadian timber and lumber this month, taking the total tariff to 45 per cent, Cockwell said Haliburton Forest has found a workaround, expanding its clientele to more markets in Europe and Asia.
Pre-tariffs, Cockwell estimates between 30 and 50 per cent of Haliburton Forest’s products, predominantly raw lumber, was shipped to the U.S.
“Basically, every board foot that we had going across the border to the U.S. still has a home, only now it’s going overseas,” Cockwell said. “We’re still selling the same amount of lumber… the silver lining we’re focusing on is that when this all settles down, we would love if we could redirect our material back to the U.S. and really ramp up [the business].”
Above all else, Cockwell said it’s the non-native creepy crawlies that have taken refuge at Haliburton Forest in recent years that keep him up at night.
Beech bark disease has been described as the “biggest, most significant problem” Haliburton Forest has faced in recent years. It was first identified in 2010, with the disease spread through fungus that lives inside insects that feed off a beech tree’s sap. There’s no cure, with Forest scientists estimating the species will be wiped out completely by 2033.
About 15 per cent of all trees on the forest’s private property are beech trees. Ash trees are also vulnerable, due to the presence of the emerald ash borer.
Cockwell said Haliburton Forest has also started to help remove invasive species from other parts of the region. He says people can send pictures of anything “that seems funny, or out of the ordinary” to info@haliburtonforest.com and his team will either identify it themselves or send it to research partners at the University of Toronto to examine.
Over the summer, a cottager sent in a sample of what ended up being giant hogweed on Kennisis Lake Road. The perennial can grow up to 14-feet and crowds out other native plants. Cockwell said staff visited the site and removed hogweed; follow-ups have shown the plant hasn’t returned.
“I’m really tired of hearing about climate change… if you were to ask me to show you where climate change is happening in our forest, I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Cockwell said. “The thing we really need to be talking about is these invasive pests. For a business like ours, invasive pests are 10 times more present and clearer as a danger than climate change.”
