Chill wind in logging heartland

Local pressure has reined in big lumber companies in British Columbia

The BBC's Misha Glenny reports that aggressive American economic policies and the war in Iraq are souring relations between the United States and Canada.

More than one person has looked at me nervously since I returned to Britain earlier this week from Canada.

"Uh?" they draw in their breath, "aren't you worried about Sars?"

To which I have to point out that in geographical terms, being worried about a cluster outbreak of Sars in Toronto when you are roaming the eastern interior of British Columbia is like panicking about events in Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles east of Moscow, when you are strolling through the New Forest.

Bush and the Americans simply use Nafta as a way of giving their industry protectionist cover... It is sheer hypocrisy. But I was proud to see Chretien stand up to him

Paul
Small businessman in Nelson

Nonetheless, lungs are always very much on the mind of the scattered inhabitants of British Columbia's wilderness.

The western hemisphere boasts a pair of two enormous lungs. One is made up from the steadily diminishing rainforests of Brazil. Its less well-known partner which pumps out an almost equal amount of oxygen for the world to breathe is the pines and firs which comprise seemingly endless swathes of British Columbia.

That northern lung also sustains more or less the entire economy of British Columbia's interior.

Fierce defence of land and trees

There is also an edge to the personality of the people who live there - the native north Americans in this part of the world, the Kootenay tribe of the Black Foot, are hard to find unless you know where to seek them out.

But the almost exclusively Caucasian population of the West Kootenay lake area has assimilated much of the Indians' respect for and fierce defence of the land and trees - public pressure has reined in the right of the big lumber companies to continue their once ruthless policy of clear-cutting which saw great areas of trees destroyed in brutal raids.

Chretien has won plaudits in British Columbia where central government is generally hated

Today's inhabitants are descendants of the many poor but adventurous European speculators who swarmed into the area in the late 19th Century when they learned that there were copious amounts of silver and gold in them there hills.

Nowadays there are dozens of little hick villages like Ymir, a few boxes of wood with rusting dismembered tractors and bicycles in the front yards with a population in the three-figure category.

But 100 years ago, as Ymir's local history information board standing silently in the snow explains, the village had 11 hotels (and, as it doesn't explain, an equal number of brothels), a well-equipped hospital, and a direct rail link to the west coast of the US to transport all the minerals and wood southwards.

Tariff kills trade

The mining is now over but the logs still roll down into Washington State, Idaho and beyond, a key element in Canada's trade with the US.

For Canada is the US's biggest single partner in trade that is worth almost $400bn annually, more than the US's combined trade with Mexico and Japan, its second and third biggest partners.

Logs rolling south to the US have been severely reduced

But the log rolling southwards slowed dramatically 12 months ago when President Bush slapped a 29% average tariff hike on softwood from Canada (ie British Columbia).

Barely noticed in the US (except by the US timber industry on whose behalf this tariff was raised), it has boosted the level of popular anti-Americanism in British Columbia to one which really is comparable to those in the Middle East.

Not a conversation goes by on Baker Street, the main shopping area in Nelson, an exceptionally pretty town on the west arm of the Kootenay lake, without the townsfolk railing against the US president and Nafta, the North American Free Trade Association.

Created 14 years ago as a western hemisphere equivalent of the European Union, Nelsoners argue that it is no such thing at all because tariffs have no place in a common market.

'Hypocrisy'

"Bush and the Americans simply use Nafta as a way of giving their industry protectionist cover," said Paul, one of the countless small businessmen in the area who has one workshop and one retail outlet, in this case as a glass-blower.

"It is sheer hypocrisy," he adds. "But I was proud to see Chretien stand up to him."

Now from a British Columbian, such praise for a Canadian prime minister, a French Canadian at that, is really something.

Jean Chretien's refusal to support the coalition war in Iraq has led to unprecedented levels of support for the Ottawa-based government in British Columbia, where things federal are generally seen as the work of the devil.

CBC, the Canadian BBC, gives full range to anti-American opinion in the country.

Indeed, one of its most popular television figures, the satirist Rick Mercer, made his career by interviewing Americans and exposing their ignorance about Canada and its people.

Hilarity and anger

Not just ordinary Americans.

Mr Mercer would persuade leading academics from America's Ivy League universities to sign petitions protesting against the Canadian Government's supposed practice of dealing with a pension crisis by herding over-65-year-olds on to ice flows and letting them float away.

Laughing at American popular ignorance of Canada is a national sport north of the 49th parallel.

But amidst the hilarity, there is real anger in British Columbia and other parts of Canada.

And although the US's economic power is impressive and persuasive, I couldn't help thinking after 10 days there that Washington's insensitivity towards a region which provides almost all the water, electricity and (even now) timber for the western United States is just a little unwise.