Only Registered Professional…

Only Registered Professional Foresters have the broad range of natural resource management skills and knowledge to deliver this new process with certainty that the public interest will be upheld as management decisions are taken and forestry practices are implemented, to protect plant life, animal life, water, soil, air and social and economic values.

Yet 14 other occupations listed in Part III of Ontario Regulation 145/01 would be within their legal rights to do pretty much whatever they like - as their actions are NOT legally interpreted as "practising forestry" and so their actions are not regulated.

PART III
ACTS NOT CONSTITUTING PROFESSIONAL FORESTRY
Excluded acts
4. For the purposes of clause 3 (2) (b) of the Act, a person who performs an act in relation to the management or manipulation of forests that is within the generally accepted scope of any of the following professions, trades or occupations is not practising professional forestry when so acting, unless the person is a registered professional forester:
1. Natural resource technician and technologist.
2. Forest management plan approver certified under the “Managed Forest Tax Improvement Program”.
3. Certified tree marker.
4. Biologist.
5. Certified arborist.
6. Landscape architect.
7. Professional planner.
8. Certified Ontario or Canadian land surveyor.
9. Botanist.
10. Zoologist.
11. Professional engineer.
12. Certified property appraisers.
13. Agronomist.
14. Ecologist. O. Reg. 145/01, s. 4.

This is such a perverse situation. On the one hand, a regulated profession (Registered Professional Forester) is bound by the Professional Foresters Act, and the by-laws of its registering body the OPFA, to act and conduct work in an ethical, legal and sound manner to uphold the public interest. But those (often non-regulated) persons that describe themselves as any of the 14 exempted professions are not!

If you wish to implement these changes AND achieve the goals you expected it to achieve, then the only way is to safeguard the public interest and that is to remove the 14 exempted occupations, by deleting Part III of the Professional Foresters Act. Let the Registered Professional Foresters, and only Registered Professional Foresters, be held publicly and legally accountable for what happens on Crown lands.

Anything less will NOT, I am sorry to say, achieve the intended goal.