ALBERTA 
Charter schools: What you need to know about their anticipated growth in Alberta

Beginning in September in Alberta, an individual can apply directly to the provincial government when seeking to establish a new charter school. 

July 7, 2020 

In Alberta, the once-radical idea of charter schools, placed largely on the back burner for the past two decades, has been brought back to the fore under Premier Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP). The party’s Choice in Education Act will come into force Sept. 1, after the government passed it June 24.

Under the new act, individuals will be able to bypass the local school board and apply directly to the provincial government to seek to establish a charter school. This follows a move last fall by the newly elected UCP to remove the cap (previously 15) on the number of charter schools in the province.

In Alberta, there are now 13 charter school authorities operating more than 20 schools or campuses — for instance, the province lists seven Calgary schools run by the Foundations for the Future Charter Academy.

These recent developments provide the opportunity to better understand what charter schools are, how they’ve been taken up by advocates of educational reform and how their re-emergence and promotion under the UCP reflects the influence of neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies in education.

Roots of charter schools

Charter schools emerged largely from the Chicago School of Economics, inspired by the ideas of prominent thinkers like Milton Friedman. Friedman argued state “monopoly” over public education was problematic, and thus education should be instead subject to consumer choices and the dynamics of the free market.

While differing based on country and context, charter schools can be understood as a hybrid type of school — both public and private. Individuals or groups may seek to establish a school under a particular educational philosophy or approach. This charter then guides the administration and organization of the school.

To date, Alberta’s charter schools include a schools for children who are “academically gifted,” an Indigenous school and a school for children learning English.

As public institutions, however, charter schools must still abide by the policies, rules and regulations set out by the government. In this way, these schools can be seen as offering students and parents choice different from the local public school.

With funding is typically determined on a per-pupil basis, if parents decide not to choose a particular charter school, it may then close. Charter schools are also subject to competitive market pressures and often have to raise capital funding for expenses such as the school building or transportation themselves. That means charter schools may turn to fundraising from community-based or corporate sources. In the U.S., for instance, some charter schools can be run as for-profit entities.
Entry into Alberta

Charter schools, once hailed as a solution to the numerous apparent failures of the public education system, arrived in Alberta with the first school opening in 1994, just two years after the first charter school opened in the United States.

Up until recently, discussion around their future or promise in Alberta has been somewhat ambiguous. But since the UCP was elected last year, the provincial government has sought to revive charter schools as part of broader educational and public sector reforms.

Read more: Why Jason Kenney’s 'common sense' education platform gets it wrong
‘School choice’

As the UCP government’s throne speech outlined, the party stresses expanding school choice. For instance, new legislation makes it easier for parents to home-school since they will no longer need Alberta school board supervision to do so.


Last fall, the UCP also removed the word “public” from Alberta’s public schools boards, a move that can be critically viewed as an attempt to obfuscate the demarcation between public and private schools.

Kenney, himself a product of elite private schooling, appears focused on the expansion of more privatized forms of education.

Charter advocates contend that as schools of choice, they offer students more specialized and meaningful educational experiences.

Critics often respond that choice is already available in public school systems and that charters don’t demonstrate any significant improvements in performance, and may in fact further segregate students, leading to greater educational inequalities.

Educational labour unions remain unsupportive as well, as charters often seek to hire non-unionized teachers.

Nevertheless, the evidence remains mixed as to whether charters provide any significant improvements to student achievement. The research and policy landscape is often contentious and heavily influenced by competing interest groups.
Privatization

In Canada, charter schools only exist in Alberta — a province with a history of school choice policies. As I discussed in my research into the development of Alberta’s charter schools, their existence can be largely attributed to political ideas rather than educational developments in the province.

Charter schools were first introduced in Alberta under former premier Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservative Party in 1994. Here, Klein in front of a campaign poster in February 2001. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

In 1994, when charters were first introduced in Alberta, it was under a provincial government focused largely on values of individualism, consumerism, privatization, commercialization and deficit reduction. Charter schools emerged as they fit in under this particular political and economic ideology.

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Today we see many of the same values once again on the rise in Alberta at the same time as charters and “school choice” ideas are being amplified.

Neoconservative and neoliberal advocates of educational reform in particular continue to push them forward — as witnessed in the United States under President Donald Trump and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy Devos.

Read more: What cyber charter schools are and why their growth should worry us
Educational reforms and democracy

While educational reforms can and must occur in response to a changing world, public schools are meant to be resistant to political changes because they represent our core democratic values and are meant to develop to serve the needs of a diverse society.

Perhaps most importantly then, the debate over charter schools points to the fundamental political nature of public education.

Recent pre-pandemic educational reforms proposed in Ontario for mandatory online courses were seen by many educators, parents and students not as learning improvements, but rather as reforms motivated by a Conservative government with similar neoliberal politics, ideas and value systems.

Ontario also touted its “enhanced” (mandatory) online learning as offering “more choice.” Those advocating school vouchers and the expansion of charter schools in Ontario have used the same rhetoric.

Education as industry?

With Alberta’s charter schools set now to expand, as I asserted in 2015, it is worth noting that to date, the rest of Canada has continued to largely — though not entirely — resist calls for “school choice” that imply forms of privatization.

Nevertheless, across Canada, chronic public underfunding of education has forced school boards to seek tuition revenue and promote for-profit curriculums.

The presence of privatization looms large and when education is defined as an industry, there will always be those who seek to profit from it.

As Canadians, the rejection of charter schools demonstrates our collective commitment to the some of the most important core principles of public education, including access, quality and equity. The idea of charter schools allows us to think deeply about our core values surrounding public education and the many promises which it’s asked to uphold.

Author

Michael Mindzak
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Education, Brock University

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POSTMODERN MONOPOLY IMPERIALISM
As U.S. buys up remdesivir, ‘vaccine nationalism’ threatens access to COVID-19 treatments

July 5, 2020 

t the end of June, the United States government announced that it had secured the entire supply of remdesivir, an antiviral drug that shortens hospital stays for COVID-19 patients, until September.

In March, there were reports that Donald Trump’s administration tried to buy a German company working on a COVID-19 vaccine in order to secure the entire supply for the U.S. A group formed by France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands struck a deal in the past few weeks to secure 400 million doses of AstraZeneca’s potential vaccine, although other countries are also encouraged to join the group on the same terms. Whether poor countries could afford the terms is another question.

It certainly doesn’t seem that “we’re all in this together” — it’s looking more and more like a dog-eat-dog world. The group that’s most likely to be eaten are those living in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Gilead, the maker of remdesivir, has licence agreements with manufacturers to supply remdesivir in 127 LMICs, but those agreements exclude large middle-income countries such as Brazil, China and Mexico.
Vaccine nationalism

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is creating a facility that will enter into advance purchase agreements with pharmaceutical companies guaranteeing the purchase of any eventual vaccines. But this proposal has generated significant global concerns about its impact on equitable access for populations, especially in developing countries. Under the agreement, rich countries will get the first crack at enough vaccine to cover 20 per cent of their population, and only then will poorer countries be guaranteed the vaccine — and only for their highest priority populations. 

A resident from the Alexandra township gets tested for COVID-19 in Johannesburg, South Africa last April. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)

The Serum Institute of India has entered a licensing agreement with AstraZeneca to acquire one billion doses of AstraZeneca’s potential COVID-19 vaccine for LMICs, with a commitment to provide 400 million doses before the end of 2020. But the terms and conditions of the agreement are unknown, including the price and the number of countries eligible for supply.

South Africa has started a trial of the vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford in partnership with AstraZeneca to try to avoid being left behind in the race to secure a supply. Helen Rees, chairwoman of the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority, said in a briefing: “That debate about vaccine nationalism now is very critical…There has to be an equitable distribution of vaccines. It cannot be all for some and none for many others.”
Costs, supply and control

The cost of remdesivir in the U.S. is going to be US$390 per vial, which would amount to US$2,340 per five-day treatment course. It’s estimated that remdesivir could be made for under US$1 a dose, less than a quarter of one per cent of what Gilead will be charging. At Gilead’s price, the company could earn well over US$2 billion in the first year the drug is on sale. The cost will hopefully be much lower in countries that are the recipients of Gilead’s licences, but what about the excluded countries? At this point, no one knows. That includes Canada.

 

Headquarters of Gilead Sciences, makers of the antiviral drug remdesivir, are seen in April 2020, in Foster City, Calif. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

Gilead is in the process of submitting an application for approval of remdesivir to Health Canada and, according to Health Canada, the review will be conducted under expedited timelines due to the seriousness of COVID-19. Of course, under the new deal between the U.S. and Gilead, there won’t be any remdesivir for Canada to buy until the end of September. Canada could issue a compulsory licence to allow generic companies to make remdesivir, but currently that authority expires at the end of September so we may be stuck with Gilead as the only supplier.

Read more: Canada's coronavirus aid package guards against drug shortages with compulsory licensing

Gilead controls the supply of remdesivir because it holds the patent on the drug. When Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, was asked if he was going to patent it, his famous response was: “There is no patent, could you patent the sun?” In other words, the vaccine was a public good meant to be used by everyone.

Gilead obviously doesn’t hold the same view about remdesivir, despite the fact that U.S. taxpayers contributed at least $70.5 million to developing the drug.

Canada’s role

What should Canada be doing about all of this? How is the federal government going to ensure that Canadians have access to COVID-19 treatments and vaccines?

Right now, we don’t have the capability to manufacture a vaccine in the country. Connaught Laboratories, which was instrumental in helping to develop the polio vaccine, used to be able to make vaccines, but it was sold off by the federal government back in 1989 to a French firm.

The group that’s most at risk for being unable to access new COVID-19 treatments are those living in low- and middle-income countries. (Pixabay)

The federal government should be looking at setting up a Crown corporation to ensure a domestic supply of critical drugs and vaccines at reasonable prices. Until that can be done, the government should extend the compulsory licensing provision in its emergency legislation so that generic companies can be allowed to make future patented therapies at lower costs.

But Canada needs to do much more. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was first elected back in 2015, he proclaimed that “Canada is back” in international relations. Despite this promise, Canada has yet to commit to ensuring that any COVID-19 research that is done with Canadian money has to guarantee that products will be available at affordable prices in low- and middle-income countries.

Canada has not signed on to the recently established COVID-19 technology access pool being sponsored by the World Health Organization that is designed to help ensure that COVID-19 health technology-related knowledge, intellectual property and data is voluntarily shared.

Canada is not back; it’s missing in action both domestically and internationally.

Author
 

Joel Lexchin
Professor Emeritus of Health Policy and Management, York University, Emergency Physician at University Health Network, Associate Professor of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto
Disclosure statement
In 2017-2020, Joel Lexchin received payments for being on a panel at the American Diabetes Association, for talks at the Toronto Reference Library, for writing a brief in an action for side effects of a drug for Michael F. Smith, Lawyer and a second brief on the role of promotion in generating prescriptions for Goodmans LLP and from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research for presenting at a workshop on conflict-of-interest in clinical practice guidelines. He is currently a member of research groups that are receiving money from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council. He is a member of the Foundation Board of Health Action International and the Board of Canadian Doctors for Medicare. He receives royalties from University of Toronto Press and James Lorimer & Co. Ltd. for books he has written.
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SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/07/fda-fast-tracks-possible-covid-19.html

Mulvaney calls U.S. coronavirus testing abilities 'inexcusable,' breaking from Trump

'I know it isn’t popular to talk about in some Republican circles,' Trump's former chief of staff says.


Mick Mulvaney. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO
07/13/2020

Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Monday criticized the U.S. coronavirus testing process, calling his family’s difficulties in obtaining tests and delays in the results “inexcusable” in the seventh month of the pandemic, splitting from his former boss’ repeated boasts about testing.

“I know it isn’t popular to talk about in some Republican circles, but we still have a testing problem in this country,” Mulvaney wrote in an op-ed for CNBC.

Mulvaney, who served in Congress before leading the White House budget office and becoming chief of staff, said that his son had recently been tested for the virus and had to wait up to a week for the results, and that his daughter was turned away from getting a test before she went to visit her grandparents.

“That is simply inexcusable at this point in the pandemic,” Mulvaney said.

Mulvaney’s anecdote comes as the Trump administration — and especially President Donald Trump -- have touted the ramped-up testing capacity in the country since serious missteps early on hamstrung testing operations.

In an interview Friday with Telemundo’s José Díaz-Balart, the president declared that “our testing is far superior to anybody,” and just days earlier, he had proclaimed that “the U.S. is, by far, number one in testing” in the world.

And the White House initially tried to dismiss a new surge in cases throughout the South and West over the last month by attributing the new crush of cases to increased testing availability. But local leaders in areas where the new outbreaks are cropping up have raised concerns about the need for better testing, and the White House was forced to reverse course on a plan to wind down federal support for testing sites in Texas.

The editorial from Mulvaney, who now serves as the administration’s special envoy for Northern Ireland, was centered on his suggestions for lawmakers as Congress works to pass a fourth stimulus package later this month.

“Any stimulus should be directed at the root cause of our recession: dealing with Covid,” he wrote, focusing on money for research, temporary hospital beds or therapeutics rather than a stimulus check for families or travel incentives — though tens of millions of Americans remain out of work.

The statement from Mulvaney that the health crisis is still raging comes as the White House seeks to push forward with its plans to reopen the economy, taking the form in recent weeks of an aggressive push for schools to reopen in the fall, despite parts of the country reporting record numbers of infections.

Most of the president’s allies have adopted that line of thinking, arguing that Americans must learn to live with the virus before a vaccine can be developed, and Trump has even begun to wage a public campaign questioning his health officials offering dire evaluations of the pandemic.

Mulvaney wasn’t always so alarmist about the health crisis — at the CPAC conference at the end of February, the then-chief of staff accused the media of over-hyping the virus because “they think this is going to be what brings down” the president. Though he conceded the virus might be dangerous enough to shutter schools and public transportation, he sought to reassure attendees that the White House was equipped to handle the issue.

AMERICA'S MANIAC MADMAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

‘Everyone is lying’: Trump questions public health experts on Twitter

Sharing messages from a former game show personality, the president prolonged his feud with Dr. Anthony Fauci.

By QUINT FORGEY

07/13/2020 


President Donald Trump on Monday shared a handful of social media posts questioning the expertise of his own public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and suggesting their scientific counsel was intended to thwart his political standing ahead of November’s general election.

In a burst of early morning online activity, Trump retweeted messages from the politically conservative former game show personality Chuck Woolery — who served stints hosting “Wheel of Fortune” and “Love Connection” — which lamented the “most outrageous lies” being spread about the coronavirus pandemic.



“Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it,” Woolery wrote in a tweet shared by the president.

In another post Trump retweeted, Woolery claimed there exists “so much evidence, yes scientific evidence, that schools should open this fall. It’s worldwide and it’s overwhelming. BUT NO.”

Trump also retweeted a message from Mark Young, Woolery’s co-host on his “Blunt Force Truth” podcast, which asked: “So based on Dr. Fauci and the Democrats, I will need an ID card to go shopping but not to vote?”

As the United States has posted peak numbers of daily Covid-19 infections in the past few weeks, the president’s relationship with Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, plummeted to a new nadir over the weekend.

The White House reportedly told various news outlets Saturday and Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things,” and furnished a lengthy list of statements the widely respected immunologist made in the early days of the outbreak.

The type of smear effort directed by the Trump administration against one of its most public-facing, trusted members is traditionally reserved for political rivals, and came after the president expressed public dissatisfaction with Fauci for his dire assessments of the outbreak in congressional testimony and media interviews.

Fauci, who told the Financial Times last Friday that he had not briefed Trump for at least two months, warned at a Senate health committee hearing in late June that the U.S. could register as many as 100,000 additional cases per day if further safeguards were not put in place.

In a livestreamed conversation last Monday with his boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, Fauci said the U.S. was still “knee-deep” in its first wave of coronavirus infections, describing the outbreak as “serious situation that we have to address immediately.”

But Trump was dismissive of Fauci in an interview last Tuesday with Gray Television’s Greta Van Susteren, saying: “I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him.” And speaking with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last Thursday, Trump remarked that “Dr. Fauci is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.”

Top administration officials have begun to follow the president’s lead in piling on Fauci, including White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who memorably sparred with the doctor in April over the efficacy of the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment.

“Dr. Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on,” Navarro told The Washington Post in a story published Saturday, adding: “So when you ask me if I listen to Dr. Fauci’s advice, my answer is only with caution.”

Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Adm. Brett Giroir, the administration’s coronavirus testing czar, said that while “I respect Dr. Facui a lot,” he is “not 100 percent right, and he also doesn’t necessarily ... have the whole national interest in mind. He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.”

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany addressed the friction between Fauci and his colleagues Monday on “Fox & Friends,” echoing Giroir and arguing that Fauci considers the pandemic response only through the lens of a “public health standpoint.”

“Dr. Fauci’s one member of a team. But rest assured, his viewpoint is represented, and the information gets to the president through” the White House coronavirus task force, McEnany said.

Increasingly ostracized within Trump’s federal government, Fauci did elicit declarations of support Monday from his peers in the medical community, who forcefully defended the veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

David Skorton, president and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and Ross McKinney, the association’s chief scientific officer, said in a statement that the AAMC "is extremely concerned and alarmed by efforts to discredit" Fauci, who "has been an independent and outspoken voice for truth as the nation has struggled to fight" the pandemic

“Taking quotes from Dr. Fauci out of context to discredit his scientific knowledge and judgment will do tremendous harm to our nation’s efforts to get the virus under control, restore our economy, and return us to a more normal way of life,” Skorton and McKinney said. “America should be applauding Dr. Fauci for his service and following his advice, not undermining his credibility at this critical time.”

Fauci is not the administration’s only senior health official to have drawn the president’s ire in recent weeks. Trump similarly targeted CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield in a tweet last week that accused the public health agency’s guidelines for reopening schools of being “very tough & expensive.”

The president’s push to return students to classrooms in the fall represents the latest front in his pressure campaign for a broad-based economic reopening, in spite of surging Covid-19 caseloads.

The U.S. has notched records for new infections in late June and early July, with daily cases reaching 60,000 for the first time. On Sunday, Florida logged 15,000 new cases, surpassing the daily record reported by any single state since the start of the outbreak.

Although Trump ceded to bipartisan calls to wear a mask in public for the first time Saturday, during a visit to Walter Reed National Medical Center, he has remained reluctant to acknowledge the coronavirus’ threat as hot spots continue to emerge across in communities across the South and West.

He claimed in an interview with Fox Business earlier this month that the highly contagious disease is “at some point ... going to sort of just disappear,” and asserted during an address at the White House marking Independence Day celebrations that “99 percent” of cases are “totally harmless.”

Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro claimed Fauci is 'wrong about everything,' as the White House seeks to discredit him on COVID-19

THIS MAN IS A FAKE ECONOMIST AND HE AIN'T NO DOCTOR WHO PROMOTES HALF BAKED ECONOMIC THEORIES AND QUACK MEDICINE

Tom Porter

President Donald Trump, left, with members of the White House coronavirus task force on March 9 including Dr. Anthony Fauci, second from right, and Peter Navarro, next to Trump. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Peter Navarro, a White House trade adviser, has criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force.

"Dr. Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on," Navarro said in a statement to The Washington Post.

In recent weeks a rift has opened between Fauci and the White House, with the expert in interviews bluntly criticizing errors in the US response to the pandemic.

According to The Post, Navarro has been lobbying against Fauci since the doctor refused to endorse the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, an unproven coronavirus treatment that Navarro and Trump had touted.


Peter Navarro, a trade adviser to President Donald Trump, has claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci is "wrong about everything" as the White House steps up its bid to discredit its own top infectious-disease expert.

"Dr. Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on," Navarro said in a statement to The Washington Post in a story about Fauci being sidelined.

He continued: "Now Fauci is saying that a falling mortality rate doesn't matter when it is the single most important statistic to help guide the pace of our economic reopening. So when you ask me if I listen to Dr. Fauci's advice, my answer is only with caution."

The president has claimed that a continuing decline in the proportion of the US population dying from the coronavirus is proof that his strategy has worked, despite an alarming increase in infections.

In a livestream press conference last week, Fauci said, "It's a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death."

"There's so many other things that are very dangerous and bad about this virus — don't get yourself into false complacency," he said.

Last week, the death rate began to climb in several US states for the first time in several months. There is usually a lag between an increase in infections and in deaths.


Navarro's statement over the weekend came as an unnamed White House official also began circulating a list of old, outdated comments Fauci had given news outlets about the coronavirus, seemingly in a bid to undermine someone polling has suggested is one of the more trusted US government officials.

In recent weeks Fauci has delivered blunt assessments of US failings in response to the coronavirus, calling for states where infection rates are climbing to reintroduce restrictions.

His statements have contrasted with the upbeat message that Trump has delivered as he seeks to stimulate the US economy ahead of November's presidential election.

Navarro has long called for the government to rapidly lift the restrictions advocated by public-health officials such as Fauci. He warned in an interview with The New York Times in April that the damage done by the lockdown could exceed that of the virus.

Navarro is one of several White House officials to lobby against Fauci, according to The Post. The two fell out, according to the report, over the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, which Trump and Navarro touted as a coronavirus cure.

Fauci, in public statements and internally, refused to endorse it, saying it had not been proved effective.

The Food and Drugs Administration withdrew its emergency permission for the drug to be used to treat patients after studies suggested it was dangerous for some, particularly those with underlying heart conditions.

Navarro, a China hawk, has also been accused of spreading political misinformation about the virus, claiming that China sought to deliberately spread it.

A casualty of Trump’s immigration policy: Millions of trees

The decision to suspend seasonal visas is expected to hurt forestry firms as well as state and federal governments.


A U.S. Forest Service sign welcomes visitors to Clackamas Lake Historic Area.

By LIZ CRAMPTON
07/12/2020 

America needs millions of new trees each year for forests damaged by natural catastrophes, thinned by logging and developed to protect watersheds. But this year, many of the workers who do the planting are being barred from the U.S. by the Trump administration.

Seasonal temporary workers mainly from Mexico and South America perform most of the reforestation work in the U.S., entering the country in October each year for a six-month planting season.

But the White House last month suspended most seasonal temporary visas, known as H-2Bs, for the rest of the year in an effort to free up jobs for American workers as the country experiences record-high unemployment

Now an entire planting season could be lost, leaving the U.S. with millions of fewer trees, forestry industry representatives warn. That could include work on the U.S. Forest Service’s own programs, which rely on contract labor to maintain federal forested lands.

Typically, only a handful of U.S. workers respond to listings seeking forestry crews.

“Virtually all reforestation is done by H-2B workers,” said Dan Bremer, a Georgia-based contractor whose company, AgWorks, places about 6,000 H-2B workers in forestry jobs across the country. “So without that program, there just won’t be any trees planted.”

That could have devastating consequences not just for environmental protection but also for the timber industry and fire prevention.

To fix the situation, lobbyists for the timber industry are pushing for the White House to issue an exemption for the sector, a decision they hope to be announced any day.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The forestry industry has consistently depended on foreign workers because not enough U.S. residents apply for forestry jobs. In fiscal year 2019, the Department of Labor certified about 11,000 visas for forestry and conservation work. The entire program is capped at 66,000 workers across numerous occupations, mainly in landscaping and groundskeeping.

Last year, there were about 35,000 employees in the forestry and logging sector, doing work from falling trees to trucking timber harvests, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Before hiring from the H-2B pipeline, employers must first advertise for U.S. workers. But Bremer said that he rarely sees Americans willing to take the type of jobs he’s placed in the last 22 years seeking foreign guest workers.

Unemployment has been fairly low in recent years and most Americans are drawn to year-round work rather than seasonal forestry jobs, he said.

“They might be interested this year,” he said. “If they want the job, they get it. It's pretty simple.”

Still, reforestation is labor-intensive work. Planters have to carry a shovel and haul sacks of 100 seedlings around their waists while navigating rough terrain and brutal winter weather. They must methodically bend over to insert as many as three hundred trees a day into holes they dig themselves.

Yet their work is invaluable to maintaining healthy ecosystems critical for supporting wildlife habitats. The forests also help ensure clean water, reduce soil erosion, and fight climate change through carbon capture. The forest industry is also a major part of local economies in states like Alaska and along the West coast.

A labor shortage would be another blow to an industry that has suffered from the pandemic and was already bracing for fewer trees to be planted this year.

Kathy LeCompte, owner of Brooks Tree Farms in Brooks, Ore., said that her farm has seen mass cancellations of seedling orders from customers worried about the safety of allowing planters onto their property or exposure while working.

So far, customers have canceled orders for at least 40,000 trees. The nursery’s income is down over $300,000 from the prior year, she said. Forestry operations have also had to shoulder the cost of protecting workers by implementing public health measures mandated by state officials like installing hand-washing stations, she added.

“We aren’t whining — we are lucky,” LeCompte said. “We are fortunate to work on a farm where distance, gloves, rain gear and eye protection is already the norm."

She urged the government to be more accommodating to the forestry sector. "If we could get workers, and government would stop micromanaging, even in this environment, we’d be fine.”

Landowners are also worried that a labor shortage could make it difficult to meet state replanting requirements. State law determines that harvested timber lands must be replanted within a few years.

In Oregon, for example, rules require at least 100 to 200 hundred new trees per acre survive within two years of logging.

A forestry machine stacks logs on land cleared of trees at the site of a new factory (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

In order to be profitable, landowners plant many more trees, typically about 400 seedlings per acre. If landowners don’t comply with reforestation requirements, the Oregon Department of Forestry can charge a $5,000 penalty per offense.

It's not just private forestry companies that use H-2B labor. Even state and federal governments rely on crews of H-2B employees to maintain forests on public lands, such as Washington’s Department of Natural Resources, which contracts out much of its nursery and reforestation work.

No longer having foreign workers who also complete tasks like collecting cones, nurturing seedlings and controlling weeds “would be very problematic,” said Calvin Ohlson-Kiehn, assistant division manager for Washington’s State Lands Silviculture Program.
Washington state typically plants about five million seedlings a year on public lands and also supplies seedlings to landowners. Any disruption to the planting process, which begins years before a tree is placed into the ground, could mean that an expensive backlog would form. Seedlings typically run about 60 cents each, amounting to several million dollars annually for the department.

“You just can’t store seedlings for two years,” Ohlson-Kiehn said. “We would have to throw seedlings away you can’t plant.”

“There would be a whole bunch of compounding impacts — it would affect us as well as the rest of the forestry and agriculture industry," he said.