There is also a wide range of political legislation and policy that hinders and/or undervalues the return Canadians receive from crown lands.
For example when a couple of years ago lumber prices were at record highs...
- in New Brunswick the crown dues for sawlogs are fixed...so no additional return was generated during the boom (Irving says thank you by the way).
- In BC the dues are calculated differently where the average of the previous year is then applied to the next years dues....this is great if prices are going up for the companies...but prices spiked fast and then crashed fast....and then your stuck with companies paying dues based upon record prices when the product sells for average prices = too little profit to justify investment.
- In Alberta they take the wholesale Chicago bulk commodity price every Friday, convert the price to $CDN, and then come up with a monthly average (for sawlogs only). So your timber dues reflects last months market prices and tracks much closer with market conditions up or down.
Unfortunately the Forestry industry is game of volume and market access. Hence why some European companies can ship from Europe container ships of product due to their mill on the ocean with dock access cheaper than we can truck from remote parts of Canada to the same market. Rail cars are relatively cheap but you need the trains running on schedule, with the right mix of empty and loaded cars, to secondary lines or dead end terminals which is in some ways counter productive to the needs of trans-North America Intermodel shipping. And it's worse on the west coast with almost all the traffic going through Vancouver due to lack of alternatives.
But this is true for a lot of the natural resources. In order to be effective you need to develop good infrastructure, often in remote/difficult areas, and then somehow find a labour force willing to work in the area (or train from scratch), and then you produce a raw good/partially refined good.
We as a nation are bad at taking that next step and developing the local/international development needed outside of a couple of examples and its' where a number of our increasingly wealthier competing nations are eating our lunch. One of the parts not talked about when talking about the Norwegian wealth funds is that the FEDERAL government took money from non-renewables and have invested a significant part of the revenues back into the country into alternate fields. There is a reason they are world leaders in the forest industry for their equipment technology (due to research and design), mill components, and have strategically invested into "poorer" countries who would provide the low cost feedstock to allow for high return products (think Brazilian pulp mills for production of office paper).
Canada has much more potential than hewing a few trees down to ship to England for the Royal Navy, or pulpwood exports to the US, or raw logs to the Pacific countries. But it takes both a cultural change (not every tree is sacred around a city in Europe - a.k.a. less NIMBY), strategic thinking on where you need access today and 50? 100? years from now, policy change to be competitive, and being open enough to create good business environments instead of trying to pick winners.