Todd Loewen speaking at 15th Growing the North Conference at Evergreen Park on February 22, 2023. Photo courtesy Erika Rolling

By Erika Rolling

Provincial

Loewen highlights his ministries work at Growing the North Conference

Feb 23, 2024 | 12:11 PM

Minister of Forestry and Parks and MLA for Central Peace-Notley Todd Loewen was at the Growing the North Conference on Thursday.

He spoke on a number of topics and work his ministry has done in the past year on the second day of the conference in Evergreen Park.

Loewen says the pine beetle population in the province is down 98 per cent from it’s peak population in 2019.

“We’ve had a pretty intensive program on managing the pine beetle by getting into the areas, cutting trees down to where they’re infected to, to reduce the amount of pine beetle out there. But we’ve also had some good weather with some cold weather early in the winter season.”

Loewen also spoke about raising funds through raffling off Minister Special Licenses down in the United States recently. They were sold at conventions in Nashville and Salt Lake City.

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He says six of those licenses brought in over $600,000 US back to Alberta, all going towards wildlife conservation.

“The biggest one was our bighorn sheep minister special license, which sold for $320,000 US. So what’s interesting about that is all that money comes back to Alberta for conservation projects right here in Alberta.”

“We have five other Minister Special License species tags that we auction off. Those other ones, we brought in about $280,000 US for them.”

Loewen also announced earlier in the week an early start to wildfire season.

“We’re preparing for the worst but hoping for the best. Right now things look pretty bleak because we don’t have a lot of snow on the ground. We haven’t been having a lot of moisture, but that could turn around very quickly. We have basically two months left of winter, and a lot of times we get a lot of snow in March and April.”

The Minister says there were 50 holdover fires that came over from 2023 into this year.

“When fire season ended in November, we’ve continued fighting fires all the way through.”

“Right now, I think we have about 250 people right now in the landscape fighting fire and it’s hard fighting fire because of water freezes. We want to put water on fire and a lot of the places are frozen where we want to pump water out of. So there’s definitely challenges to to fighting fire in the wintertime.”

He notes as spring approached more and more crews will be getting ready for fighting fires.

Loewen also spoke on Kleskun Hills becoming a provincial park this year.

It’s a it’s a beautiful area up there. I think it’s a real treasure in this area, and so I’m looking forward to getting that officially opened and having people enjoy that area.

He says there’s no set date on when the official opening of it will be, but it will be sometime in the spring.