The protest was aimed at the corporate customers of logging giants AbitibiBowater, Kruger, Buchanan and pulp manufacturer SFK Pulp. Their business supports destructive logging operations that are turning the 10,000 year old Boreal Forest into disposable products like tissue paper and junk mail.

“Sears, Toys “R” Us, Talbots, Best Buy and others are paying for an ancient forest to be converted into throwaway flyers, romance novels and toilet paper,” said Kim Fry, a forests campaigner with Greenpeace Canada. “They should instead flex their financial muscle and demand that their suppliers end logging in intact forest areas.”

Toronto Police intercepted and arrested activists Mark Goldsworthy, Roxanne Gadoua, Naila Lalji and Vanessa Buttersworth before they could completely deploy the 3.1 x 34 metre banner. They are now being detained at Toronto Police’s 52nd Division at 255 Dundas Street West.

The customers, who also include Talbots and Harlequin Books, are financially supporting the logging of woodland caribou habitat despite the fact that caribou is a federally listed threatened species in Canada. Scientists predict woodland caribou will be extinct by mid-century in Ontario unless vast areas of forest are protected.

Greenpeace acknowledged that reducing the use of paper products is one of best measures possible to reduce the pressure on the Boreal Forest, as evidenced by Canadian Tires’ decision yesterday to end production of its paper catalogue. The retailer should also end the purchase of paper from AbitibiBowater for the millions of flyers and advertising inserts it distributes annually across the country.

Already, an area three times the size of France has been degraded and fragmented by logging the Boreal Forest region (175 million hectares) to make advertising flyers, magazines, catalogues, lumber and other products.

Canada’s Boreal Forest stretches across the north of the country, from Newfoundland to the Yukon. It represents a quarter of the world’s remaining intact ancient forests and stores 186 billion tonnes of carbon in its soils and trees. Less than nine per cent of the forest in Ontario and five per cent in Quebec are protected from industrial development.

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