An apparent provincial budget cut has put the future of Alberta’s Dutch elm disease program in doubt and put millions of trees at risk, says the program’s founder.
April 1 is the start of the annual elm-pruning ban in Alberta. Under city bylaw, anyone who prunes an elm tree in St. Albert between April 1 and Sept. 30 without written authorization from the city can be fined up to $5,000.
Elms are trees with wide, umbrella-like canopies, double-toothed edged leaves and grey, deeply furrowed bark. Forest Drive is lined with them.
Dutch elm disease is a fungus transmitted by the European, banded and native elm bark beetle that clogs the sap flow of elms, killing the trees in as little as six weeks, said city arborist Kevin Veenstra. It’s not currently in Alberta, but has been spotted in Saskatchewan. The European bark beetle has been spotted in St. Albert.
“The beetles are very sensitive to the smell of fresh pruning sites,” Veenstra said, which is how they infect trees. The pruning ban is meant to make sure there are no sap-oozing trees around to draw beetles when the bugs take flight during the summer.
It would be devastating if this disease ever caught hold here in Alberta, said Ieuan Evans, vice-president and founder of the Society to Prevent Dutch Elm Disease (STOPDED), the provincial group that brought in the elm-pruning ban and manages the provincial Dutch elm disease monitoring network.
“We’d lose … all 30,000 elms in Calgary and the 100,000 mature elms in Edmonton,” he said, as well as the many elms now being planted in St. Albert. “It would be a disaster.”
STOPDED normally gets $110,000 a year to run its Dutch elm program, said Janet Feddes-Calpas, the group’s executive director. That got cut to about $60,000 last year, and has apparently been reduced to $35,000 in this year’s budget.
“We can’t do it on $35,000,” she said. “There just won’t be enough resources to do the monitoring.”
The group kept the program going last year by tapping reserves and cutting back on public awareness.
The program should still be getting around $60,000 this year between funding from Alberta Environment and Alberta Agriculture, said Finance Minister Doug Horner.
The agriculture cash has come through, Feddes-Calpas said, but the environment support remains unconfirmed months after it normally would have been received.
Alberta Environment spokespersons were unable to confirm the funding as of press time.
Elms can be found throughout Forest Lawn, Erin Ridge and Grandin, Veenstra said, and have been frequently planted along boulevards in recent years.
“It’s become our number-one tree,” he said.
STOPDED has pegged the value of Alberta’s urban elms at $634 million. Dutch elm disease has already wiped out vast stands of elms elsewhere in North America, at the cost of millions, Evans said.
Horner said he was not aware of any significant cuts to STOPDED in this year’s budget, but noted that all departments had to cut back this year.
“If what (Evans) is suggesting is that he can’t do the program with $60,000, then I guess we should get rid of the $60,000,” Horner said.
The province stands by the Dutch elm disease monitoring program, Horner said.
“I anticipate that STOPDED will continue to do the great work that it does,” he said.
Alberta is the last jurisdiction in the world that’s free of both rats and Dutch elm disease, Evans said, and that’s due in part to the province’s diligent monitoring program.
He hoped the province would restore the program’s funding.
“We can always get rid of rats again, but once we have Dutch elm disease we are losing 100-year-old trees,” he said. “For God’s sake, where’s the priority here?”
