British Columbia’s forest sector has “never been under greater stress,” Premier David Eby says.
Bob Simpson, who served as mayor ofQuesnel, B.C., a longtime forestry community, between 2014 and 2022, said the province’s forest sector is “stuck in a time warp,” carrying on with clear-cutting and exporting raw logs and lumber at a pace ecosystems and the timber supply cannot maintain. Eby asserts the need for change is driven by those losses along with “inadequate land-use planning and replanting efforts by previous governments, unfair softwood lumber tariffs in the United States, and the unchecked export of raw logs.”
B.C. has also committed to increasing the tenure or harvesting rights held by First Nations and local communities, while Eby’s letter asks Ralston to prioritize the shift from a “high-volume to high-value” forests sector, aiming to export fewer raw logs in favour of locally manufactured wood products.
“If the timber was there for the industry to cut in 2021 they would have cut it, and they couldn’t, because their supply is constrained,” Parfitt said. Built on the banks of the Fraser River in the central Interior, Simpson’s home of Quesnel has “long been one of B.C.’s most forest-dependent communities,” he said.The forests surrounding Quesnel were hit hard by beetle infestations in the mid-2000s, he said, and the government at the time responded by setting higher allowable cuts to prevent the spread and salvage value from the timber.
The Quesnel timber supply area is the focus of one of four pilot projects underway to shape the B.C. government’s new framework for 10-year forest landscape plans. While the community faces uncertainty, Simpson said Quesnel could also be a proving ground for innovation that would create more value and jobs in the industry while reducing pressure on forests and the timber supply at the same time.