This is the third in a series of four articles resulting from a months-long investigation into Paper Excellence, a B.C.-headquartered pulp and paper company that has quickly grown to control large tracts of Canadian forests and become the largest company of its kind in North America. The stories are part of Deforestation Inc., an investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists involving 140 journalists from 27 countries.
The help was coming at a hard time for forestry workers. Less than a week earlier, Canfor said it would shut one of its mills in Prince George and leave 300 people out of a job. In the past, that money has included a $75-million provincial loan to purchase hundreds of hectares of forest in Nova Scotia. And in Powell River, B.C., the city has provided $12 million in tax exemptions to Paper Excellence .
But according to APP, the company has set aside large tracks of land for conservation, significantly reduced conflicts with villagers and now monitors deforestation and wildfires using satellite technology.Previous stories in this series looked at the rise of Paper Excellence and analyzed evidence linking it to APP, including leaked communications, cross-posted employees, corporate filings, land titles and shipping records.
“If the company can promise [full employment] for a certain amount of money, they're more likely to get it if they're the only game in town.” A spokesperson for the B.C. lobbyist registry said staff check for obvious errors or omissions but don’t have the capacity to “verify” or “approve” each of the hundreds of registrations. The spokesperson said it is the responsibility of the lobbyist to accurately report the information.
Just over a year later, the company’s chief forester Quinton Hayward called on the government to maintain current levels of old-growth logging while increasing how much wood can be logged across B.C. every year, according to a letter sent to the B.C. Old Growth Review Committee. In July 2021 and again in October 2022, a public relations firm working on behalf of Paper Excellence contacted Statistics Canada asking it to sever the links it had drawn to the Sinar Mas Group, according to communications obtained through an access to information and privacy request by ICIJ partner the Halifax Examiner.
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