Peter Cressey has been visiting the Carmanah and Walbran valleys for decades. Nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the sprawling spider-web of cutblocks and logging roads that mark the island’s interior, these two valleys form one of southern Vancouver Island’s largest remaining intact old-growth ecosystems. They’re home to centuries-old spruce trees, gnarled cedars and plants and animals that live in few other places.

“It’s not just the trees,” Cressey, who volunteers with Friends of Carmanah Walbran, says. “There’s a whole bunch of threatened species, the marbled murrelet, the screech owl, the specklebelly lichen and the dromedary jumping slug. There’s a whole list of very unique species that are facing some serious threats.”In the early 1990s, Cressey was arrested at a logging blockade in the region, part of a campaign that convinced the province to expand what was then called Carmanah Pacific Provincial Park to include parts of the Walbran in 1995.Today, the park is known as Carmanah Walbran. BC Parks describes it as “a luxuriously forested sanctuary that is without a doubt one of the most remarkable wild places on Vancouver Island.” But right now, they also say it’s “inaccessible by vehicle” and that “the day-use areas, campground, and trails are currently unmaintained.”

That’s because it’s blocked by landslides on one side and locked metal gates on the other. BC Parks didn’t provide a timeline for restoring park access. Instead, they directed questions to Tsawak-qin Forestry, the company responsible for both the metal gates and, they say, for clearing the landslides. 

In an emailed statement, Tsawak-qin told The Narwhal that they are “working with government and others to open access to the western, public access point of the park,” but didn’t offer a timeline. They promised to “provide more information when it becomes available.” 

Carmanah Walbran is one of many outdoor recreation areas in B.C. accessed by resource roads. Cressey and others say its ongoing closure raises questions about public access to public lands, and the province’s management of thousands of kilometres of resource roads that connect British Columbians to some of the province’s most spectacular back country regions.

Ministry approves gates to close park to recreational users, citing ‘safety concerns’

When Cressey talks about the logging protests of the 1990s, a period sometimes called the War in the Woods when activists and First Nations fought old-growth logging in Clayoquot Sound and up into the Carmanah Walbran region, there’s a hint of pride in his voice. But he’s also learned a lot since then, and though his passion for protecting old-growth forests remains, his tactics have changed.

Today, Cressey’s with the Friends of Carmanah Walbran, which is focused on protecting ancient forests through education and community building. Much of their work centres on the central Walbran Valley, a stand of old-growth forest just outside the southeastern edge of Carmanah Walbran Park. On a map, it looks like someone took an ice cream scoop to the park boundary. Torrance Coste, associate director of the Wilderness Committee, calls it “the bite.” 

That bite is not part of the park itself. According to Coste, activists remember it was left out at the request of logging companies. But decades of activism have kept the saws at bay, and the area is currently covered by a provincial old-growth deferral. Within it lies a network of trails and campsites built and maintained by Cressey and the Friends of Carmanah Walbran. Some of these trails, like the Anderson Lake and Marble Canyon trails, cross into the provincial park, while others sit outside the boundary entirely. All of them are maintained by volunteers.

For years, Friends of Carmanah Walbran have used trail maintenance trips and educational gatherings to bring people into the region to advocate for protecting the old-growth forests that still lie outside the park boundary. But this spring, something changed. 

In March, Cressey learned that the province approved Tsawak-qin Forestry’s request to put locked gates on roads east of Carmanah Walbran Park. These gates blocked access to both the bite and the trails from it that cross into the park. 

Cressey reached out to Tsawak-qin to request permission to pass through the gates for a birding event in early July. Initially, he says, the company seemed open to letting the birders through. He even offered to give them the names of everyone participating — a group of birders, artists and scientists. But eventually, Tsawak-qin told him they couldn’t allow the group through the gates. Cressey says they told him it was due to “public and worker safety issues.”Tsawak-qin didn’t directly address questions about the birders, but noted in an emailed statement to The Narwhal that the gates were put in place due to “several incidents [that] have occurred recently in the Walbran area that endangered people and caused damage to property,” citing a burnt bridge deck, damaged bridge cables and blocked drainage structures.

This “created unsafe road conditions,” Tsawak-qin Forestry said. “In addition, there is evidence of members of the public entering active work sites,” it added, though they did not give specific examples. 

There was a blockade in the Walbran between August and December 2025, which led to 13 arrests. The company didn’t reference this blockade directly, but Cressey thinks that it, and the continued presence of a nearby protest encampment, contributed to the company wanting to shut down access. 

On July 16, social media accounts from this camp posted a video of two people locked to one of the Tsawak-qin gates. In the video, one masked figure explained the action as a response to the company cutting off public access to “public land.”

British Columbia’s Forest and Range Practices Act allows resource companies to request permission to install and lock gates to prevent public access on back country resource roads. According to the province, these approvals are granted when “use of the road would likely endanger property, public health or public safety.” 

In the case of the eastern Carmanah Walbran gates, Coste says it’s unclear what the justification is, or what threat a birding event might pose to property or safety.

He worries that approvals for these kinds of gates have been increasing since the Fairy Creek blockades where more than 1,100 people were arrested opposing old-growth logging in the Fairy Creek watershed near Port Renfrew in 2020 and 2021.

When asked whether this was true, the Ministry of Forests declined to comment, explaining that finding the answer was “a complex ask during the middle of field season when resources for data gathering are limited.”

Coste thinks logging companies could be trying to solve that problem by “closing access to vast swaths of the island [and] the province to any and all other user groups.” Tsawak-qin did not comment when asked about any direct connections between logging protests and their request to gate these roads. 

“If logging companies have a problem with blockaders, that’s a political issue that they should take to the province, not deal with it with gates out on the back roads,” Coste says. “If companies can’t log without fear of people getting in the way of their operations, they have a social licence problem.”

Why aren’t public land access groups talking about the Carmanah Walbran?

For Cressey, part of the problem is that BC Parks isn’t clear about what qualifies as access points to Carmanah Walbran. The park’s website lists directions to access the park’s western side and the Ministry of Environment and Parks says that “there are no developed BC Parks facilities or designated BC Parks trails within the [eastern] portion of the park.” But the Ministry of Forests recommended park access routes on both the eastern and western sides of the park, adding that the public could still pass the eastern gates on foot.

For Cressey, using the western side of the park might have been the easiest solution to his locked gate problem. But the road on that side, called Rosander Main, was also blocked, not by gates, but by landslides that had come down in the fall of 2025. 

Neither BC Parks nor the Ministry of Forests have plans to clear the landslides. The responsibility for clearing that road, they say, lies with the logging companies that use it. 

Coste says that’s a problem, calling it “anti-democratic” that a private company can control public access to the park. “It’s a huge concern that access to an iconic provincial park like Carmanah depends on whether or not a private company is logging next to the park.”

As short-term closures at Joffre Lakes Park near Pemberton and Botanical Beach, a popular section of Juan de Fuca Park on Vancouver Island, both of which have instated reconnection periods for rights-holding First Nations members, have prompted an outcry, Coste says it’s notable the ongoing access issues at Carmanah Walbran Park haven’t gotten more attention.

“[Carmanah Walbran] has been closed for 10 times longer than Joffre Lakes will be closed this year,” Coste says. “And not a peep from the folks that are up in arms about the Joffre closure.” 

Among the groups concerned about the Joffre Lakes closures is the Public Land Use Society, an organization whose directors have close ties to the mining and mineral exploration industries, which was founded in 2025 to advocate for public land access. Its former director Caroline Elliott, who joined the society in May 2025 and left in January to run as a leadership candidate for the BC Conservative Party, has been a leading voice in opposing British Columbia’s decision to work with the Líl̓wat and N’Quatqua Nations on annual, short-term closures at Joffre Lakes, calling them an “ancestry-based park closure.” 

When The Narwhal reached out to the Public Land Use Society, its executive director, Warren Mirko, wasn’t aware that Carmanah Walbran Park was closed. 

“[The Public Land Use Society] has not yet heard from the public regarding this site and was unaware of the access issues,” Mirko wrote in an email. But while he agreed it was a concern, he differentiated it from Joffre Lakes, describing the latter as “a deliberate government-supported closure of a popular provincial park.”For Coste, the lack of attention to the Carmanah Walbran issue “underscores that it’s not really about access to the land and access to provincial protected areas” for groups like Mirko’s, but about opposing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which was passed with unanimous consent in B.C. in 2019 but has since become a locus of controversy. In his emailed statement, Mirko wrote that the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and “other issues surrounding government’s reconciliation initiatives and agreements are central matters in respect of public access and provincial governance over Crown land.”

Access to parks is a province-wide problem in B.C.

While Mirko and Coste don’t agree on much when it comes to reconciliation and parks, both have concerns about how British Columbia manages resource roads. While Coste is worried about the road leading to Carmanah Walbran, Mirko is focused on an access road to the Incomappleux Valley near Revelstoke in the B.C. Interior. In June, his organization joined the Quad Riders Association of British Columbia in questioning the province’s decision to decommission the Incomappleux Forest Service Road. 

According to the province, the deactivation is due to road damage and plans to establish a conservancy, a type of park in which human access and natural resource development is limited to preserve ecological, recreational or cultural values, in the upper valley. But Mirko and the Quad Riders argue this closure would unfairly cut off property and trail access, questioning the province’s “authority to proceed” in a press release.The province outlined its authority in a document released in April 2025, citing the Forest and Range Practices Act — the same rationale used to approve the gates east of Carmanah Walbran Park. 

Issues with resource roads are nothing new for Louise Pedersen, executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia.

“Outdoor recreation in British Columbia has co-evolved with forestry and other types of resource extraction,” Pedersen says. “So a lot of our access uses resource roads.” 

But those roads, Pedersen explains, aren’t managed for recreation. When the logging or mining operations pull out, they decommission the roads and leave them unmaintained, often cutting off access to recreation areas in Crown lands. And with an estimated more than 600,000 kilometres of resource roads criss-crossing the province, it’s a big deal — one that Pedersen says is getting worse. 

“In the last decades, things really have been accelerating,” she says. “With these big climate and weather events that we’ve been having, we are seeing a lot more kinds of disastrous outcomes like flooding and wildfires closing down these resource roads.” On top of that, Pedersen says, there are increasing numbers of “logging companies getting out of areas where they’ve been operating for a long time,” leaving roads unmaintained. In some places this is simply the result of logging operations finishing. In others, it’s being blamed on downturns in the forestry sector and sawmill closures. But whatever the reason, when the companies pull out, the roads revert to the care of the province. 

“When not being actively used for industrial purpose[s] the roads are classified as a ‘wilderness road’ and only maintained to address environmental concerns,” a statement from the Ministry of Forests explained. 

The problem, Pedersen explains, is “the province is not required to facilitate access or maintain these resource roads to support outdoor recreation.” So when you get a case like Carmanah Walbran, where the road was blocked by landslides, and no logging companies are working beyond them, no one is obligated to clear them.

It’s something she hopes British Columbia’s new outdoor recreation strategy will change. Launched in May, the province plans to create “a modernized framework for high-value recreation access and resource roads.”Pedersen isn’t sure yet what that means. But while she’s waiting, the Outdoor Recreation Council has launched a survey to gather information about priority roads where access to trailheads, campsites and parks is currently cut-off or at risk. 

“I’m sure we’ll find that there are going to be many thousands of kilometres that are of very limited interest, but there are some that will just kind of float to the top as priority resource roads,” she says. 

In the meantime, the Carmanah and Walbran valleys remain nearly inaccessible to the public. Coste worries about the long-term implications of cutting off public access to parks, especially ones with threatened ecosystems.  

“When people can’t visit these forests, can’t walk through them and see what’s at stake for themselves, it becomes much easier for old-growth logging to continue out of public view,” Coste says. “Access is a critical part of building public understanding and support for protecting what little remains.”

Updated on July 29, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the connections between the directors of the Public Land Use Society and the mining and mineral exploration industries. Additionally, Caroline Elliott was previously referred to as a “first slate” director of the society, but joined nearly three months after its incorporation in March 2025.

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British Columbia’s three major political parties found rare common ground in the last provincial election on the forestry sector’s use of glyphosate. The common and controversial herbicide ingredient is used to kill off plants that might compete with planted trees for water, nutrients and sunlight.

During the 2024 campaign, the BC Greens promised to ban the use of all chemical herbicides in forestry. The BC Conservatives committed to stop all aerial spraying of glyphosate. And the BC NDP, which was re-elected with a slim majority that October, promised to phase out the sector’s use of glyphosate altogether. 

Despite those commitments, chemical herbicides were sprayed across hundreds of hectares of forests in 2025, mostly in the area northeast of Prince George, B.C.

For James Steidle, founder of Stop the Spray B.C., it’s a “disappointment.”Aerial spraying of forests has been most common in the province’s northeast. The areas sprayed last year fall within the Fraser River watershed, he noted. There, companies target species like fireweed, huckleberries and elderberries, he said. “All these really cool plants and berries that they think are out-competing the spruce trees,” he said. “These are things that animals eat.”

People use these areas as well, to harvest berries and other plants, to camp and to hunt, Steidle said. But he warned it’s not easy to access detailed information about planned spraying.

Companies have until June to report spraying activities from 2025 to the province. The data reported as of Jan. 22, 2026, shows Canfor, a Vancouver-based forestry company, was responsible for most of the spraying in the northeast last year. Steidle questions why the company continues to spray herbicides in cutblocks when many other local companies have given up the practice of aerial spraying. The Narwhal reached out to Canfor for comment but did not receive a response ahead of publication. 

For Steidle, a bigger concern is that there are no laws or regulations to prevent spraying.

“The NDP has broken their promise, I’d say,” he told The Narwhal.

When asked by email if the NDP government remained committed to phasing out the use of glyphosate Premier David Eby’s director of communications deferred The Narwhal to a statement we had already received from the Ministry of Forests, which did not answer the question.

Concerns about B.C.’s approach to reforestation is just one of the challenges the forestry sector is grappling with amid major upheavals in the industry, including mill closures, reduced logging levels and ongoing trade pressures.

Chemical herbicides have been used to kill off plants that might compete with tree plantations

Herbicide use in B.C. forests dates back decades. Companies are responsible for managing the sections of forest they’ve logged until the trees they replanted are considered “free growing,” unimpeded by other vegetation. 

To make sure they hit that target, and avoid potential fines from the B.C. government, companies clear away other plants that might compete with planted trees — a process known in the industry as brushing.

Forest professionals use various brushing methods to remove plants that might compete with planted trees, including manually or mechanically cutting back other plants, spraying herbicides, prescribed burning or using livestock to graze on vegetation, according to a statement from B.C.’s Ministry of Forests. Government data indicates companies most commonly cut back competing plants manually. They also use herbicides like glyphosate to kill off aspen and other plants that fall under the broad category of “herbaceous.” This can include plants like huckleberries and wild rose. Companies use backpack tanks to target species on the ground and helicopters to spray from the air.

Glyphosate, which the World Health Organization says is probably carcinogenic to people, is the main component in the common herbicide Roundup. When plants absorb the chemical it prevents them from taking up nutrients, essentially starving them to death. 

In Dec. 2024, The Narwhal reported on the use of glyphosate in B.C. forests. At the time, we incorrectly reported more than 1 million hectares of forest had been sprayed with herbicides since the 1970s. A re-analysis of government data shows companies actually reported spraying more than 430,000 hectares across more than 1 million hectares of cutblocks. In many cases companies reported spraying only a portion of a particular cutblock.

However, the sprayed area available in the government application The Narwhal retrieved the data from only appears to be reported for the initial brushing treatment even if a cutblock was brushed multiple times. 

When asked to confirm if more than 430,000 hectares have been brushed with herbicides, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests said its data recounts areas that have been sprayed multiple times and shows 738,000 hectares have been treated with herbicides since 1987. In the same time period, 7.4 million hectares of forests were harvested. 

The spokesperson noted that most chemical herbicide treatments occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s. “The past 20 years have accounted for only a third of the total treated area,” the statement said.

The area forestry companies reported spraying with herbicides each year in B.C. has declined since 1989, when it peaked at about 40,000 hectares, according to a 2019 report by FPInnovations, which describes itself as a private non-profit focused on research and development in the forestry sector. In 2024, companies reported spraying about 340 hectares with herbicides. As of Jan. 22, 2026, companies reported spraying almost 600 hectares in 2025.

At the same time, the practice of brushing itself has declined alongside a “greater desire” to manage forests to strengthen biodiversity and build resilience to wildfire, the forests ministry statement said. 

B.C. government mum on promised phase-out of glyphosate

But past herbicide use can have lasting impacts on forest ecosystems, potentially excluding or restricting the growth of certain trees and plants for years after. And while herbicide use has declined even in northeast B.C., Steidle said the practice still takes a toll. 

“These might be small areas, but they’re important areas that people target for berry picking, for hunting,” he said. 

Late last year, Lheidli T’enneh First Nation announced it was banning glyphosate spraying across its territory, which encompasses Prince George. Lheidli T’enneh Chief Dolleen Logan could not be reached for comment ahead of publication.

In November, Elder and Land Guardian Les Baker told reporters at a press conference announcing the ban that he’d heard concerns from the community about the use of herbicides. 

“They don’t feel safe going and collecting their berries or their food from the bush anymore,” Baker said, according to CBC and the Prince George Citizen.

Forestry companies are generally required to develop and consult the public on pest management plans for their planned use of herbicides but don’t have to publicize exactly where and when they plan to spray — though notices must be posted around the treatment area itself.

According to the Ministry of Forests’ statement, BC Timber Sales, the government agency responsible for managing about 20 per cent of B.C.’s public timber harvest, has not used glyphosate or other herbicides for reforestation since 2022. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment and Parks said glyphosate use in forests has declined significantly and is typically used when other methods haven’t or aren’t expected to successfully remove competing plants. 

The statement noted concerns raised by First Nations are “explored” during pest management plan consultations. It noted “band resolutions such as the [Lheidli T’enneh First Nation’s] position signal a need to continue these discussions and are used to support assessing potential infringement of Indigenous Rights and Title.”

The statement did not answer The Narwhal’s question about whether the ministry would prohibit forestry companies, like Canfor, from using chemical herbicides or if the government remained committed to phasing out the sector’s use of glyphosate.

Steidle ultimately wants to see an end to herbicide use in forests. Until that happens, he’s calling for greater transparency — specifically, he wants the maps companies submit to the province 30 days before spraying to be made public. 

“The government has these maps, and they could release them,” Steidle said.

The Environment Ministry spokesperson said officials are working to improve the ministry’s digital systems to improve transparency in the pest management process. 

Updated on Feb. 13, 2026, at 2:37 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to clarify that the 738,000 hectare figured referenced by the B.C. government referred to areas that had been brushed with herbicides

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The woods surrounding the Highwood Pass, a mountain valley southwest of Calgary, are quiet. The traffic snarls of fall, which brought day trippers flocking to see larch trees pop yellow against the green hills, are gone. The road through the pass is closed until the spring. 

Gone too is a temporary camp and barrier across a logging road, set up to protest in advance of clear-cut operations in this popular corner of Kananaskis Country along the rocky spine of southwestern Alberta. At least for now. 

At first blush, it’s odd for protesters opposed to logging to leave the area before the logging starts, but that wasn’t really the point of the camp set up by a group called Defenders of the Eastern Slopes. 

“Yes, we want to protect these valleys from the logging and protect the fish from the logging, but one of our goals is also to start the process of creating a culture of civil disobedience,” one of the organizers, Michael Sawyer, says. 

It’s not something generally associated with Alberta and it’s not something Sawyer has always focused on. He’s spent decades fighting through more official/polite/formal channels: in courts, through letters, within environmental organizations and without. But in this time and place, he thinks a more direct approach is needed. 

“I would argue that, given the politics in this province, and I would even say nationally, we need more and more citizens who are prepared to stand up against undemocratic and illegal activities by the government.”

So while the camp is gone and the woods are still, the group behind regular gatherings on the outskirts of the cutblock are ready to put their bodies on the line at the first sign of activity.

“We’re keeping an eye on things,” Colin Smith, another member of Defenders of the Eastern Slopes, says. “We’ve got eyes and ears out there.”

The area in question and why it matters

The area in question is surrounded by protected land in the multi-use area known as Kananaskis Country — a mishmash of parkland, recreational spaces and industrial activity along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. 

It’s an area popular with residents of nearby Calgary, but has been set aside for logging since before Kananaskis was established. It’s also the headwaters for all of the creeks and rivers throughout southern Alberta and into the wider Prairies. 

In 2024, an earlier clear-cut plan covering 1,100 hectares, an area the size of over 2,000 football fields, was shelved after pushback and the sale of Spray Lake Sawmills to B.C.-based West Fraser Timber. Now, it’s been revived.

New permits have been issued by Fisheries and Oceans Canada for the construction of logging bridges across rivers and creeks in the valley. Those permits allow disruptions to habitat for endangered native trout species in the valley — a fact that frustrates the group.

In an emailed statement, West Fraser Timber said it understands “how important it is to protect bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout habitat in the Highwood” and that as part of its planning, the company will be “monitoring conditions before and after harvest to help inform responsible stewardship.”

The company said it paused Spray Lake’s earlier plans to “hear from people who live, work or recreate near our operations,” and added operations won’t start until its planning processes are complete. It did not say whether or not those operations would start this winter.

But it’s not just logging the group is concerned about. The eastern slopes face multiple threats, from clear-cutting to the potential for new coal mines south of Kananaskis, all of which could impact the water that flows from these headwaters across the Prairies. 

Denuded hills don’t hold on to water, which exacerbates the risk of flooding during rainfall and leaves the area more parched during droughts. Pollution from reopened mines would rush off the hills and into irrigation channels and drinking water. 

Sawyer, who lives in nearby Nanton, says his tap water comes from these hills.  

“We’re treating our foothills headwaters like they don’t matter from a water point of view, but they’re absolutely critical, and the government is just not paying attention to it,” Sawyer says.

West Fraser Timber said it will establish buffers of at least 30-metres around watercourses.The office of the Minister of Forestry and Parks did not respond to an interview request prior to publication.

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In November 2021, photojournalist Amber Bracken was arrested by the RCMP while on assignment for The Narwhal. So we launched a lawsuit to take a stand for press freedom. The trial recently concluded. Learn more.

The eastern slopes: ‘vital’ to ecosystems, water and more

The Rocky Mountain headwaters have been the subject of increasing concern to Albertans. The United Conservative government is working to reopen coal mining to the south of the pass, at the same time that reservoirs and rivers across the province have seen consecutive years of depletion due to droughts. 

Mike Judd, another member of the Defenders of the Eastern Slopes, says the government and industry hold too much power, which allows them to enforce a narrative focused squarely on resource extraction.  

“They have the propaganda machinery to keep a constant conservative message out there, which is the eastern slopes are a warehouse of treasures that keep the Alberta economy rolling,” he says. In his mind, that’s a narrow definition of wealth. 

“There’s not a thing in their message that’s about the eastern slopes being the vital water source for Alberta, about it being the vital place for so many different species of birds, fish and animals, and for being the vital place for so many people to have a recreational outlet.”

It’s another reason Judd and Sawyer believe civil disobedience is a necessary tool — to draw attention to their fight and, as Judd puts it, “rattle the chains” a little. 

Starting in October, the defenders hosted weekend events nearby, to introduce people to the issues and the idea of civil disobedience. The community made art that could be hung on the barrier across the logging road. 

Without any current logging or bridge building to oppose, there was no standoff or risk of arrest — yet. 

“It’s just giving people who have been interested in doing something like this a place to show up and meet other people,” Smith says.

“This hopefully can be a catalyst to future actions.”

Group hopes to ‘bridge political polarization’ over shared concern for headwaters

The Defenders of the Eastern Slopes isn’t solely focused on the Highwood Pass. The group might plan blockades in other areas of the vast stretch of woods and mountains that skirt the border of B.C. and Alberta, according to Smith. 

He’s been contacted by the RCMP, who sent out a liaison officer and he’s heard the company doesn’t plan to start operations this winter, but there’s no confirmation as yet. 

The RCMP did not response to a request for comment by publication time.

Smith says the threats to the region are a unifying force. He said that, while at the camp this fall, he had conversations with hunters and a coal worker that involved both disagreement, and finding common ground.

“Water and land protection and stewardship can bridge political polarization — especially water,” he says. “Most people can agree that we need clean water.”

— With files from Amber Bracken

Updated on Dec. 19, 2025, at 10:39 a.m MT: This story has been corrected to identify larch trees properly. Lark trees, as previously written, is not a tree species.

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In early September 2025, as wildfires cast a pall of smoke across parts of B.C., Forests Minister Ravi Parmar was asked about a study from the University of British Columbia which found clear-cut logging can make catastrophic floods larger and much more likely.

“The clear-cut logging that I think people would assume is leading to that is 1950s-style harvesting,” Parmar said. “I don’t think that’s happening in British Columbia anymore. We lead with world-class silviculture practices.”

That statement might come as a surprise to some who have seen recent photos of logged areas of Vancouver Island’s Walbran Valley, which show once-dense forests cut down to nothing. 

The minister’s comments came as a shock to Younes Alila, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Forest Resources Management and the lead author of the study Parmar was asked about.

“It sounds like he’s living on another planet, certainly not in British Columbia,” Alila, who has spent 30 years researching the way logging impacts watersheds, told The Narwhal.

The B.C. government’s forestry website defines clear-cutting as a type of logging that involves cutting entire stands of trees. This can happen all at once across an area earmarked for permitted logging — known as a cutblock in the industry — or piece by piece, a process known as strip cutting.

Sometimes, small stands of trees are spared — called clear-cutting with reserves — and B.C. also has rules to protect so-called special trees, the biggest and oldest specimens of certain species, including cedar, maple, fir and spruce.

When The Narwhal asked Parmar to clarify his claim that clear-cutting is an outdated forestry practice, the minister did not clarify. Instead, he said logging practices today involve more care than in the 1950s.

“I’m very comfortable with where we are in British Columbia in terms of the steps that are taken before a permit is submitted,” Parmar said.

B.C.’s current forestry practices balance environmental considerations and the needs of the provincial forestry industry, according to Parmar.

Alila disagrees.“The clearcutting continues as we speak,” he told The Narwhal.

‘These are not hypothetical clear-cut logging scenarios’: forestry professor 

Alila isn’t the only one raising eyebrows at Parmar’s statement. Tegan Hansen, senior forests campaigner with Stand.earth, called the minister’s claim “incredibly disappointing.”

“Clear-cutting happens in every part of B.C., from the Skeena to Vancouver Island to the Kootenays,” she told The Narwhal. “I think it’s an incredibly damaging statement.”

When a section of forest is clear-cut, it’s not just the trees that disappear, Hansen said. The understory also dies, including the ferns and shrubs and lichens and mosses that once grew from the forest floor up to the canopy.

“I’ve walked in clearcuts that were logged a few months ago in the summer, and the ground has started to bleach and all of that life is dead, and the logs have been removed, and the earth is churned up from the machinery,” she said.

Stripping trees from the land can have dire consequences. Alila’s research has shown that forest canopies help regulate the water cycle, slowing snow melt in the spring, which can help prevent sudden floods. Tree roots also help stabilize the soil and contribute to moisture retention, reducing the likelihood of drought.

“These are not hypothetical clear-cut logging scenarios,” Alila said of his study subjects. “These are actual cutblocks and actual, real watersheds in actual British Columbia.”

Old clear-cutting practices were ‘pure exploitation’: B.C. government

Mike Morris, a former BC Liberal MLA who represented the forestry-dependent Prince George-Mackenzie riding from 2013 to 2024, is an avid outdoorsman. He’s been hiking, hunting and trapping in northern B.C. forests since the 1960s — before clear-cutting became a widespread practice. Now, he’s regularly reminded of the scale at which local forests are being logged.

“It’s a shocking thing to see when you stand there and you can look around and for miles on either side of you, nothing but clearcuts,” he said, describing a 3,000-hectare clearcut that borders his trapline in northern B.C.

“It’s surrounded by a number of other clearcuts that equate to about 30,000 hectares in size over the last 25 years.”

Forty years ago, clear-cutting was by far the dominant type of logging taking place across B.C., according to data supplied by the Forests Ministry. In 2023, only 17 per cent of the area logged in B.C.’s southern Interior was clear-cut, according to the ministry, while eight per cent of coastal and northern cutblocks were clear-cut.

Clear-cutting with reserves is now the dominant practice, according to the ministry’s data. Ninety per cent of logged areas in the northern Interior were clear-cut with reserves; 74 per cent in the southern Interior and 47 per cent on the coast.

“Leaving a few trees here and there doesn’t change the practice,” Stand.earth’s Hansen said. “Ecologically, from the perspective of that forest, of all the life that relies on the forest, there’s no difference.”

Clear-cut logging remains “a viable and appropriate approach to sustainable forest management,” according to a statement from the Forests Ministry. While logging in the 1950s focused on getting as much timber out of B.C. forests as possible, a statement from the ministry said modern clear-cut logging accounts for ecological impacts at each specific cutblock.

The B.C. government’s online introduction to forestry practices says the way clear-cutting used to be done — a system known as “clearout” logging — “has given clear-cutting a bad name for some time.”

Unlike the “pure exploitation” of clearout logging, the modern clearcut system “manages a stand for the long term,” the document states.

Why is B.C. still clear-cut logging?

Morris believes that pressure from the forest industry coupled with B.C.’s increasingly uncomfortable financial situation has left the provincial government with little appetite to reform forestry, despite mounting evidence of the serious impacts of intensive logging.

“I find government maintains the status quo more often than not, just because it’s the easiest path to take,” he said. “But at what cost? At the cost of more lives, at the cost of more infrastructure damage that the taxpayers will have to bear?”

He’s particularly worried about the connection between losing tree canopies and natural disasters. “It’s causing landslides, it’s causing drought and it’s causing increased wildfire risk. To me, that is a clear and present danger that any minister should be aware of.”

Alila believes B.C.’s lack of action to curb clear-cutting comes down to dollars.

“Clear-cut logging is the cheapest way to cut the wood,” he said. “There are many other logging practices that are more eco-friendly. There are [a] wide variety of silvicultural practices that would have way less effects on hydrology and on wildlife, on biodiversity, but we keep resisting going there, unfortunately, because it’s the cheapest way.”

Even if B.C. were to abandon clear-cutting tomorrow, its effects could linger for a century before forests regain their capacity to moderate the water cycle and stabilize the soil.

“We’re going to be living with the effect of the clear-cut logging all over B.C. for decades to come,” Alila told The Narwhal.

Updated Nov. 20, 2025, at 11:49 a.m. PT: This article was updated to reflect the fact that Mike Morris served as an MLA from 2013 to 2024.

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B.C.’s NDP government has recently lent a steadying hand to its beleaguered forestry sector, pausing stumpage fees, expediting permits and investing in mills to prevent its looming fall — but some say to no avail. 

“Why does it keep getting worse?” Prince George-Mackenzie Conservative MLA Kiel Giddens asked during the spring legislative session, voicing a question that continues to echo months later. 

A new report commissioned by the Sierra Club BC points to a theory: B.C.’s supply of unlogged, high-value trees that industry has long relied on is dwindling, rendering short-term fixes and freebies inadequate.

As report co-author and forester Dave Daust puts it, “If you have a car with a broken engine, fixing the flat tire is not going to fix the problem.”

Pressure on B.C.’s most at-risk forests appears to be intensifying. The report says the province’s efforts to temporarily pause logging in rare forests through old-growth deferrals have failed. Instead, B.C. forests were four times more likely to be logged inside recommended deferral zones than outside over the past four years. With industry pressure exacerbated by escalating wildfires, the report suggests B.C.’s century-long feast on big, old trees is approaching its end. The question is how many of them will be left. 

Since being elected in 2017, the BC NDP has taken a Janus-faced approach to forest management. In 2020, it committed to a “paradigm shift” that would transform its forest management system from one that prioritizes logging fast and furious to logging only what ecosystems can handle. More recently, they’ve seemingly cooled on such commitments; at the beginning of the year, Premier David Eby instructed his forest minister to aim to raise logging levels by roughly 50 per cent compared to 2024. 

“The failure to fully deliver on old growth commitments is a profound betrayal of trust in First Nations, the public and future generations,” Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, said in a statement. 

“As the climate crisis deepens, allowing these irreplaceable forests to be logged is reckless and short-sighted.” 

‘The deferrals failed’ 

In 2021, Daust and co-author Karen Price, an ecologist, were among a five-person panel that mapped and recommended 2.6 million hectares of at-risk old growth forests be deferred — a temporary status that would keep them from getting cut down as longer-term land use planning decisions took place.

“It was intensely disappointing to see how badly they failed,” Price says. Their report found that in four years, around 113,000 football fields worth of old-growth deferral zones were logged. Wildfires deepened the loss further, burning almost the forest equivalent of 206,000 football fields. Drawing on the province’s forest inventories and GIS mapping software, the report identified the highest deferral logging rates in the dry interior regions and in sub-boreal forests in the province’s central interior.

The trees were able to be logged because the province made deferrals optional, pending approval from First Nations. But groups like the BC Assembly of First Nations and the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs described the province’s approach as a “hot potato,” passing difficult decisions to First Nations without involving them in the decision-making process or providing adequate transition funding to support potential revenue shortfalls. 

Price says B.C.’s approach to deferrals and the still-nascent change they were meant to precipitate are telling. 

“This analysis confirms what we suspected,” she says. “The paradigm hasn’t shifted.”

By email, B.C.’s Ministry of Forests said that logging across the province has fallen by 40 per cent since 2021, while logging in at-risk old-growth forests has fallen at a higher rate of 50 per cent — a finding that reflects different numbers than those identified in Price and Daust’s research. 

“We are accelerating action on multiple fronts to protect and restore old growth while supporting First Nations, communities, and workers,” the ministry added. It also said its joint $300-million conservation financing mechanism with Parks Canada “will fund First Nations-led permanent protections for old-growth forests.”

The problem with planted forests in B.C.

Core to the forest industry’s long-term conundrum is that, so far, it isn’t logging the vast blanket of planted forests it has created. 

For one thing, these forests are young, with around 80 per cent less than 40 years old, according to the Ministry of Forests, meaning the majority of the province’s logging happens in unlogged forests. But even when they mature, they may prove to be shoddy stand-ins for the forest they replaced. 

Price describes planted forests as towns with only “one type of people with one type of skill.” Lacking the forest equivalent of doctors, teachers, artists and farmers, their lack of genetic and structural diversity succumbs more easily to disease and disturbances like fire and adds fewer nutrients to the soil. They tend to grow smaller, weaker trees. It’s a bad situation for industry and for ecosystems. 

B.C. has never analyzed how much unlogged forest — also known as “primary” forest — it has left. Instead, it divvies up its forests into two main categories: old-growth trees that are beyond 140-250 years, depending on their location, and everything else. ​​

In other words, the forests B.C. categorizes as “old growth” are generally considered “primary,” but “everything else” includes primary and planted forests. 

Price says there are reasons to pay attention to that broader category of primary forest and how much remains. 

For one thing, that’s because unlogged forests in B.C.’s classification system lose “old growth” status when they’re burned in a wildfire or beset with pest infestation like the pine beetle, events that set back their official age clock as if they were just clear cut. But the likeness stops there, says Price. “Naturally disturbed forests still have functionality that plantations do not,” she says. 

In a changing climate, those wildfires and pest infestations are growing more frequent — almost four per cent of the province’s remaining old growth burned in the last four years, according to Price and Daust’s analysis. In the last decade, fires across the province burned seven times more than historic average. Meanwhile, companies are ramping up wildfire salvage logging in burned forests. Companies also target primary forests when logging for biopellet producers like Drax, which export wood pellets to places like the U.K. and Japan, where they’re burned for electricity. All told, Price says pressure on non-old-growth, primary forests is increasing. 

How much of B.C.’s old-growth forests are left?

For the first time, Daust and Price provide data on the kinds of primary forests that remain. Their findings indicate a shrinking map of primary forest, particularly in easier-to-log areas and in the bigger-treed stands. 

They found a third of B.C.’s forests have been degraded by planting or deforested to make clearings for things like private land, pipelines and roads. The remaining two-thirds is primary forest, but much of that is located in the province’s northern regions, where trees tend to be smaller and difficult to access. They also found large tracts of primary forests, including those with bigger trees, in limited protected areas and in small patches next to degraded forests. 

That patchy picture is an ecological problem, Daust says, because each ecosystem type requires a certain threshold of intact, unlogged forest to thrive. When those thresholds are crossed, generally considered to be anything less than 30 per cent of what was there originally, ecosystem collapse begins to loom. 

“The continued decline of primary forest indicates our inability to have an industry that is sustainable on a set footprint,” Peter Wood, a lecturer and coordinator in international forestry at the University of British Columbia says. “We’ve always been able to go a little further”

Besides the ecological consequences of exhausting primary forests, Wood says Price and Daust’s report has a stark message for industry too: “There’s actually very little left in terms of the really economically viable primary forest.” 

Wood laments what he sees as an information “vacuum” obscuring the supply challenges behind the industry’s growing crash. “Why are we only getting this from an NGO report?” he says, noting announcements like this week’s mill closure in 100 Mile House shouldn’t come as a surprise. “This is stuff that I would hope government should be not only aware of, but should be communicating to the public.”

Price and Daust hope the industry’s current crisis moment accompanies a turning point, aligning it with the kinds of forestry ecosystems can sustain, and including efforts to restore the province’s vast and struggling planted forests, and to protect 30 per cent of the province’s ecosystems by 2030. 

But, despite its purported commitments to paradigm change, Price says B.C.’s forest management continues to harbour major blind spots about ecosystems and what they need to thrive. “If you have an ecosystem perspective, all these things fall into place nicely,” she says. “The government doesn’t have that.”

Updated Nov. 14, 1:39 p.m. PT: This story was updated to include a statement sent following publication by B.C.’s Ministry of Forests

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A morning fog has cleared at the Kelsey Bay log sort near the town of Sayward, B.C., on Vancouver Island. Thick drifts of pulverized cedar bark pile against the loading dock, evidence of the millions of trees that departed from here across the ocean, never to return. 

“We’ve seen our territories decimated,” Wei Wai Kum Chief Christopher Roberts explains. Behind him, five freshly cut, old-growth cedars line the warming pavement. 

These trees, Roberts says, help explain why the nation is here today. 

After watching trees vanish from their territory for more than a century, nations are claiming sizable stakes in an industry that has long excluded them. Wei Wai Kum is one of four First Nations to purchase a $36-million stake in La-kwa sa mukw Forestry Partnership, a joint operation with logging company Western Forest Products Ltd. Their partnership came after companies including Western Forest Products agreed to leave the biggest, canoe-carving trees like these in their communities. A sign, for Roberts, that the industry was willing to change. 

“If it wasn’t for that, I don’t think Wei Wai Kum would have had the confidence to enter into the purchase agreement,” Roberts says, addressing the small crowd before him, some seated on fold-up chairs for the day’s events celebrating the partnership.

Their purchase last year adds to a wave of new First Nations-owned forestry tenures in B.C., which jumped from 10 to 20 per cent of the province’s logging allowance in the last four years. According to the Ministry of Forests’ budget notes, tenure transfers to First Nations are “occurring at a faster rate than anticipated.”

But the long-awaited opportunity comes at a turbulent time: B.C.’s major logging companies are liquidating their mills and licences, and moving much of their operations to the southern U.S. It’s a trend that, according to industry testimony at the U.S. International Trade Commission, is “highly unlikely to reverse itself in the foreseeable future.”

Reasons for the upheaval are varied, but Garry Merkel, a professional forester and a member of the Tahltan Nation, points to a pervasive, underlying factor: most of the highest-value big trees are gone, and many of B.C.’s mills are built to process lots of trees at once. “Everybody is competing for the last little bit,” he says. 

That puts some First Nations-owned tenures in a pressure cooker, trying to supply the wood to keep forestry-reliant communities going while working to steward ecosystems under growing strain. 

Right now, Roberts remains uncertain whether that high-wire act is achievable. 

“I’ve always believed that when First Nations are the ones that take over the ownership of licences and tenures in their territory, it would be a different value set they would have used,” he says. 

“I’m just not seeing that yet.”

B.C. forestry: a flawed system

First Nations had been using and stewarding the province’s forests for millennia when 27-year-old Henry Reginald MacMillan — better known in B.C. as H.R. MacMillan — a third-generation Canadian settler with roots in Scotland, arrived in Victoria in 1912 to launch the province’s first forest service. He came with a radical plan, learned in the continent’s new fleet of forestry schools, to transform B.C.’s forests into a planted crop of trees, like peas or potatoes. Major forest companies would be the foot soldiers of this revolution, and were granted long-term licences from the British Columbia government to log First Nations’ territories, without their input or consent.For decades, companies bought and sold access to First Nations’ land like trading cards. 

First Nations people, meanwhile, were forced onto reserves. “You couldn’t go off a reserve,” Merkel says. “You couldn’t own land.” Under the Indian Act, they also couldn’t hire lawyers, preventing them from advocating for their rights in the bustling resource economy. 

Many First Nations people worked in the industry, but they were excluded from decision-making or ownership. In 1991, nations held less than one per cent of the province’s logging tenure. 

The largest ten companies in the province, including MacMillan’s own company, MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., held almost 70 per cent.

Meanwhile, the industry supersized its tools to cut forests faster, including megamills and mechanized logging machines. B.C.’s companies refined their approach to high-volume, low-value forestry and companies saw their incomes skyrocket. 

Many First Nations resisted the growing scale of forestry in their territories. 

Landmark legal victories for the Haida, Gitxan and Wet’suwet’en and other nations throughout the 1990s and 2000s prompted B.C. to change its approach to forestry in the province. “They realized they had to figure out how to work with the community,” Merkel says. In 2010, B.C. introduced a suite of new policies, including a revenue-sharing program to allocate a share of its logging proceeds to impacted nations, many of which remain in place today. 

But those agreements also came with strings, including clauses restricting nations’ ability to contest companies’ logging in their territories. 

“We think they’re a flawed system,” Chief Councillor waamiiš Ken Watts of Tseshaht First Nation says. The nation owns various forestry tenures on southern Vancouver Island. “It’s just saying, here’s our colonial laws you have to live by, sign this agreement, we’ll give you a bit of change at the end of the year from what we’ve made off of your territory,” he says

Those agreements came with some new opportunities for First Nations-owned tenure, but many of the licences came with caveats: unlike major forest companies, licensees had a limited window to log wood, and some were limited to pine beetle-killed areas. Many of the licences were never fully utilized. 

Opportunity in the B.C. forestry crash

Now, after years on the margins, First Nations’ tenure opportunities have exploded as B.C.’s biggest forest companies sell off major parts of their long-held licences. 

“We’re seeing fire sales all over the place,” Merkel says.Companies like Interfor and Canfor have sold up to half of their timber licences to First Nations. Western Forest Products has taken a more incremental approach, entered into co-owning arrangements, including with the Huu-ay-aht First Nation and through La-kwa sa mukw Forestry Partnership.

But the opportunity comes with a bitter pill: the industry is in freefall. Merkel sees some multinational corporations are jumping ship. “As long as they get something out of it and get out of the liability, that’s cash they can take and go buy, I don’t know, a shrimp farm in Africa or something.”

U.S. softwood lumber tariffs, which rose to 45 per cent this month, are the latest shock. And Merkel points to other, more insidious causes for the crash: namely, that H.R. MacMillan’s forest project didn’t work as planned. Planted forests haven’t grown into the old, big trees industry made its fortunes from. 

“Now we’re dealing with a lot of scrub in that corner that we didn’t get to before,” Merkel says. Mills, meanwhile, are often designed to log lots of wood — often the big, old stuff. 

Some nations who paid handily for their recent tenures are in “tough situations,” Merkel adds. “They’re bound economically.” That crunch can incentivize faster, cheaper, clear-cut logging, even though old growth is often scarce. 

For some nations, the situation may worsen. As logging declines across the province and the price of wood falls, B.C. has warned that revenue sharing on forestry with First Nations will see a sizable drop, with “the first major decline in payments” beginning this year.

Meanwhile, federal funding cuts loom for Indigenous Services Canada. The department provides key services like health care, drinking water and education — things non-Indigenous communities have had disproportionate access to, thanks in part to forestry revenue.

Those vacillating government funds underscore Chief Ronnie Chickite’s desire to establish financial independence through tenure ownership. “I think we got in at the right time,” says Chickite, whose community We Wai Kai First Nation is one of the four nation members of La-kwa sa muqw Forestry Limited Partnership and owns other forestry companies. 

 But dividing the shrinking pie may become more difficult. 

The La-kwa sa muqw partnership, for example, faces ongoing job action from United Steelworkers, which disputes the company’s intent to hire a segment of non-union workers. And it surfaces another tension: the Ma’a̱mtagila Hereditary Chiefs claim rights to territory where the partnership is licensed to log, and have called for a halt to the company’s operations, which includes logging in big-treed, old-growth forests. Canada and B.C. currently do not recognize the Ma’a̱mtagila nation after its amalgamation with the Tlowitsis, one of the La-kwa sa mukw partnership-owning First Nations. “The Ma’a̱mtagila never gave their land away,” said Chief Nelson Bruce of the Hayalikawayi namima clan, in a press release.In recent estimates notes, the B.C. Ministry of Forests acknowledged that tenure sales can trigger unique conflicts when First Nations tenures extend across other nations’ territories. Elsewhere, other configurations of these tensions have erupted: a co-owned tenure between Western Forest Products and Huu-ay-aht First Nation faces a blockade protesting the company’s logging led by Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones — who opposes his own nation’s decision to consent to old-growth logging in its territory. 

“There is very little left,” Jones said in an August press release. “We must save it for our children and all the children to come.”

‘It is possible’: First Nations charting alternative paths in forestry

Over the years, Merkel says many nation-owned tenures have been leading the charge by managing forests in a way that doesn’t tax their future. 

“We’re seeing much higher standards of land care and a lot more focus on ecological health and the relationship to the land,” he said. 

“It is possible,” Naxginkw Tara Marsden, Wilp Sustainability director with the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs says. Besides adhering to the Gitanyow Lax’yip Land Use Plan, which protects 51 per cent of the territory, Marsden says the nation’s own tenure exceeds the land use plan’s standards, and it is researching different approaches to leaving trees standing in cutblocks.

By sending their wood to a local, value-added mill which employs many of the nation’s members, Marsden says Gitanyow can get more for their trees, creating more breathing room to innovate. 

Marsden wants to see B.C. address decades-old deregulation that let companies close their local mills in the first place, by restoring appurtenancy rules, which required logs to be milled in the regions where they were cut. 

Marsden, Watts and Roberts are among those looking for change in B.C.’s log pricing system, also known as stumpage fees. That could mean reducing stumpage rates for certain types of forestry, like logging in second growth or selective harvest.Currently, Watts says, it’s not affordable to do that kind of logging. “If it’s not affordable to go out, we can’t do those really creative [cutblocks] that everybody wants us to do … The value of it all through the whole chain has got to make sense for everybody.”

Alexandra Thomas, a member of the Tlowitsis Nation with shíshálh ancestry and a forest stewardship coordinator with the Nanwakolas Council, one of the La-kwa sa muqw partners, is interested in using forests to harvest other, non-tree products, like medicines and foods. 

“Here’s how you get more people into the forest, into the places that they should be observing and paying attention and spending time,” she says. Deepening communities’ relationships to forests, Thomas says, is critical to shift away from B.C. forestry’s long-held tunnel vision that prioritizes economic values over ecological and cultural ones. 

“We have paths before us, and we get to choose the path,” she says. 

Changing the system

The late afternoon’s sun beats down as Chief Roberts finds a place to sit by the sidelines. 

He gestures to the nearby Salmon River, which, true to its namesake, once housed an abundance of the fish, and which has almost disappeared, in part, he says, due to the impacts of widespread logging across the watershed. 

Back when the fish were abundant, a young, college-bound H.R. MacMillan was holed up on a boat a few miles upriver, nursing an axe wound to his left hand as his colleagues staked out timber licences throughout the watershed. He was there when the first logging equipment arrived on wide boats. That fall, the watershed’s trees began to disappear. 

Roberts is waiting for a sign that tenure ownership will usher in the forest’s new chapter. 

 “I often find myself really conflicted,” Roberts says of his involvement in the industry today. “It’s really hard to change a system … It’s just like the train is going and you can’t stop it.”

But Roberts remains cautiously hopeful for what’s ahead.

“It’s just finding the right balance and levers to pull,” he says. 

“Right now in B.C., it’s not even close to equitable.” 

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Wildfire is part of the natural lifecycle of a forest; but as Manitoba continues to battle the embers of its most devastating fire season in more than 30 years, its leaders are starting to consider a more active role in managing this critical resource to stave off the flames.

In early October, as more than 70 wildland fires still smouldered across the province, Premier Wab Kinew and a handful of cabinet ministers released Manitoba’s first all-encompassing plan to slash carbon emissions in the next 25 years. 

Among the promised initiatives was a commitment to “co-develop a wildfire prevention and preparation approach that reflects Indigenous leadership, land-based knowledge and nature-based solutions” — a first hint at how the provincial government plans to respond to the growing threat of wildfire.

“We just came out of the worst wildfire season in living memory,” Environment and Climate Change Minister Mike Moyes said at a press conference for the new strategy this week.

“We recognize that local communities often will have insights in how to respond or how to prevent things. As we review [the wildfire response], we’re going to be looking to make those connections with local leaders and communities so we can get it right, heaven forbid, if that ever happens again.”

The 2025 wildfire season, which began in early May in the midst of a record-shattering heat wave, has seen 432 fires consume more than 2.1 million hectares of land — a surface area larger than Lake Ontario. Two people died trying to evacuate a blaze near Lac Du Bonnet, the first civilian wildfire deaths in Manitoba’s recent history. The province declared a state of emergency in late May and another in July. The Canadian Red Cross recorded more than 32,000 evacuees, many of whom are still waiting to go home. 

In nearly 100 years of recorded wildfire history in the province, only the 1989 season was more severe. 

There are few details about the direction Manitoba’s fire prevention strategy will take. Provincial officials have deferred questions about the strategy until the final review is completed. 

But in an interview prior to the launch of the emissions-reduction plan, Natural Resources Minister Ian Bushie acknowledged the wildfire risk is changing — and Manitoba’s approach to managing its forest resources will need to change too.

“If this fire season is our new normal,” he says, “then maybe we’ve got to be able to adapt some of our policies to adhere to what that new normal would entail.”

Manitoba’s forestry industry is ‘scared to death’ of increasing wildfire risk

Michael Doig is a long-time Manitoba forester who currently manages a working group in the province’s forestry and peatlands branch. 

Much of his team’s work involves taking detailed inventories, carefully monitoring forest health and conducting complex modelling to draw up decades- or centuries-long plans for harvesting and regenerating the province’s vast forests.

Nearly half of Manitoba’s land area is covered by forest — 26.3 million hectares in all. The majority is made up of dense, boreal wood: a mix of boggy, black spruce lowlands, and uplands dotted with white spruce, poplar and jack pine. There are stands of broadleaf forest dotting the southern prairie grasslands — clusters of aspen, burr oak and other deciduous species.

Some two million hectares are considered provincial forests, which serve as recreation areas, research hubs and timber reserves. Other sections are wrapped within the bounds of provincial parks and protected areas, where they are (for the most part) undisturbed by industrial activities.

And then there are the 11 million hectares of woodlands set aside for commercial logging in two sprawling forest management licence areas — where Doig and his team invest the majority of their resources.

“Our province is huge and our forest industry is somewhat centralized in the northwest and western regions,” Doig says.

That’s not to say the rest of the province’s forests go without oversight. In eastern and central Manitoba, provincial staff keep track of logging and renewal activities and manage limited, small quota harvests. The province participates in a national forest health survey every year, which requires flying over and monitoring forests in provincial parks and other forested regions.

But the two large swaths of land licensed to forestry companies Canadian Kraft Paper and Louisiana-Pacific come with boots-on-the-ground monitoring, troves of inventory data — and the potential to generate significant provincial revenue.

Logging generated $6.4 million in Crown royalties in 2024, though a significant drop compared to 2022 and 2023, when royalties reached approximately $12 million. 

According to the Forest Industry Association of Manitoba, the industry generates an average of $700 million in revenues annually and contributes more than $330 million to the provincial GDP. 

Fire seasons like this year’s are bad for business. 

More than 1.2 million hectares burned in logging licence areas alone in 2025 — approximately 10 per cent of the province’s regularly harvested forests. It’s the most damage the logging areas have seen in nearly 100 years of recorded fire history.

It’s still too early to determine the full consequences the fires will have on Manitoba’s logging industry, and Doig says the province will soon review the impacts and could potentially adjust harvest borders to compensate for potential damage in the future. 

But the trends that have emerged across the country in recent years are cause for concern.

“The [forestry] industry is scared to death,” says British Columbia-based Bob Gray, one of Canada’s foremost wildfire researchers.

June and July 2023 saw lumber production in Canada dip 20 per cent below the previous five-year average for the same months, according to a report from the Canadian Climate Institute. The research group’s modelling shows if forests are left to burn as they have, the impacts of climate change — including wildfires — could cost the country thousands of jobs and billions in revenue.

The impacts are already felt in B.C., where lumber mills have closed after fire decimated their source of product. 

“Whole regions now have nothing but young trees. There’s nothing to harvest,” Gray says. 

If nothing changes, “those regions will start to expand. It will get to a point where the industry is done. You’re chasing guts and feathers across the landscape.”

According to the Canadian Climate Institute, the cost of wildfire protection has been climbing by $150 million per decade since the 1970s. Wildfires have cost provincial governments more than $1 billion in six of the last ten years.

Wildfires, to some extent, beget more wildfires. Severe burns can damage soil, making it more challenging for a forest to recover and leaving the forest more vulnerable to future burns. Forests that re-burn multiple times are at risk of transforming to new, less treed ecosystems. 

As fires burn they blanket the skies in heavy smoke and harmful particulate matter (associated with increased risk of health issues impacting the lungs, heart, cardiovascular system and brain). These pollutants contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, and trap heat in the atmosphere, worsening climate impacts like drought — which in turn makes forests more vulnerable to fire.

Proactive forest management can mitigate wildfires — and ensure sustainable harvests

In his 40 years of wildfire research, Gray says he’s starting to see approaches to forest management change — but just not as fast as they need to.

Historically, forest management has focused on economic returns, both in terms of royalties to the Crown and revenues for shareholders. 

“But if forestry is going to survive then we have to tackle the fire-risk problem, and that means doing very specific treatments in very specific places not driven entirely by economics,” Gray says. 

Gray acknowledges that might require compromises like asking companies to harvest less profitable stands for the greater benefit of managing fire risk. But Gray believes there are ways to get the best of both worlds, bringing profit for industry while helping manage the long-term risks.

Foresters choose stands to harvest based on age, health and vulnerability to natural disturbances such as disease or fire. Manitoba’s forestry department prioritizes harvesting older or damaged stands with “a high fuel load, so lots of standing dead timber or ladder fuel,” Doig says. Ladder fuel refers to dead trees or underbrush that help a fire climb higher up a tree.

“When you take an old, tall forest and make it into a young, short forest, fire behaviour changes dramatically.” 

That’s because older forests often have more timber that’s ready to burn — and more fuel creates more intense fires, Doig explains. 

Doig says forestry teams have recently started to prioritize stands closer to communities — even if they aren’t the most profitable — to help protect homes, buildings and critical infrastructure from fire.

“We’ve always tried to stay away from communities; the thought process is now changing a bit. We need to get closer to communities with our forest management activities to change the forest landscape a little bit,” he explains.

Gray says the forestry industry can also look to diversify stands while regenerating forests. Flammable conifers, which make up the majority of replanted forests, aren’t always good investments.

“The chances that the tree you plant today is going to make it to maturity in 100 years is pretty slim,” he says.

Instead, he recommends planting more hardwood lumber — like aspen — to take advantage of its fire-resilient qualities. A mature aspen stand can be significantly cooler and damper than surrounding areas while serving as a barrier against high winds. 

Doig says Manitoba has considered changing the forest composition, but it can be challenging. Jack pines — a big part of Manitoba’s loggable forests — grow naturally in deep sandy soil; aspen stands may not be sustainable in the same growing conditions.

The province is, however, studying assisted migration, a process of deliberately moving seeds from one area of the forest to another to understand and better predict how forest composition will evolve.

But the most important role industry can play in fire mitigation, Gray says, is transforming how it deals with slash — a term for the unsaleable trees, branches, deadwood and discarded treetops left behind after the harvest.

One hectare of harvested forest can generate between 50 and 100 tonnes of slash, Gray says, and all that woody detritus on the forest floor fuels hotter and more intense wildfires.

It’s standard practice for foresters to limit slash as much as possible; emerging biomass and engineered wood product markets have created more uses for the leftover lumber and more opportunities to maximize the economic value of forests. Manitoba is already looking for ways to cash in on those markets, Doig says. 

But in cases where that’s not possible — like forests that aren’t easy to access by road or are located far from processing and manufacturing facilities, “you basically need to start to burn the slash,” Gray says. 

“That’s the key strategy: thinning it and then burning it.”

In Manitoba, Doig says, the slash that can’t be brought to market is typically spread out on the landscape to allow nutrients to return to the soil and provide habitat for small animals while avoiding the risks posed by large piles of dead, flammable wood. 

But Gray says even slash that’s been spread out can be “hazardous forever” in a time of extreme fire weather. 

“Timber harvest just rearranges fuels, it doesn’t remove fuels,” Gray says. “All you’ve done is take canopy fuels, aerial fuels, and put them on the ground. You open things up, now things are hotter and drier and there’s no wind friction — so you just sped up fire.”

By contrast, a forest stand that’s deliberately burned after harvest becomes more resilient, he says. 

Grassy, herbaceous vegetation will grow back first, and in the case of a wildfire, will burn with less intensity than denser forest. Once replanted conifer trees are tall enough to close the canopy and shade the grassy material below, the stand is “sort of non-burnable for a while,” Gray says.

“I think prescribed burning is always a tool for consideration, but it’s not part of our plan, not part of our toolbelt at this time,” Doig says of Manitoba’s forest management strategy. Records show 42 such burns in provincial history, all between 1995 and 2015. 

Canadian Kraft Paper and Louisiana-Pacific did not respond to written requests for comment. The Forest Producers Association referred interview requests to members of the Wildfire Consortium of Canada, which was not able to comment on forest industry perspectives by publication time.

Experts recommend strategic forest thinning in Manitoba’s provincial parks

Outside of the logging areas, forest management activities are limited. Manitoba conducts forest health surveys and allows limited harvest, but Gray says provinces should take more active roles in managing its forests in parks and protected areas too. 

While the intent behind leaving swathes of forest undisturbed by industrial activity is laudable, “fire doesn’t recognize lines on a map,” he says. 

Nopiming Provincial Park was all but wiped out by a 359,000-hectare fire that started in early May. After more than 150 days, the sprawling blaze has consumed more than 70 per cent of Nopiming, along the province’s eastern flank, and portions of Atitaki Provincial Park farther north. As of early October, it is still considered an active fire.

All told, more than 260,000 hectares of provincial park lands have been impacted by fire this year — more than double the total area burned between 2020 and 2024.

Forest management in these parks is minimal, Doig says. Logging was banned in all but one provincial park in 2009, so there’s less attention to forest inventory and strategic harvesting, though staff do clear some sections for infrastructure, park expansion and other needs.

Gray says provincial governments can take cues from Canada’s national parks to better manage those protected forests. 

Industrial logging is generally prohibited in national parklands, but strategic forest thinning is permitted in some parks to reduce fire risk. Jasper National Park, which was scorched by wildfire in 2024, has allowed selective logging and prescribed burns to clear excess vegetation, especially surrounding infrastructure and townsites, since 2003. 

Riding Mountain National Park, in Western Manitoba, conducted 4,000 hectares of prescribed burning in 2024 and a further 1,400 hectares in April this year.

British Columbia has adopted similar practices in its provincial parks, Gray says. 

The key is that provincial governments need to take a more proactive role in protecting these natural resources from fire. 

“We cannot take a static approach in dynamic systems,” Gray says. More time and resources need to be invested in “getting out ahead of as much fire as possible versus reacting to it.”

Manitoba needs diverse viewpoints to shape its wildfire strategies: minister

Manitoba Minister of Natural Resources and Indigenous Relations, Bushie, who oversees both the wildfire service and the forestry department, says the early start to this year’s fires put more of a spotlight on wildfire mitigation. 

“As a good, responsible steward of the land … it’s imperative that we evolve when things change,” he says. “As much as I want to say we have policies in place, absolutely they’re going to evolve as the seasons progress. And if there’s added investments we need … I think we have to maintain that flexibility.”

Fire mitigation strategies were top of mind for Bushie and other Canadian leaders during the annual meeting of the Council of Canadian Forest Ministers in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador in June. 

The council released its Wildland Fire Prevention and Mitigation Strategy in 2024 after more than two years of engagement with political leaders, academics, Indigenous governments and industry. 

“Wildland fire management in Canada needs to be transformed,” the strategy reads. “This transformation can only be achieved by taking a more proactive approach to preventing and mitigating risks before they occur.”

To get there, the report stresses the need for a whole-of-society approach, with leadership from both governments and Indigenous communities often uniquely impacted by wildfire; more than 40 per cent of fire-related evacuations between 1980 and 2021 were in predominantly Indigenous communities. The report recommends increased investment in training, education and prevention programs, as well as financial incentives for industry.

Implementation is currently underway, focused on risk planning and community education before shifting investment to prevention and mitigation programs. 

Whatever tools the province ultimately chooses to advance its wildfire mitigation efforts, Bushie says it will need input from First Nations, rightsholders, industry, community members and other “boots on the ground” Manitobans.

“I don’t think there’s a one-size fits all brush when it comes to forestry management,” Bushie says.

“It would be irresponsible of us not to engage and have every idea on the table.”

Julia-Simone Rutgers is a reporter covering environmental issues in Manitoba. Her position is part of a partnership between The Narwhal and the Winnipeg Free Press.

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A B.C. Supreme Court justice has ordered a group of people blocking a logging road in the Walbran Valley on southern Vancouver Island to stop. The decision to grant an injunction to Tsawak-qin Forestry Limited Partnership, a joint partnership between the Huu-ay-aht First Nations and Western Forest Products, alongside an enforcement order is expected to set the stage for the RCMP to remove people from the area.This fight over British Columbia’s old-growth forests comes four years after the start of the historic Fairy Creek protests, where more than 1,100 people were arrested.

The Walbran Valley blockade began in late August and has prevented a logging company from working and accessing tools, equipment and vehicles on the other side of the blockade. Pacheedaht Elder Bill Jones, who was at the forefront of the Fairy Creek protests, is one of the parties named in the court filing, and the only person to respond to the application. Others named include Will O’Connell, John Doe, Jane Doe and “persons unknown.”

After hearing arguments from both sides on Sept. 9 and Sept. 11, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Amy Francis concluded on the morning of Sept. 12 that “counsel for Mr. Jones has made no effort to explain or suggest that the protesters’ conduct is legal. This is because it is illegal.” “The court in such circumstances, has no choice but to protect the lawful conduct and business of the plaintiff, and to address the illegality of the defendant’s behaviour,” Francis said. “In these circumstances, I find the rule-of-law considerations must prevail, and the balance of convenience weighs in favour of granting the injunction.”

Five years after pledging reform, B.C. faces renewed resistance

On Sept. 9, while the Vancouver court was hearing arguments related to the injunction, The Narwhal visited what blockaders are calling Cougar Camp, where about a dozen people were gathered with tents and a sheltered kitchen area behind a fence made from rough planks of salvaged cedar. Inside the camp, a large sculpture of a cougar sat in the middle of the logging road, made from wood gathered from debris left behind by loggers. At the cougar’s paws were several small, hand-made wooden signs bearing slogans: “Defend the old growth” and “Protect the sacred.”

O’Connell was one of the people at the camp. He learned of plans to log eight parcels of land — known as cut blocks in the logging industry — in the Walbran Valley more than a year ago and told The Narwhal he had hiked the stands of trees in the valley multiple times. When he saw satellite images revealing logging had begun, he knew he would try to stop it.

“It was a wonderful clarity, because I spent five years feeling like there should be more I’m doing for the old growth,” he said. “I should be doing something because I’m feeling a continuous sadness for the loss of these places and the betrayal of the government, who is continually not acting.”

The latest conflict over the future of British Columbia’s remaining old-growth trees arrives amid the fifth anniversary of the release of the old-growth strategic review, co-authored by professional foresters. It warned “the priorities that currently drive our forest management system are backwards” and urged a “paradigm shift,” offering 14 recommendations to improve forest management in B.C.

The NDP government promised to implement them all. While logging has been deferred in some of the priority areas identified in the report, old-growth trees are still being taken out of B.C. forests.

O’Connell called the B.C. government’s failure to fully implement the review panel’s recommendations and continue allowing logging in areas identified to host old-growth trees “gut-wrenching.”

“There are greater travesties happening in the world than the destruction of our last ancient forests, but this is our forest, this is our backyard and it’s something we can change and we can choose to do it differently.”

This conflict sits at the centre of a complex relationship between First Nations, the B.C. government, logging companies and environmental advocates.

B.C. court hears arguments from both sides 

The request in court to stop the blockade at Cougar Camp was made by Tsawak-qin Forestry Inc and Tsawak-qin Forestry Limited Partnership to protect its permitted logging operations in the Walbran Valley from interference.

The company’s request said the Fairy Creek blockade “resulted in a significant breakdown in the rule of law” and warned the situation in the Walbran “risks spinning out of control again,” unless the court intervenes. 

A statement posted on the company’s website on Sept. 8 states the Pacheedaht First Nation Chief and Council, whose territory the cut blocks are on, consented to Tsawak-qin’s plans for logging in the Walbran.

“Our planned activity incorporates specific measures to integrate cultural and ecological priorities, including the protection of culturally significant trees, support for traditional bark harvesting and respect for Indigenous Knowledge,” the statement reads.

A statement from Pacheedaht Chief Arliss Daniels included on the company’s website calls the Walbran blockade “an unlawful obstruction.”

“Blockaders must immediately vacate the area,” Daniels said. “Our lands are not to be misused or disrespected under any circumstances.”

The legal representatives for both sides made their respective cases on Sept. 9 and Sept. 11 at the B.C. Supreme Court. On Sept. 9, following a call-out for support from the Fairy Creek social media accounts, around two dozen observers sat in on the morning proceedings. 

The lawyers representing Tsawak-qin argued the blockade was unlawful and undemocratic, preventing the forestry company from legal harvesting activities. The blockade put 11 forestry jobs and millions in revenue at risk, the lawyers said, at a “critical time” of year for harvesting, as the machinery can’t operate in heavy rain. Additionally, the company raised concerns about safety, saying a fire truck and emergency transport vehicle were inaccessible behind the blockade. At one point, the judge reprimanded a number of observers for laughing when the company’s lawyers once more invoked the idea of democratic process, asking them to be respectful. 

A lawyer for the Tsawak-qin described the Cougar Camp as a “sophisticated, targeted and well-funded blockade” organized by the same group that carried out the Fairy Creek blockades.

Ben Isitt, the lead lawyer representing Bill Jones, argued in court the value of the forests for biodiversity and cultural survival outweigh the claims of economic harm by the logging company. The threats to life and liberty posed by climate change, the defence said, is a threat to everyone, with disproportionate impacts on the Canadian Arctic, coastal communities and Indigenous Peoples. In addition, the defence claimed Jones’s constitutional rights as an Indigenous person would be harmed, and that the ecological impacts to the forest would also cause harm to his cultural and Aboriginal Rights. 

Outside of the courtroom, Isitt described the court proceedings as an “uphill battle.”

“Case law in B.C. has moved in a disturbing direction, placing more weight on the interests of industry than on Indigenous interests and ecological concerns.” 

“In a planet that’s burning, it’s non-negotiable for Bill [Jones], protecting those forests. That’s the context for this dispute,” Isitt said. “And ultimately, we need the province to step in and honour its commitments.” 

In her decision Justice Francis said the case is “not about the wisdom of government forest policy.” “It is decidedly not about the court’s views on whether and where old-growth logging should occur in this province, even in the context of climate change, in an injunction application,” she said. “Those are matters outside of the constitutional competence of the courts.”

 At Cougar Camp, ‘waiting for the RCMP’

Meanwhile, under a pale grey sky at the camp, several people made coffee, planned meals and watched over a toddler. Others helped to build a small cabin to offer Bill Jones and other Indigenous Elders who might visit the camp a little more comfort than a tent or vehicle. By the end of the day, the cabin would have a split red cedar door and a small wood stove.

“We’re building this whole thing up and we’re here and we’re just waiting for the RCMP to come in and destroy everything we created in terms of a community and infrastructure,” O’Connell said.

Ahead of the court’s decision, the RCMP declined to comment on a timeline for enforcing the injunction and did not immediately respond to questions about what enforcing the injunction would look like.

The RCMP’s enforcement of injunctions against the Fairy Creek blockades was criticized by its own watchdog agency, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission. RCMP officers took “frequent unreasonable actions” during the Fairy Creek blockades, according to the commission’s 2024 report, and used “disproportionately intrusive” methods while enforcing the injunction.

“The commission is concerned about similarly broad and intrusive strategies being implemented during future protests, leading to similarly unreasonable searches and arrests,” the report concluded.

The RCMP did not immediately respond to questions about whether any actions or changes had been undertaken in its approach to enforcing injunctions since the report was released.

In court, the defence argued the injunction filed by the logging company is too broad, putting the safety and civil liberties of people at the blockade at risk. They argued the injunction area should only apply to the forestry tenure, and that a police enforcement order was unnecessary given the small number of people at the camp. Speaking outside the courtroom, Isitt warned “there’s a very high risk that the police will act with disregard for people’s basic human rights, as they did at Fairy Creek. So, if the judge feels she must issue an order, the terms need to be narrow, need to be carefully fashioned, to limit the risk of police abuse to the greatest extent possible.” 

One of Tsawak-qin’s lawyers dismissed this concern, telling the court, “The police are accountable, and there are methods for keeping them accountable.”“Blockaders seek to avoid accountability for their unlawful acts, for taking matters into their own hands when they have a concern with public policy,” the company’s lawyer said.

Francis granted an enforcement order, but denied a clause that would have empowered the police to take “any action that is reasonably necessary to prevent persons from contravening any provision of this order.”“I am very reluctant to endow the police with extra enforcement powers beyond those that were granted in the Teal Cedar injunction application,” she said referring to the injunction from the Fairy Creek blockade.

O’Connell recalled once thinking the Fairy Creek blockades could turn the tide. But the hope that blocking logging roads will actually save ancient trees has receded to a trickle.

“We all did everything we could,” he told The Narwhal. “It’s just hard to be here expecting to lose and still doing it.”

— With files from Zoë Yunker, Michelle Cyca and Lindsay Sample

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The B.C. government greenlit a watershed security strategy it co-developed with First Nations more than a year ago, according to an internal government document obtained by The Narwhal. But the province has failed to release the strategy despite repeated calls from First Nations partners to do so.

“I can’t tell you how deeply frustrating it is for me,” Xtli’li’ye Lydia Hwitsum, co-chair of the First Nations Water Caucus which co-developed the strategy, said in an interview. “We had done such good work.”

The BC NDP promised to develop a watershed security strategy during the 2020 election campaign. In early 2023, the province announced a $100-million endowment for a watershed security fund and launched public consultations through an intentions paper for the strategy. The paper outlined goals to strengthen local and Indigenous governance of watersheds, to build watershed knowledge and take a holistic approach to watershed management and ecosystem protection.

Cabinet approved the final strategy in early 2024, according to a December 2024 briefing document prepared for Water, Land and Resource Stewardship Minister Randene Neill, which The Narwhal obtained through a freedom of information request. 

A ministry spokesperson said its release was paused as the province built an implementation plan and worked to secure additional funding, but offered no timeline for when the strategy would be public. 

Aaron Hill, executive director of the conservation charity Watershed Watch Salmon Society, said “it’s very disappointing” the strategy hasn’t been released. 

“My impression of what happened is that the government got cold feet leading up to the last election and decided to put it on ice,” he said. “And that’s where it remains.”

Both Hwitsum and Hill said plans to release the watershed strategy seemed to stall amid public backlash to the government’s proposed changes to the Land Act, which would have brought the legislation in line with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. 

“When it came to our strategy, they just couldn’t get the courage together to do it,” said Hwitsum, a former chief of the Cowichan Tribes.

The ministry did not directly address these concerns in its response to The Narwhal’s questions.

Logging, urban development, climate change threaten watersheds across B.C.

In the meantime, watersheds across B.C. are under threat. Decades of clear-cut logging dramatically changed watersheds stretching from the coast through the Interior, Younes Alila, a hydrologist with the University of British Columbia’s faculty of forestry, told The Narwhal.

“We continue to lose our forest cover in B.C. at a very alarming rate,” he said. The result is a heightened risk of floods, drought and landslides, which threaten fish and other aquatic life, alongside the communities, farms and businesses that rely on access to clean water. 

Climate change compounds those threats, particularly in watersheds transformed by extensive urban and industrial development in ways that make them less resilient to extreme weather events. 

Just two years ago, pink salmon were left stranded and struggling for oxygen as water levels in xʔəl̓ilwətaʔɬ, the Indian River, dropped to dangerous lows amid an unrelenting drought. Two years before that, extreme rainstorms battered the province leading to widespread flooding and deadly landslides. 

“The situation is really scary,” Alila said, adding there’s “no doubt” a watershed security strategy is needed. Alongside investment in watershed restoration, he said the province needs to overhaul its forestry and water management policies to address the root causes that leave watersheds across the province in such a vulnerable state.

A more holistic approach is needed now, Hwitsum said, one that is co-developed with First Nations and places Indigenous Knowledge at the forefront. 

That the strategy the First Nations Water Caucus co-developed with the B.C. government has been set aside is “hugely deflating,” she said.

“We worked really hard for that and we were ready to hold that strategy up and say look, here’s a framework,” she said. 

The water ministry spokesperson said “the province agrees that more needs to be done to support watershed security and face the scale of the water challenges in B.C.” 

Alongside exploring options to bolster the water security fund, the spokesperson noted the government is working across ministries to reform water permitting, support farmers affected by drought and invest in community water conservation projects and critical infrastructure, including flood defences.

“The province is focused on supporting watershed security alongside First Nations, local governments, stakeholders, industry and the public,” the spokesperson said.

B.C. urged to raise industry water rates to bolster watershed security fund

As the First Nations Water Caucus continues to push for the strategy to be released, Hwitsum said the group is also looking at options to grow the watershed security fund.

The fund, which is currently co-managed by the Real Estate Foundation of BC and the First Nations Water Caucus, supports a range of projects focused on ecosystem health, reconciliation, climate resilience and sustainable economies. 

Earnings from the $100-million endowment are meant to provide annual funding for grants to support projects across B.C. But applications already exceed what it can afford to support while protecting the initial investment. In its first intake round in the spring of 2024, for instance, the fund received 131 applications requesting a total of $33.8 million in funding, but was only able to fund 26 projects totalling $5 million.  

In the December briefing document prepared for Minister Neill, government officials warned the fund “must grow to meet the scale of water challenges facing B.C.”

The water ministry spokesperson said the province has asked the federal government to contribute funds and is exploring other options including increasing government revenue to fund water priorities.

Hill sees a clear path forward: the province could increase the payments industrial users are required to pay for water.

“Quebec is a great model for this,” he said. It recently raised rates for companies that use water, but don’t store it, from $2.50 to $35 per million litres.

Currently, the B.C. government charges commercial water users — including mining, oil and gas and bottled water companies — $2.25 in rent for every million litres of fresh water they take. “We’re practically giving it away to large industrial users,” Hill said. 

“This is a huge province with these massive watersheds and all kinds of threats and issues that this fund is positioned to address,” he said. “It just needs more money.”

Editor’s note: The Real Estate Foundation of BC has financially supported work by The Narwhal. As per The Narwhal’s editorial independence policy, no foundation or outside organization has editorial input into our stories.

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A new peer-reviewed scientific study suggests logging practices in Ontario are unsustainable and out of line with the province’s own strategy for sustainably managing forests.

It’s no surprise to David Flood, a registered professional forester, who has long thought Ontario was permitting too many trees to be cut down. 

Flood is from Matachewan First Nation in northeastern Ontario, home to much of the province’s boreal forest. There, Flood’s community has watched as forests became smaller and more sparse over time, threatening the natural habitat for caribou and martens, two species that rely on mature forests for their habitat. 

Flood is the general manager for Wahkohtowin Development, a decade-old social enterprise held by three First Nations — Chapleau Cree, Missanabie Cree and Brunswick House — to strengthen Indigenous participation in forest and land management across their territories. 

“We’ve felt for a long time that there is overconsumption going on,” Flood said in an interview with The Narwhal.

The Ontario government has a forest management planning manual that directs forestry companies to determine sustainable levels and practices for logging, he said. But that leaves a lot “open to interpretation.”

“The way these plans run do not benefit habitat and animals and ecosystems that we rely on,” Flood said.

In January 2021, Flood reached out to three scientists to dig into the data on forest management in northeastern Ontario: Jay Malcolm, a professor emeritus with the University of Toronto’s Institute of Forestry and Conservation, Julee Boan, the partnership director with the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Justina Ray, the president and senior scientist of the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. 

Their study, published on Wednesday, confirms what Wahkohtowin Development has been witnessing for years: forest degradation has reached concerning levels in the pursuit of maximizing logging activity. The researchers looked at 7.9 million hectares of forest spreading south from around Hearst, Ont., including eight different areas of managed forest — an area just smaller than Lake Superior, if you were to drop the largest of the Great Lakes onto land.

The scientists found habitat for species, including caribou, has plummeted, and just over 20 per cent of the forest has been standing for more than a century.

The findings come as many voices, including First Nations and scientists, have expressed concern about the environmental impacts of Ontario’s Bill 5 and the federal government’s Bill C-5. Both pieces of legislation allow elected officials to exempt certain development and mining projects from laws that would minimize harm to natural habitat. Flood and the scientists worry Ontario’s forests will be even further diminished.

“We did the analysis and showed there’s a negative impact on our forests and there’s still a do-nothing attitude,” Flood said. 

Study finds northeastern Ontario lacks old-growth forests and caribou habitat

Ontario’s forest management strategy is rooted on the principle of natural disturbance emulation — a technical term for the practice of clear-cutting forests to mimic events that occur naturally, like wildfires and windstorms. These natural disturbances are important for forests to regenerate, preserving their biodiversity. By mimicking them through logging, the idea is to replicate these benefits while reaping the reward of timber. 

The problem is, that balance appears to be off. The study finds the rate of forest degradation is much more than what natural cycles allow.“In other words, we are logging way, way too much,” Malcolm, the lead researcher, told The Narwhal. 

The study looks at forest health between 2012 and 2021, comparing it to the state of a naturally disturbed forest and a forest managed to remove as much timber as possible. It offered several insights. Based on natural forest cycles, around 53 per cent of Ontario’s boreal forest should be more than 100 years old; the scientists found only 22 per cent of the area studied had been undisturbed for a century. 

Based on natural forest cycles, the scientists expected 76 per cent of the boreal forest they studied to be marten habitat; instead only 36 per cent of their habitat remained, and even that was in a fragmented state. “There were little bits here and there that the marten couldn’t possibly live in and run across,” Malcolm said. “It couldn’t. It just can’t.” 

And then for caribou, the findings were “the most devastating,” Malcolm said. Only 12 per cent of their habitat remained, versus the 76 per cent that would be present in a natural forest cycle.

“It’s all just so far in excess of what’s sustainable,” he said.

Malcolm said Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources doesn’t look at nature empirically. It uses computer models to design forests and then tries to emulate them, he said, adding that this approach is “leading them astray” because it’s not grounded in the reality of forests today. 

As the government gets ready to embark on a review of its forest management rules, Malcolm and his colleagues believe “the tools the government needs to fix this are not in their toolbox.” 

Instead of allowing companies to maximize timber, the study’s authors believe Ontario should look to implement sustainable harvesting practices like cordoning off some spaces from logging, pushing for partial clear cutting — meaning leaving some trees in an area standing — and forcing companies to move to different areas every few decades to let forests recover. 

“We’re not trying to say: don’t log,” Malcolm said. “We’re trying to say: log in a sensible way.”

Ontario’s minister of natural resources did not respond to The Narwhal’s request for comment by publication time.  

First Nation awaits response from Ontario over forestry lawsuit 

Flood said the latest study is the “most recently available science” to back up what his people have been seeing and arguing for years. “[The study] totally matches what’s happening on the ground,” he said. “This is why the forest isn’t the same as it was 150 years ago.” 

In 2022, Chapleau Cree First Nation, Missanabie Cree First Nation and Brunswick House First Nation jointly filed a lawsuit against the provincial government claiming the province had “undertaken and authorized forestry and related activities … which have significantly diminished the nations’ ability to exercise their Treaty Rights and maintain their way of life.” This includes their rights to hunt, trap and fish, and to access the forests and waters for spiritual and cultural practices.

In their statement of claim, the three nations argue the province’s forest management rules had failed to measure and mitigate the cumulative impacts of logging activity by permitting unfettered spraying of herbicides, including glyphosate, which the World Health Organization says is probably carcinogenic to people. 

“We can’t eat the berries after they’ve sprayed the forests,” he said. The chemical also threatens the health of moose, who shelter in the edges of the forests where herbicides are most commonly sprayed. 

The lawsuit also states the province exempts forestry companies from environmental oversight, including through the assessment process and species protection laws. The nations claim these failures “constitute a persistent pattern of error and indifference” that has harmed their way of life. 

The nations are still waiting for the province to respond to their statement of claim and subsequent evidence filings. No court date has been set.

“We need better mechanisms,” Flood said. “You can’t just clear the way.”

Updated on July 7, 2025, at 9:57 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to remove the timeline over which David Flood has been a registered professional forester. Flood has been working in forestry for 30 years but has been a registered professional forester for eight years.

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Note: This article discusses sexual violence. Please read with care. If you have experienced sexual violence, resources are available at Ending Sexual Violence. Because of the sensitive nature of discussing assault, The Narwhal has used pseudonyms for sources who preferred to remain anonymous to readers.

When the ground thaws every spring, a rag-tag workforce assembles across the country. Armed with shovels and bug spray, tree-planters head out into the Canadian wilderness to put baby trees in the ground, replanting recently logged forests. 

Operating in the shadow of the commercial logging industry, tree-planting is physically and psychologically demanding and the workforce skews young. Typically paid per tree, planters work long hours, trudging through cutblocks weighed down with heavy gear and bags full of seedlings, chased by voracious clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies and the occasional bear. 

Most of these places are pretty far flung — with dozens of workers sometimes flown in by helicopter or driven to the end of a logging road, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town. When access is so challenging, companies often set up remote bush camps, rows of tents squished together inside a bear fence or shared accommodations in a trailer. 

The work starts early and finishes late — day after day, followed by a single night off where there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but blow off steam. Planters often can’t leave camp during their downtime because they’re at the mercy of company transportation, whether that’s a helicopter flight or a day-long, dusty drive to town. That’s one reason why, on those days off, some camps can get pretty wild: drop a big group of young people into the middle of the forest and many of them will bring drugs, alcohol and an appetite for sex. 

To some, it’s an appealing lifestyle and a lot of fun. For others, it’s an environment that allows bad judgement, or worse. 

“It’s the perfect storm of a situation,” Anna, a veteran planter with 13 years of experience, says on a call from a remote logging camp in B.C. (Anna is not her real name. The Narwhal agreed to use pseudonyms to protect the identities of sources who spoke about sexual assault in camps.) “In tree-planting, you get a bit of a mixed bag of weirdos. Some people are truly themselves when they’re out here and it’s really great to see them blossom. But the things that make this job beautiful are also the things someone can use as a gateway to be a piece of shit.”

She’s talking about sexual violence and harassment. Current and former workers, as well as worker advocates, say it permeates through the industry and takes on a unique ugliness in the context of remote work. Anna describes herself as a “bush mom” these days — looking out for rookies and calling out bad behaviour when she sees it. She works on contract wildfire crews as well as tree-planting and says that similar dynamics — remote locations, close quarters, stressful work, scarce labour and not much to do on days off — means that gendered violence is common there as well.

“The further you get into some of these places, the weirder it gets with this sort of sliding social acceptance,” Anna says. “Sometimes you get into camps and they’re like, ‘Who’s gonna f*ck the hot rookie first?’ It becomes this weird game these dudes get competitive about — and it’s usually fuelled by alcohol.”

Karina Etzler has first hand experience. They were sexually assaulted in Ontario planting camps four times between 2018 and 2023, once as a planter and three times when they were a crew leader.

In one camp, most of the young men, including those who assaulted Karina and others, were “caught up in this sort of ‘boys club’ kind of culture,” they say in an interview. 

“They would just go around camp chanting and it was clear that to them it was fun and they thought it was lighthearted — but to everyone else it was an explicit and aggressive display of inconsiderate male power.”

“It felt like war to everyone else but they just didn’t see it.”

Tree-planting and the culture around it offers a lot of freedom to people who don’t easily conform to societal norms. It’s a seasonal job that gets workers away from desks and into the wilderness. The piecemeal pay means the harder you work, the more money you make. For some, heading out to camp for a couple of months each year is a means to living a more anarchic, free existence. But that freedom can come with a dark side — one that those in the industry are gradually accepting needs to be addressed.

Talking about sexual violence can carry stigma and like most survivors, the sources who came forward for this story didn’t file police reports about their assaults. Some have never told friends and family about what happened to them — there’s no record, other than their memories. While none of the sources named individuals or identified specific companies they worked for at the time, The Narwhal reached out to half a dozen silviculture companies across Canada to discuss this issue. None answered our questions. 

Every survivor said the culture of tree-planting can normalize sexual violence. That normalization was on display even in the brief few weeks of reporting this story. When The Narwhal put out a call for sources on a Facebook tree-planting forum called King Kong Reforestation, one of the first responses was from an anonymous member who wrote, “f*ck off, go find a problem that actually exists.” 

Airika Owen is co-ordinator of a multifaceted assault prevention program called Camp Assault Mitigation Project, or CAMP, which provides training and support for forestry, pipeline and other industries and remote workers year round. For the forestry sector, she says it’s especially important in the spring, as the planting season gets underway and a wave of newbies starts, and ideally it happens in person.

“We try to get out to as many as we can, but we’re a tiny non-profit in northern B.C. so we can’t do a ton in person,” Owen says on a call from her office in Smithers. “But we have flown to camps and we have driven probably thousands of kilometres on logging roads at this point.”

Owen says that while issues of gender-based violence are systemic across industries, jobs in remote locations such as tree-planting pose particular challenges.

“These workplaces are the most unique in Canada — they require kind of out of the box, impromptu solutions when problems like sexual violence arise,” she says. “I can’t just walk into a camp in the middle of nowhere in a tent at 7 o’clock at night with mosquitoes everywhere and press play on a video of a boss and a receptionist in an office building. It doesn’t speak to their experience at all.”

Owen says the sector has been responsive to calls for action but there’s no Band-Aid solution that will make the problem go away. Assaults still fall through the cracks — often leaving survivors to carry the weight of their trauma alone. 

‘The stars were lost from your eyes’

When Chris was 20 years old, she signed up for a season of tree-planting in Ontario. She had never slept in a tent before. She says she got into the industry for innocent reasons, including a belief that it was a good thing for the environment. 

A few days into her new job, she was raped.

Chris blamed herself. First of all, she’d been drunk. But also, the world around her was steeped in misogyny and she had absorbed the idea that she wasn’t good enough. Tree-planting is inextricably intertwined with productivity and a hierarchy follows: those who plant the most trees have the highest value. The workforce is about 40 per cent female, according to a 2021 industry report, but Chris says even when she outperformed her male colleagues, her achievements were downplayed, including by her superiors and colleagues. It forced her to develop a tough exterior and choke her demons down. 

“I was very confused and I was focusing on my planting,” she says of the aftermath of her assault. “I just dedicated myself to that. I loved the whole experience of being out in nature — it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” 

When Chris started finding her groove and getting a lot of trees in the ground, her abuser apologized to her for his actions. Yet at the same time, “the guy who did this would talk about it to his friends, really proud of himself for doing it and bragging about it,” she says.

The stories floated around camp, adding to the endless onslaught of gendered slights and daily comments. It all got inside her head and Chris found herself spiralling mentally, even as she made herself tougher and harder physically.

Karina also found the impossibility of avoiding their assailant to be one of the hardest parts of being sexually violated in a remote camp. Everyone goes to work together the next morning, piling into a pickup truck or van to head out to the cutblock.

“The next day I would just go about totally normal and even talk to the people that did horrible things to me, because my brain was…” They trail off, leaving the thought unfinished. 

“You’re in this isolated work environment and you mostly don’t really think about the traumatic things that happen to you because you’re still living in it,” Karina continues. “You have to pretend that nothing wrong happened. You kind of exist in this weird bubble while you’re there and everything just, I don’t know, feels kind of normalized, skewed.”

After she left camp, Chris became hostile to the people she loved — and herself. Her university grades plummeted and she considered dropping out. 

“I started treating myself really, really badly,” she says. “I wouldn’t shower properly, I wouldn’t brush my hair, I wouldn’t get new clothes. I would wear things that were really ratty and really dirty all the time — this was for years.”

Chris says the incident itself, as bad as it was, was “a blip” compared to the relentless psychological erosion of her value as a human being. The sexual assault was like a stone thrown into water, the centre of a much bigger thing. The ripples around it were a culture in which she was consistently and repeatedly demoralized and devalued.

“At the end of the whole planting situation, I had internalized misogyny so badly that my entire personality, everything changed,” she says, her voice cracking. “I went back home and my mom was like, ‘When you left, you used to have light in your eyes and when you came back it was like there was nothing. It was like the stars were lost from your eyes.’ My mom actually said that.”

Chris eventually found her path, travelling the world, completing two masters degrees and becoming a university professor working overseas. But she has never shared her story until now and says, “I’m still dealing with trauma.” 

Shortage of qualified tree-planters means abusers often aren’t held accountable, putting more people at risk

The tree-planting industry is a microcosm of broader society — sexual violence is everywhere. Because a vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported, estimates of the scale of the problem vary but hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, are sexually abused every year in Canada. In advocacy circles, an oft-quoted statistic is for every 1,000 cases of sexual violence, around 30 are reported to police and just three make it through the justice system to conviction.

“An existing culture that allows that kind of stuff gets amplified in remote working situations, but it doesn’t spontaneously occur there,” Karina says. “It’s a product of society that is just allowed to bloom a little more.”

Jordan Tesluk is a forestry safety advocate who has been involved in tree-planting since the early 1990s. He audits companies in B.C. and Alberta and considers the industry to be remarkably transparent about sexual violence — and says that transparency allows the sector to make progress in support and prevention. 

Tesluk points to a principles of conduct document drawn up by the Western Canada Forestry Association that holds the industry to standards for equitable hiring, providing a dignified workplace, preventing violence and responding when incidents do occur. 

He says other initiatives are in the works — “I’m personally working on a certification process for equality, diversity and inclusivity, which includes preventing violence and harassment” — while noting a policy-based approach only goes so far.

“Having some sort of a checklist, well, that’s not really helpful,” he says. “We don’t want a paperwork exercise. This calls for cultural and societal change — and that includes workers stepping up and taking responsibility for themselves and the way they relate to each other.”

For Tesluk, the biggest challenge is helping companies see this is part of a bigger problem and the only solution is talking about it. 

“How do I take away their fear that this is somehow going to reflect poorly on them and that it’s not going to single them out?” he says, explaining he tries to convince companies it’s not about calling them out so much as bringing them in “to be part of the solution.” 

Owen agrees that sexual violence is not “an industry-specific thing.” Even so, she says, companies should acknowledge they’re bringing workers into “an environment that has extra factors such as isolation and increased stress load and all of that.”

One persistent issue is very limited resources, including staff. Tree-planting — and work in remote areas more generally — faces a specific kind of labour scarcity, as companies need to ensure certain qualifications or certifications are covered in their crews.

“They’re really scrambling to try to duct tape responses together and come up with creative solutions that work in the middle of nowhere,” Owen says. “The first aid person might also be a peer support worker. They might also be a crew leader. You’re just trying to plug people and resources into square holes and trying to hammer them in and make them fit, because that’s all you have to work with 100 kilometres from the nearest town.”

August Nope, one of the founders of an advocacy organization called the Tree Workers Industrial Group, or TWIG, says staff shortages play into how management handles reports of assaults and harassment.

“Often there’s a bias,” he explains. “If it’s a rookie worker who had something happen to them and they’re making a complaint against a fifth-year crew lead who’s super helpful and that person is irreplaceable because he has his first aid ticket, then it’s going to be really difficult.”

Karina decided not to report an assault in part because of how unlikely it seemed that the perpetrator would be fired. “Even if they did an investigation and decided this actually happened, from what I’ve heard, they just move that person to a different camp,” they say. “If I know that’s going to happen, I’m just kind of pushing this predator off to hurt other people.”

That’s one reason why Karina decided to confront one of their assailants directly. They say they left that conversation feeling like their message — “Here’s why this is fucked up; here’s why you can’t do that” — was received and there was hope for changing the pattern of behaviour.

“I was under the impression that it got through to this particular person,” they say. 

But while the confrontation was the right decision for them personally, Karina says it had unintended consequences. Word travelled, and Karina heard that a director at another camp weaponized their courage against an acquaintance who tried to report a violent incident.

“She got sexually assaulted and went to tell him about it … and he basically was like, ‘Well, other people have just talked to their rapist about it — you should do that, that’s what Karina did.’ ”

Owen says there’s no one-size-fits-all approach but points out sexual violence isn’t treated the same as other safety issues.

“If there was bear attack after bear attack after bear attack in a season, or in a number of seasons, there would be massive overhaul and changes to any industry,” Owen says. Of course, a bear attack is hard to hide.

“But with sexual assault, so much of it the person just tries to keep their head down and get through the season,” she says. “Or they pack up and they leave and you never hear of it.”

Creating consent includes education, prevention and response

Groups like TWIG are working to create community, advocate for survivors and open up spaces for people to share their experiences, good and bad. Nope says real change requires both a cultural shift and realistic policies and procedures at the company level. Often, camp managers or others in positions of leadership are young and unprepared to handle incidents. Instead, they’re left to improvise under high-pressure conditions. 

Zero-tolerance policies, for example, might seem good at face value, Nope says. But they don’t mean much if they aren’t backed up by procedures for how to deal with things when they come up — because they inevitably will.

“People are using substances, people are drinking, so you just have to be ready to deal with a situation and not fool yourself into thinking that nothing bad is ever going to happen,” Nope says. “That one line that says, ‘We are a zero-tolerance place for harassment and assault’ — what do you do with that when something happens? If you’re the manager of a camp and you have no HR or sexual assault prevention training, based on that policy if anyone ever does something you’re supposed to fire them. But that’s not what happens.”

When Nope first started tree-planting 11 years ago, he was 17 and presented as female. 

“I certainly have a lot of personal experience in this area, unfortunately,” he says. It was years spent at different companies and camps that led to the founding of TWIG, “to start building a safe community. We have this problem in society and specifically in tree-planting camps, which is that consent culture doesn’t really exist.”

One of TWIG’s early projects was developing a 2021 pamphlet on sexual assault prevention.

“We worked really hard to disseminate those zines,” he says, laughing as he explains the group’s tactics, including sneaking copies into other companies’ camps and hiding them amongst the seedlings. “If we’re in the bush and there’s another tree-planting company, we’ll drop them in people’s caches.”

TWIG also throws parties in the off-season, modelling good behaviour and decision-making in the hopes that planters will take those safe practices back to their camps the following season.

“Sometimes it’s really about showing people what it can be like so they can bring that standard with them into their workplaces.”

Nope says that moving beyond a simple, gender-focused conversation about violence prevention to fostering true consent culture requires an understanding of how colonialism shapes our worldview — including in the forestry industry. 

The first step, he explains, is “learning how our language and the way that we move through the world, without realizing it, is based on taking what we want.”

“I want to keep working towards a world where we’re not comfortable taking whatever we want from a person, where we understand how to ask,” he continues. “I think it’s about teaching people to slow down and how to care about each other. Ultimately, the people who learn that, their lives are going to be so much richer because they’re going to understand how to have relationships of reciprocity with each other.”

Karina is still planting but no longer living in camps, instead accepting small contracts within driving distance from their home base in Halifax. Their hope for the future is complicated and generous. They say they’d like to see education and harm reduction that doesn’t ostracize or dismiss perpetrators, because they believe greater change can occur by teaching people to understand their actions, the harm they caused and what consent means. 

“No one thinks that they’re the problem, because everyone has this idea of every act of sexual violence or assault or rape being something very grand and obvious,” they say. 

“I think it usually isn’t. It could be anyone, really, and it stems from people not understanding what consent really is and what assault really is.”

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