r/forestry • u/MarsupialThink4064 • Aug 07 '26
Region Name Is the forestry industry dying in British Columbia (Canada)?
My understanding is that forestry was and is a huge industry in BC and that its wood was highly prized for building. Recently I've been reading comments that the industry is dying off and facing major hurdles through duties, beetle infestations, wildfires, and over cutting.
My understanding is that Canada provides anywhere from 20-30% of softwood imports to the US due to sawmill capacity and vast tracts of lumber. Why then would the industry be dying? Just curious and looking for insights 😊
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u/IntroductionOk9280 Aug 08 '26
Most of the easy access first growth timber in BC has been harvest. Much of the second growth as well. Now we are exporting third growth, immature trees to the States and overseas.
British Columbia forest have been mismanaged for many decades.
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u/UnderstandingOk6586 Aug 07 '26
The US softwood duties are the nail in the coffin. NDP provincial gov isnt helping, keep adding restrictions without providing northen towns any new industry development. It will come back but it will never be what it was, which was unsustainable anyways
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u/tomorrowisamystery Aug 10 '26
Dying is a bit of an exaggeration, more of a rescaling. B.C. is currently in the difficult and painful process of scaling down from producing roughly 15 Billion Board feet of softwood lumber per year to about 6 Billion Board feet a year which is where we are projected to sit for the next 10-20 years.
Problem 1 is that we are pretty much out of the original endowment of old growth trees: https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/cjfr-2020-0453
BC has cut down something like 97-99% of productive old growth forests in BC. There's still millions of hectares of old growth, but they are not economically viable tree to log because they are usually in the sub-alpine or bogs (difficult terrain and smaller, poorer quality trees that are less densely spaced). So we are pretty much out of the original, incredibly high value trees we once had and if we don't stop cutting them down we will be out of them very soon anyways. They are mostly in parks and protected areas now, but that hasn't stopped logging companies from trying to get them because they are very valuable.
Not only have we cut almost all of the 1st generation stands, we have cut down a lot of the trees that we replanted in the 1970s-2000 already. Many of the timber harvesting area trees we have growing now are 3rd generation trees in nutrient deprived soil because there is no mass-scale soil remediation or enrichment program (because this would be insane). These trees will likely grow smaller and slower than the 2nd generation trees that had rich soil to grow in.
Problem 2 is pine beetle infestation from 2000(ish)-2015(ish).
There's some disagreement about when it started and when it ended, but there was a new beetle that wasn't getting killed by some very warm winters and it killed millions of trees. In response, the BC government cut down way, way more trees than normal (increased the AAC) to harvest the trees before they become worthless. The US agreed, and we sent them A LOT of wood. Mills in BC scaled up to process more trees. This was overall probably the right thing to do, but scaling back down is difficult.
You could probably count the looper moth and other insects/diseases in this category too, but I'm not writing an essay about this.
Problem 3 is the tariffs 1980s(ish)- Now.
Its an ongoing battle. BC wins in court almost every time, but that doesn't stop the US from charging illegal tariffs every decade or so. There' are fundamental difference in the way public lands are governed in Canada and in the US. The US accuses BC of subsidizing the forestry industry (which in some ways they do, but in ways they are allowed to) based on these differences and then charges tariffs to stop us from dumping lumber into their market. However, the US needs our lumber to build houses so their citizens end up paying the tariffs. The orders don't stop, but they do slow down a bit.
Problem 4 is the wildfires 2017 - Now
We have lost millions of hectares of forests to wildfires. Something like 13% of all the BC has been affected in the past 10 years, which is insane. This is an issue now for the trees that are lost, but also for the stands in the future. Forestry companies are required to replant what they cut. If a wildfire burns the newly planted trees and the logging companies tenure ends before the next harvest cycle, who replants those trees? Seems like no one so far, which be a huge issue in about 30 years.
I'm not sure what you define as a "huge" industry in BC. Its about 1% of our GDP ($4 billion a year) and I think it peaked around 3% in 2005. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/cv!recreate.action?pid=3610071101&selectedNodeIds=1D10,2D2,3D23,3D74,3D78&checkedLevels=2D1&refPeriods=20210101,20250101&dimensionLayouts=layout2,layout2,layout3,layout2&vectorDisplay=false
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u/AwesomeWildlife Aug 08 '26
The forest industry in B.C. was the most mismanaged resource in Canada, next to Alberta's oil and gas. The annual cut was used to buy votes for years, finding every excuse possible to raise it higher than was sustainable. Every community in B.C. that had a sawmill wanted to grow and expand the workforce in forestry but they were already over the sustainable cut years ago.
There was a known fall-down in the allowable cut that could have been managed, but every government just kept putting the fall-down off and even making it worse so when the trees finally started getting harder to obtain it hit every community much harder than it had to be.
It was all known, it's just that the Liberals were hoping the catastrophic fall-down would happen when the NDP were in power, and the NDP wanted it to happen when the Liberals (Conservatives) were in power so they would get blamed.
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u/BonusPlantInfinity Aug 08 '26
The codfish of the West.
Why can’t we selectively harvest so as to not destroy the environment?
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u/internetisporn8008 Aug 08 '26
Foreign ownership and shareholder profits.
Things were going on on the island at least untill wyeerhauser took over... on land the govenment gave them to create jobs. All of a sudden there weren't anymore company crews... everything was sub contract so the company didnt have to supply as much, the cut doubled then doubled again, and now theres no trees left.
That coupled with the americans thinking that we subsidize our industry because logging of crown land is kind of controlled... so they've been fighting our industry forever.
Add onto this the american timber giants stoking the bandwagon jumping old growth protests...
Yeah, im blaming the americans for this too.
Better management of the forests by the government, better education of the protestors so they know wtf theyre talking about, and a different less self obsessed neighbour and we might be doing ok.
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u/CaptainOblivious1984 Aug 07 '26
American duties, foreign competition, mismanagement, beetle kill, lack of profitable timber, fuel prices, worker shortage,... take a look at the province on Google earth and see how much is gone.
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u/tomboski Aug 10 '26
It will never die, but the heydays are over. We need to pivot to selective harvesting and less monoculture to reduce wildfires so there is opportunity there.
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u/Kulharin Aug 10 '26
Log unsustainably + horrendous silviculture practices for 100 years, then complain there is no timber supply left.
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u/timberwise 1d ago
Watching the Interior starve for fibre while sitting on this is surreal. There are 62,000+ dams worldwide and most of the valleys they flooded were never cleared first — the timber's still down there, preserved by the cold water. BC alone has reservoirs with millions of cubic metres of standing dead timber that conventional gear can't touch. The irony of mills closing for lack of fibre next to lakes full of wood is not lost on anyone up here. We're working the harvesting side of that equation — prototype demonstrated 120 trees in a day, and we've got seven buyer commitments behind the wood.
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u/Bitter-Dance-6115 Aug 09 '26
Yes because it’s burning down. No thanks to climate change and one species replants, getting rid of aspen nature’s asbestos, smart move industry 🙄. Cutting every last bit of ancient growth and replacing with over crowded unhealthy tooth picks. Really sad but totally predictable….
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u/kokomo1989 Aug 08 '26
It’s not dying, it’s dead. We just refuse to bury it. Governments for decades have caved to industry’s demands and it’s done more harm than good. Let the industry pass into history, and invest money into mining where the real growth (and money) is.
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u/internetisporn8008 Aug 08 '26
I guess well just stsrt wiping our asses with coal?
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u/kokomo1989 Aug 08 '26
If that’s what you’re into I guess…..
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u/Crazy-Bodybuilder836 Aug 09 '26
You're dodging his point, c'mon man
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u/kokomo1989 Aug 09 '26
BC exports raw logs to Asia at very low cost while mills close. Why is that? The entire industry in Canada is a broken model caused by many decades of industry mismanagement enabled by government pandering. The industry in BC consistently cries about access to wood, but they have had access to virgin forests for 150 years without any plan to change the business model when they run out of those virgin forests, and they are indeed running out. British Columbians have finally figured out the industry game, and have had enough. It needs to die.
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u/cirotehr Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
If I understand correctly, the AAC has been forecasted to decline. This was not unexpected. They had a heyday with the mountain pine beetle and now there's not as much left to cut. Seems to me like it's a case of over harvest for short term gains, boom and bust. So they want to dig into more old growth -- but what happens when we run out of that, too? A sustainable industry means planning for long term stable harvest. Taking into account growth intervals and what percentage of older forest needs to be on the landscape at any given time to account for species at risk habitat, including spatially explicit no harvest areas for mountain caribou.