‘There’s a lot at stake’: BC’s forestry industry lost 10,000 jobs in 2023

It’s no secret that British Columbia’s forestry industry is a massive economic driver for the province.

According to the BC Council of Forest Industries (CoFI), forestry contributes $17.4 billion to BC’s gross domestic product and creates around 100,000 good-paying jobs, both direct and indirect.

However, that is obviously a living number from year to year, and in 2023 that figure dropped to 90,000, according to CoFI’s economic impact study published in April.

That’s 10,000 jobs lost in 2023 alone, with half of them being direct and the other half being indirect or induced.

Those job losses are coming as BC’s harvest levels are declining, from 50 million cubic metres of forest in 2021 down to 43 million in 2022 and 35 million in 2023.

CoFI president and CEO Linda Coady says the big issue is access to logs, and credits that to a pair of issues – the permitting process and changes occurring in land-use planning.

“We do feel that the permitting and regulatory process needs to be improved and that would help open up more access to logs going to sawmills, then chips from the logs will go to pulp mills,” she said in an interview with NowMedia earlier this week.

Forestry is BC’s second leading export, behind only energy, but Coady says “there’s no doubt we could do better.”

The annual allowable cut in BC is set by the chief forester, currently Shane Berg, and it’s based on scientific and land-use planning considerations.

The number is typically set around 60 million cubic metres per year, but BC only harvested a little over half of that in 2023.

To put that in perspective, Finland has a third of the forested area as BC, but harvests twice as much per year.

And the comparison between Finland and BC, which Coady admits has some flaws due to the different types of forests and other factors, can also be looked at from a wildfire perspective.

Over the past decade, Finland has averaged 364 hectares of forest burned in wildfires each year, while BC has averaged an astonishing 720,000 hectares.

Coady said forestry companies can help play a role in wildfire mitigation through methods like the strategic thinning of forests, moving debris and more.

However, that becomes more difficult if the industry is in decline, which is why CoFI is calling on the government to accelerate actions being put in place to stabilize forestry in BC.

“There’s a lot of change happening; there’s a lot at stake,” she said. “We need to agree on how to move forward. There are some solutions on the table, but we gotta get going on them.”

Watch Coady’s entire interview with NowMedia below and click here to see CoFI’s 2024 economic impact study.

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