Premier David Eby told the annual gathering of the B.C. Council of Forest Industries (COFI) on Friday said that the government plans to ease industrial carbon prices for pulp mills as the province’s forestry sector continues to struggle to remain competitive.
“We have been working with COFI to address costs faced by the sector,” he said. “Whether it is in relation to water permits or carbon pricing.”
B.C. axed its consumer carbon tax last year, but kept industrial carbon pricing, a mechanism by which companies must pay for the pollution they release into the atmosphere. This pricing system ideally encourages producers to clean up.
But Eby says the government wants to make it fair for pulp mills, which cannot easily reduce emissions coming from lime kilns.
“Putting costs on for no reason, for no end goal, is something that we do not want to do,” Eby said.
These changes come amid deep struggles for B.C.’s forest industry, with mill closures and job losses across the province. The last workers left Domtar’s Crofton pulp mill just days before the COFI convention.
The primary issue for the industry is the punishing American duties and tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber, which make B.C. forest products prohibitively expensive south of the border. Other complaints include lack of access to economically viable timber, excessive red tape and long permitting times.
Interim B.C. Conservative Leader Trevor Halford also spoke at the convention on Friday.
“David Eby is going to come in here, and he’s going to blame American tariffs on softwood lumber for the decline of your industry,” Halford said. “And some of that is true, let me be clear. But we all know that there are deeper structural domestic issues that we’ve neglected here in B.C.”
He said that under the NDP, the approach to the forest industry has been “managing decline,” rather than working to boost growth and create jobs.
A panel at the COFI convention illustrated how B.C.’s annual cut declined at a much faster rate than other jurisdictions. When asked why, Eby said there was a bump in production as the province worked to cut down and use up trees killed by beetles, followed by a few down years because of wildfires “vaporizing” large swaths of forests.
But he also acknowledged the need to cut red tape.
“That doesn’t mean that I think the provincial government is off the hook on this at all,” he said. “We have an important role to play here to make life easier for the sector — more predictable, faster permits.”
Others link the industry’s current fortunes with the over-exuberant extraction of previous decades.
Eddie Petryshen of the conservation group Wildsight says we are still in the “plunder mindset” when it comes to the province’s forests and that we need a transition plan away from “business as usual.”
“The chickens have come home to roost,” he said. “We’ve exhausted our forests, and we’ve exhausted our land base in many parts of the province.”