Forests Minister Ravi Parmar is in the midst of an eight-day trade mission to Asia to forge some new ties for B.C.’s forestry industry, blaming U.S. tariffs for recent mill closures and trying to find new places to sell B.C. wood products.
“The reason these mills are curtailing and closing is not because of government policy, rather because of the actions of Donald Trump and his assertive tactics on forestry workers in our forest sector in British Columbia,” he told reporters in a call from Tokyo on Wednesday.
But B.C. Conservative Forests critic Ward Stamer doesn’t see it that way, arguing that the B.C. government has hampered the province’s forestry sector through excessive rules and regulations.
“For whatever reason, this government doesn’t seem to want to make any changes to policy or regulations and recognize that it’s not just Donald Trump’s fault, it’s not just the federal government’s fault,” Stamer told Black Press Media.
Both acknowledge that the recent announcement of the closure of the West Fraser timber mill in 100 Mile House is a result of the company being unable to access economically viable timber.
Parmar said the company applied for seven permits this year — and was granted every one within 25 days — but that was all the profitable timber the company could find to log.
“When you have 45-per-cent duties and tariffs, full fibre no longer becomes viable for them to move, especially when you’re reliant on the United States as a sole trading partner,” he said. “It’s why we have to diversify.”
Parmar’s mission to Asia includes stops in South Korea and Japan, and he is joined on the trip by First Nations leaders and industry representatives.
Japan is the second-largest market for B.C. lumber by value, buying $887 million worth of product in 2024.
This is still dwarfed by the U.S., which in 2024 took in 74.8 per cent of B.C.’s softwood lumber, worth roughly $4.5 billion.
Parmar said he has already struck a couple of deals that have resulted in the signing of memorandums of understanding for companies to buy Canadian wood products.
While he promotes the forestry industry, Parmar defended the province’s record on environmental protection, despite a new Sierra Club report that the province “continues to prioritize timber supply over ecological resilience.
Parmar said old-growth logging is down more than 50 per cent since 2021, when old-growth deferrals were introduced.
“It shows a clear downward trend,” he said.
The Sierra Club counters that much of the land set aside was already in the process of protection before the deferrals were introduced, and that logging is still four times more likely in at-risk forests recommended for deferral than on other stands of old growth.
The Sierra Club’s study found that nearly five per cent of the 11 million hectares of old-growth forest that existed in B.C. in 2021 has been logged in the four years since.
Critic wants companies to earn more per tree
Stamer, a former logger himself, wants the government to ease restrictive regulations to ensure forestry companies can get more money per log, while making it cheaper to do business.
He gave the example of the added costs of the requirement to build a bridge instead of a fish culvert on certain logging roads.
“That’s 10 times more than a fish culvert,” he said of the cost.
Stamer doesn’t deny that the tariffs have some impact — saying it’s good that Parmar is over in Asia trying to strike some new deals — but he doesn’t think that will get the fibre moving in the short term.
A couple of quick actions that Stamer suggested are making it easier for companies to access burnt timber after fires, and for the province to encourage the use of scraps that end up in burn piles for biomass power generation systems.
“If I were the forests minister, I wouldn’t be having junk piles that we would burn,” he said. “I’d be making sure that we could be grinding it up and creating electricity, just like our pulp mills are doing.”
On the whole, Stamer wants trade diversification, but said there is more the provincial government could do to make things easier for industry.
“The minister is pointing the fingers in the wrong direction because he should also be pointing at himself,” he said. “This government is partly responsible for the mess that we’re in.”