As B.C.’s forestry industry licks its wounds following a series of recent mill closures, B.C.’s forest critic says truck loggers are hurting, too.
Kamloops-North Thompson MLA Ward Stamer attended the Truck Loggers Association’s 81st annual convention last month, and came away with a dire picture of how these B.C. workers are feeling in terms of their job security.
“I was in the industry as a logging contractor with my dad, and they’ve always had six months, eight months, almost a year’s worth of work laid out,” Stamer said. “Now there’s some of them that don’t even know what they’re going to be doing within a month … They’ve never seen it like this before.”
Stamer lamented the closing of the Atli Chip mill near Port McNeill, announced last month. He said the closure was unexpected, but not altogether unsurprising given the domino effect set in motion by a previous Crofton pulp mill closure on Vancouver Island.
He said “we never heard a peep” about the Atli Chip mill closure in the week before it happened, “but that’s what happens when you get something like a pulp mill that goes down, it can drag anywhere between four to six solid mills with it.”
Stamer explained that mills need as close to total utilization of trees as possible to stay viable. When a pulp mill closes, there’s nowhere for some wood products to go, and value-added becomes value lost.
“There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be utilizing all the wood fibre that we have,” Stamer said, adding there shouldn’t be any “junk piles” being burned.
“You should be able to chip it and ship it,” he said. “And when you lose a pulp mill, now you lose not only the ability to be able to bring in all the different value-added, but it shuts down those businesses because they have to be able to sell everything that they make.”
There was once a time when forestry businesses could afford to lose 10 per cent of their volume by foregoing selling their wood waste to chip, pellet and pulp mills, according to Stamer.
“They can’t do that anymore,” he said.
There is a chain reaction of closures that has B.C.’s forestry industry heading to a crisis point, according to the Conservative forest critic.
“The 100 Mile West Fraser mill goes down. The next thing you know, the pellet plant in Williams Lake goes down, because they were interconnected,” he said. “In this industry, we’re all connected.”
Fixing the problem is about boosting the harvest rate in the province, and Stamer said there shouldn’t be excuses given what other countries have done.
He pointed to Sweden, which has more than doubled its timber volume in the past century, according to Swedish Forest Industries. Meanwhile, B.C.’s annual allowable cut is going the other direction, dropping about nine per cent since 2021, according to the Ministry of Forests.
However, there are factors that complicate this comparison. Swedish Forest Industries attributes much of the country’s success in boosting its harvest rate to clear-cutting, which it says is a suitable practice for the kinds of forests found in Sweden. But it’s a controversial practice in B.C., where there has been plenty of political pressure to avoid it where possible. Though it remains a highly common practice in B.C. (more recently, clearcutting with reserves has been the prevailing method), experts point to its environmental harm and its potential to cause or worsen extreme flooding events.
Nonetheless, B.C.’s harvesting levels are lagging. What has changed more significantly than the annual allowable cut in recent years is the percentage of that cut that is actually harvested. Historically, the province’s harvest level has been around 78 percent of the annual allowable cut. That’s down to 65 percent over the last five years, with levels declining in the last two years, the ministry told Black Press Media in an email.
“The reasons for this gap include impacts from wildfire, the decline of beetle-salvage opportunities, increased costs affecting economic operability, volatile markets, and conservation efforts,” the ministry said.
A number of factors have led to the series of mill curtailments in B.C., including volatile markets, low pulp prices, shrinking fibre supply, climate-driven wildfires, and punishing duties and tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump, according to the ministry.
The challenges in the forestry industry that are directly causing uncertainty for logging contractors are also myriad. The ministry said increases in consultation and some “evolving” land use decisions are affecting fibre availability. As well, it said it’s harder to access fibre from longer distances as the province shifts from old growth forests to second growth forests.
The ministry said work is underway to eliminate backlogs, streamline permitting and make processes more efficient in the industry.
And there are some positive indicators, according to the ministry.
“Over the past year, we have reduced cutting-permit timelines from 40 days to 25 days. This includes wildfire salvage permits, where last year, for the first time in years, we actively began harvesting stands burned during the same wildfire season,” the ministry said.
“BC Timber Sales has sold 25 per cent more volume between April 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2025, as compared to the same period in the previous year,” it added.