A commentary by the national campaign director for the Wilderness Committee.
In the long battle over old-growth forests in B.C., September 2020 was a moment of hope.
After promising to deliver solutions on the contentious issue of logging in threatened ancient forests, the NDP government finally released the results of its Old Growth Strategic Review panel: a comprehensive report based on the largest public review on forest policy ever done in the province.
This report was sweeping. It showed status quo forest management was broken and prescribed a paradigm shift. This was seen as vindication for conservationists who had been saying the same for decades.
It set milestone dates and a three-year timeline to implement necessary changes for old-growth protection and forest policy reform. The government committed to implement the report’s 14 recommendations in their entirety before calling a snap election in which they promised to protect old growth forests. Those three years have passed, though, and not one of the 14 recommendations is complete. At-risk old-growth forests continue to be clearcut. The NDP government hasn’t kept its promises.
Since September 2020, government attention to old-growth has come in fits and starts. In June 2021, the Fairy Creek blockades had exploded into the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history and garnered headlines around the world.
The NDP government announced it would accept deferrals — temporary holds on logging — in the Fairy Creek watershed and the nearby central Walbran Valley at the request of local First Nations. A few weeks later, it announced the formation of an expert Technical Advisory Panel to help determine which old-growth forests in B.C. are most threatened.
Immediate action to protect at-risk old-growth was a key recommendation of the original report in 2020. That it took the provincial government more than nine months to begin determining what constitutes “at-risk old-growth” speaks volumes and is a perfect indicator of its pace.
Thankfully the technical panel worked more quickly: its recommendations were released in early November 2021. Chief among these was the deferral of 2.6 million hectares of the most threatened old-growth, less than five per cent of B.C.’s total forested area. The government said these deferrals were only its intention, to be enacted after the go-ahead was given by First Nations.
This was a good standard, but it’s also a double standard, as that explicit permission has never been required for logging. The province passing the buck to First Nations without providing adequate resources and assistance was widely condemned by Indigenous leaders in B.C.
In 2022, more updates on the progress towards these deferrals were consistently packaged to sound as hopeful as possible. Then in February 2023, the government announced that 2.1 million hectares of old-growth has been deferred to date. It later clarified that less than half of that is within the area the technical panel had earmarked.
The NDP government has withheld specific information about these deferrals and whether or not they have actually stopped any planned logging in threatened forests — as opposed to simply setting aside stands that weren’t slated for logging in the first place. Improved public information and transparency, another key recommendation of the 2020 report, remains undelivered.
Talk-and-log has been the norm in B.C. for decades, with governments vowing to answer the public desire to protect old-growth, setting new goals and launching more processes and studies, then continuing to permit the destruction of irreplaceable forests.
Unfortunately, the NDP has proven itself loyal to the broken status quo. So far, the B.C. government has not shown the will or the courage to deliver the paradigm shift it promised three years ago.
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
