The Forester Panel at the 2026 COFI Convention — titled Predictable and Economic Access to Wood — brought together five practitioners and researchers for a discussion moderated by Michael Armstrong, COFI Senior Vice President and Chief Forester. The panel covered the triad or three-zone forest management model, the gap between BC’s harvest targets, inter-jurisdictional comparisons, coastal forestry challenges, First Nations forest operations, and biomass. Panelists were Cheryl Hodder, Chief Forester of Wood Products Canada at Canfor; David Elstone, Managing Director of SparTree Group; Shannon Janzen, Principal of Hypha Consulting; Percy Guichon, CEO of Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation; and Christian Messier, Professor at the University of Quebec and co-founder of Habitat.
Armstrong opened by displaying a chart showing BC’s interior and coastal sawmill production declining by approximately 50% since 2017 while other Canadian provinces have remained relatively flat. Elstone, who produced the chart, said the pattern is not a boom-and-bust cycle — which would affect producers broadly — but a structural shift happening in one province. Hodder described the situation in BC as one of relentless uncertainty, stemming from global trade conditions, duties and tariffs, and provincial operating conditions and policy. Separately, she said what she sees on the ground from foresters is determination and resilience from people who love what they do.
Messier, who pioneered the triad approach in Quebec beginning in 2000, described a 15-year pilot on a one-million-hectare unit with Resolute Forest Products — now Domtar — that was built from the bottom up through extensive community and stakeholder engagement. He said the model works by separating forest activities into three zones: a protected zone, an extensive zone where multiple values are prioritized, and an intensive zone where harvesting is concentrated with less conflict. He said the pilot was a demonstrable success — less conflict, no additional cost, and broad stakeholder satisfaction — but was eventually shut down by the Quebec government, which wanted uniformity across the province rather than a locally managed system. He said a recent Quebec government attempt to reintroduce the triad failed because it was designed top-down without consulting the foresters who had run the original pilot, and was framed as a cost-reduction tool for industry rather than a conflict-reduction framework for all users. His advice for BC: implement it flexibly, bottom-up, and with genuine listening to all parties.
Janzen said BC’s coast and interior face distinct challenges but share common needs: a comprehensive forest inventory that covers the full land base so managers understand what they are working with, regional decision-making structures, and clarity around tenure and land management boundaries. She said the coast faces a particular transition challenge as the sector moves away from high-value old-growth cedar and log exports toward second-growth harvesting, where economics are more difficult. She said the coast is the one part of Canada where the forest sector can actually grow, and that the opportunity is real — but it requires boldness in adopting area-based management with genuine regional governance structures, including mechanisms for dispute resolution. She said conflict is expensive and that the tools to reduce it are already available. She also said the sector needs to think beyond hitting a harvest target as an end goal and instead manage forestry as something meant to continue in perpetuity — the objective being long-term sustainability rather than reaching a number and stopping.
On Forest Landscape Planning, both Janzen and Elstone said the process will only succeed if licensees — First Nations and non-First Nations alike — come to those tables as true partners rather than as defenders of their existing AAC allocations. Elstone said most FLP tables are fundamentally about relationships, and that if participants arrive focused primarily on protecting their stake, progress will stall. Janzen said FLPs represent an opportunity to get to regional area-based management with real dispute resolution structures, but that requires all parties to approach the table with genuine openness about what a shared future looks like.
Hodder identified two key changes needed in BC. The first is strategic: high-level policy alignment among ministries, and clarity about what the harvest target actually is — noting the disconnect between an annual allowable cut of 60 to 62 million cubic metres, a mandate letter target of 45 million, and a budget projection of 29 million. She said resolving that gap requires a long-term public policy commitment backed by political will and management fortitude to implement it. The second is personal: approaching difficult conversations with an assumption of good intent on all sides, moving from an adversarial dynamic to a collaborative approach to shared challenges.
Elstone said the most immediate practical step for BC is simply to stop making policy changes for a period of six months to a year, allow existing changes to be understood and operationalized, and assess their consequences before layering on further reform. He said the permitting and access issues being discussed now are the same ones that were documented and presented to government two years ago, and that the problem is not a lack of identified solutions but a failure to act on them.
Guichon spoke from the perspective of a remote First Nations forest company in the Chilcotin, where communities are harvesting mountain pine beetle-impacted stands as an act of stewardship — reducing wildfire risk and utilizing degraded fibre — but facing stumpage rates of negative $30 to $40 per cubic metre with no mechanism to offset those costs against more productive areas elsewhere in the same timber supply area. He called for cost-ledgering to allow stumpage from productive and unproductive areas to be blended across a TSA, arguing that the current system effectively concentrates harvesting near mills while leaving remote areas and remote First Nations communities without a viable path to market. On biomass, he said Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation has developed mobile grinding and chipping operations to process fire-killed wood from 2017 and beyond, creating jobs and reducing wildfire risk, but that the stumpage system creates perverse incentives — his company pays up to $10 per cubic metre for fire-killed pine while a neighbouring operation pays 25 cents for green wood — and that BC needs to create tenure and pricing structures that make biomass investment viable.
In a rapid-fire closing, each panelist identified one priority for the next 12 months: Elstone said stop making changes; Hodder said develop a strategic economic plan that gives all the current changes context and direction, and provide clarity on what a post-permit world looks like for companies operating under FLPs; Guichon called for local decision-making and appraisal system reform to distribute harvesting more equitably across the land base; Janzen said governance — specifically defining regional area-based management units with structures for dispute resolution; and Messier said flexibility — that any triad or three-zone model must be adapted to local conditions rather than applied as a uniform recipe.
Drafted with the assistance of digital tools to streamline the process.