Conservative Forestry Critic Ward Stamer wants to decrease regulation of the logging industry and an increase to the annual allowable cut. Logging proponents love to cite how important and valuable the industry is to B.C. communities. The reality, however, is quite different. Here are some figures that show clearly – in almost every metric – that logging is less valuable to B.C. communities and the B.C. economy than tourism. … These figures of the logging industry are from 2022 and the tourism figures are from 2022 and 2023, so they are roughly comparable. Tourism employed over 125,700 people; logging and related industry employed approximately 100,000. Tourism resulted in $5.9 billion in wages and salaries in 2023, 11.8 per cent higher than in 2022; Logging and related industries resulted in approximately $9.1 billion. There were 16,860 tourism businesses in operation in 2023, mostly in small communities, many of them remote and, increasingly, more of them Indigenous owned.