Canada and Mexico align their positions ahead of next week’s pivotal CUSMA review meeting. In other Business news: a BC mining-rights lawsuit—tied to a First Nations agreement—invoked the 2002 Carrier Lumber precedent; CN Rail was fined $435,000 for a BC wildfire; Seaspan sold its barge division to Hodder Tugboat; China’s softwood log imports declined 17%; and Russia’s lumber is on course to fall 4%. Meanwhile: questions remain as investigators probe the Longview pulp mill implosion; and a new Wood Fuel and Heating Association is launched in the UK.
In Forestry/Wildfire news: officials urge swift action on the Senate’s Canada on Fire recommendations; US Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz is sandwiched between political hires; supplier choices by Indonesia-based APRIL challenge FSC’s remedy process; a study says plant diversity in Italy’s Norway spruce plantations is lower than in native forests; and Tasmania corrected the record on native forest logs sent to Victoria for processing.
Finally, a new book says bats are intelligent, trainable and essential to healthy forests.
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog News Editor
Canadian officials will meet their Mexican and American counterparts on July 1 for the first tri-lateral meeting to review the Canada-U.S.-Mexico (CUSMA) agreement, a spokesperson for Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc confirmed. …LeBlanc’s office tells CTV News the meeting is scheduled to be virtual for now, but that things could evolve. Minister LeBlanc and Chief Trade Negotiator Janice Charette met with the United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on the sidelines of the G7 summit in France last week. …July 1 is the deadline for all three parties involved in the trade pact to decide whether to renew the deal for another 16 years, withdraw from the agreement altogether, or start an annual rolling review process that could last years.
A Toronto company is suing BC, saying it was stripped of its mining rights as part of a deal with the Gitxaała Nation. In a lawsuit filed in BC Supreme Court, MCC Canadian Gold Ventures says it was asked to rescue a small gold mine on Banks Island, south of Prince Rupert. But then the BC government stripped its mining rights to offset some of the impacts of another BC Supreme Court ruling involving the Gitxaała. The company says it invested millions in the property and now cannot move ahead on the project. …The province has not filed a response. …MCC said their case has “striking” parallels to a lawsuit launched by Carrier Lumber in the 1990s. In 2002, the province paid a large settlement to Carrier Lumber over a lawsuit it won over government decisions the company said made it impossible to harvest timber in the BC Interior.
CN Rail has been fined $435,000, having been found responsible for causing a wildfire near Spences Bridge a year after the nearby town of Lytton was devastated by a catastrophic wildfire. According to a June 17 BC Forest Appeals Commission decision, CN Rail was found to have caused a wildfire that burned outside of Spencers Bridge in September 2022. Last year, the BC government issued a $435,371 fine to the company. Broken down, the fine covered $60,000 for damaged or destroyed mature Crown timber, $27,000 for damaging or destroying forest and grassland resources, and a further $348,000 to cover the cost of controlling wildfire K72249. “During their investigations, Natural Resource Officer Service staff collected field information and photographs and obtained recorded statements from several eyewitnesses. As a result of their investigation, the Natural Resource Officer Service alleged that CN Rail had contravened… BC Wildfire Regulation(s),” the decision reads.
China remains one of the world’s major importers of softwood logs and lumber, but its 
Russia’s softwood lumber production is on course to fall 2 to 4 per cent in 2026, a second straight annual decline for an industry stripped of its European customers and now watching its Chinese lifeline weaken. That is according to consultancy Strategy Partners, whose forecast in Russian business daily Kommersant follows an official 2.5 per cent fall in 2025 to 28.5 million cubic metres and a sharper 4 per cent drop across the first four months of this year. The downturn is already visible in official data, with Russia’s Economic Development Ministry ranking wood-processing among the country’s weakest industrial performers after output fell 4.3 per cent in the third quarter of 2025 and 7.8 per cent in October. Deputy Industry and Trade Minister Mikhail Yurin told a Federation Council committee the sector had entered a downward trend, warning output could fall 20 to 30 per cent in 2026 under the worst-case scenario.
Mass timber is often promoted as an environmentally friendly building material, and in many cases that reputation is deserved. A grounded way to view that claim is through actual building systems, and 
In his 2025 book, The Genius Bat, Yossi Yovel, an Israeli ecologist, describes experiments he conducted with six Egyptian fruit bats, including an exercise in which he trained them to land on a target and wait for him to approach with a reward — a slice of banana. …Many readers will find the image of bats as trainable, friendly and possessing intelligence, distinct personalities and perhaps even a sense of humour to be quite jarring. But this effect is exactly what Yovel is striving to achieve. His goal with the book is to dispel the many myths surrounding bats and to convey what remarkable and endlessly fascinating creatures they actually are. …Due to misinformation many people are unaware of the benefits bats provide by eating massive amounts of harmful insects, producing guano, which is an important natural fertilizer, and pollinating plants and spreading seeds. Without bats, humans would be in deep trouble.
Residents in Nelson, Creston, Kaslo and surrounding areas are invited to share their input on the development of the Kootenay Lake Forest Landscape Plan (FLP) to guide forest-management decisions in the area. The Kootenay Lake FLP initiative focuses on improving forest management for the 1.2-million-hectare Kootenay Lake Timber Supply Area. People can share their thoughts through a survey from June 22 until Aug. 21, 2026. The Kootenay Lake FLP team will be present at local events so people can learn more about forest landscape planning and ask questions. …FLPs are being developed through collaborative planning with First Nations and engagement with forest licensees, local communities and other stakeholders in each local area. The partnering First Nations in the Kootenay Lake FLP are yaqan nuʔkiy, Shuswap Band, Adams Lake Band, Skwlāx te Secwepemcúl̓ecw and Ktunaxa Nation Council Society.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) announced Monday a 10-year extension of the Indian Trust Asset Reform Act (ITARA) Demonstration Project, a program that allows participating tribes to exercise greater authority over the management of forest trust lands and surface leasing activities. The extension … continues a federal initiative designed to give tribes more control over the management of their trust assets while reducing federal oversight and bureaucracy. Under the program, tribes engaged in forest land management or surface leasing on trust lands may develop an Indian Trust Asset Management Plan. Approved plans allow tribes to establish their own forestry and surface leasing regulations and assume certain approval authorities that would otherwise remain with the Department of the Interior. …Officials said the extension reflects the department’s continued support for tribal self-governance and recognition of tribal expertise in managing forest trust assets.
The U.S. Forest Service published the results of a six-city study delving into consumers’ participation in urban wood systems and their interest in urban wood products. According to the Forest Service, for the past 20 years, approximately twice as many trees were removed annually from urban areas in the United States as has been harvested annually from the U.S. National Forest System. Yet, most of this urban wood is treated as waste instead of as a valuable resource to generate economic growth and sustainable cities. The waste and underutilization of this neighborhood resource has been countered by a growing movement to divert urban wood from the waste stream and utilize this significant resource in an array of wood products, from high-end furniture to construction grade lumber to wood chips. Using removed wood for valuable products both avoids substantial waste disposal fees and can be a foundation of profitable businesses and markets. 
MONTANA — More than 190,000 acres of recommended wilderness in the Flathead National Forest could be opened up to off-road vehicles (ORVs), according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture secretarial memorandum that leaked earlier this month. The memo, which laid out federal officials’ plans to unwind protections that have been in place in northwest Montana since 2018, prompted local and national advocacy groups to rush to action. Following four years of interagency collaboration, environmental analysis and an extensive public participation process, the Flathead National Forest’s Revised Land Management Plan was officially adopted in 2018, designating 193,403 acres of land as recommended wilderness… The New York Times earlier this month reported that a leaked memo directed the use of ORVs on 5 million acres in Montana and Idaho, 193,403 acres of which are within recommended wilderness areas on the Flathead National Forest. Local stakeholders say the directive would unwind years of collaborative work if it comes to fruition.
During the 1930s, Italy’s government launched a sweeping reforestation effort in the Prealps region near Lake Como, planting fast-growing Norway spruce on land that had been pasture and meadow for centuries. It was a conscious decision, made mainly to answer the demand for timber, but it did not involve much ecological thinking. Now, 90 years later, a new study has gone back to measure what that decision actually did to the landscape, and the results are not flattering. According to the study, ‘
JAKARTA — Pulp and paper giant APRIL’s recent decision to lower its deforestation commitments and source wood from two companies associated with extensive recent forest loss has created a new challenge for its relationship with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), with environmental groups urging the world’s leading forestry certifier to terminate the already suspended reassociation process. In late May, APRIL announced it was reviewing its decade-old Sustainable Forest Management Policy 2.0 and lowering its deforestation cutoff date from 2015 to Dec. 31, 2020. The move allows the pulp and paper producer to source wood from PT Industrial Forest Plantation and PT Mayawana Persada, two companies that have experienced some of the country’s largest recent forest losses. APRIL said the decision was necessary to address fibre shortages after the Indonesian government revoked the operating permits of four of its long-term suppliers earlier this year, affecting around 15% of its wood supply in Riau Province.
AUSTRALIA — Tasmania’s public native forestry company has corrected the record in a parliamentary committee after earlier stating that all logs from public native forests were processed in Tasmania. Tasmanian sawmill operator James Neville-Smith confirmed that some logs had been sent to Victoria, where processors had received compensation from the Victorian government as part of its industry shutdown. Mr Neville-Smith said the decision was due to retooling a sawmill to be plantation-only, meaning that hardwood logs needed to be processed elsewhere. Logs displaying stickers from Tasmanian state forests were also spotted at a mill in Powelltown, in the Yarra Valley, that was also a recipient of millions in Victorian compensation payments. Victoria phased out native forest logging in 2024. Since then, environmental groups have raised concerns about large quantities of logs being transported to Victoria on the Spirit of Tasmania, but were told that all were from private forests.