Stuart Muir

Six weeks before Northwood, on June 3, the Canadian Forest Sector Transformation Task Force—a panel appointed by the Government of Canada, not an industry lobby—released its final report. Its verdict was not the one the political class in Victoria has spent a decade rehearsing. The crisis, the task force concluded, is not primarily the product of tariffs, markets or natural disaster. In its own words, “the most fundamental challenges facing the forest sector are homegrown: lack of access to cost-competitive fibre, underinvestment, inadequate domestic construction … a crisis of confidence by our workforce and the communities in which we operate.”

…Here is where I land, and where the task force lands with me: this is a policy-made crisis, which means it has a policy solution. Three conditions, and none of them require a single British Columbian to choose between a healthy forest and a working one. First, stabilize fibre with long-term commitments tied to specific mills—the task force recommends a shift toward area-based tenure on leases of twenty-five years or longer. …Second, work with Ottawa on single-window approvals that recognize provincial equivalency: one application, one decision, one set of conditions. …Third, increase active management—more harvesting, more thinning, more silviculture—not as a favour to industry but as the most effective wildfire policy available to us, and the only way to rebuild the fibre base. The province controls the land, the tenure, the rules and the permits. It also means the province owns the results—the $17.4 billion, the hundred thousand jobs, the eight million hectares, and now the shuttered gates at Northwood. Ottawa has finally said the word out loud. Homegrown. The only question left is whether Victoria will admit it grew this, too, and start growing something better.