B.C.’s mills have been a key driver in forest health and reforestation efforts across the province, and as they close, external funding will be required to ensure decades of forestry work don’t go to waste and become wildfire fuel, according to experts. Canfor announced the pending closure of its pulp mill in Prince George in July, adding to a growing list of more than 20 lumber mills closed permanently or indefinitely in the province since 2023. These moves have erased thousands of mill jobs from B.C.’s economy, while creating consequential gaps in the province’s forestry sector. As John Betts, executive director of the Western Forestry Contractors Association, explained, B.C.’s forests are full of fuels in need of attention, and a lack of processing facilities creates missed opportunities and squandered assets without new processing solutions. This Canfor closure, he said, “is just the tip of a larger sort of problem.” “What we’re losing is an opportunity to dispose of and sell this biomass that we’re going to need to remove. If we don’t have a place to sell that, the whole system begins to break down, which is a subset of the larger necessity that we do need a viable wood product sector in British Columbia if we’re actually going to restore the ecosystems that we’re all dependent on,” he told CTV News. “All economies or markets are a series of interdependencies. They all depend on each other. So, you’ve got the pulp market, the saw log market, the reforestation market, the restoration market … are all linked.” Direct losses Those interdependencies are all too apparent in the world of restoring B.C.’s forests, according to Timo Scheiber, CEO of Brinkman Reforestation and president of the Western Forestry Contractors Association. Scheiber said reforestation work is often funded by harvesting activities, which Betts noted aren’t happening as much without somewhere to process lumber; harvesting activities employ about 5,000 people directly across the province — continually adding to jobs lost in the sector. These blows to the industry come at a difficult time, Scheiber said, as those in the sector are still working to return B.C.’s forests to a healthy state after a mountain pine beetle epidemic ravaged them for more than 15 years. “With the Northwood Pulp Mill, that’s utilizing an important part of the profile, and without that demand for that, it’s going to lead to higher waste,” he said. “We’re going to get less value out of the forests that we are harvesting, which is unfortunate, and less utilization, and ultimately it’s going to reduce the amount of funding that we have for other activities.” Every time another mill closes in B.C., or elsewhere in Canada, Scheiber said, it just takes out another piece of the larger puzzle that is the forestry sector. “It just reduces our ability to function in the now and means that likely we’re going to have to come up with a lot of money down the road to rebuild some of that capacity,” he said. Reforestation efforts Replanting B.C.’s forests — lost to logging, wildfire, or other causes — has been supported at both the provincial and federal levels, highlighted in the last decade by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Two Billion Trees program, later reduced to one billion trees as the project wound down. The program was announced in 2019, launched in 2021, and wound down in 2025, according to the Canadian federal government. “While existing agreements will be honoured, the program is no longer accepting applications,” the feds announced on their website at the time. As of June 2025, 228 million trees had been planted across the country, out of 998 million committed to be planted through the program. In B.C., some planting commitments remain ongoing through 2031 — including 21.8 million trees planted by Central Chilcotin Rehabilitation Ltd. within the traditional territory of Tŝideldel First Nation and Tl’etinqox government, and 46 million trees planted by Cariboo Carbon Solutions to restore areas impacted by natural disasters, specifically including the area affected by the devastating wildfire in Lytton in 2021. B.C.’s provincial government has a commitment running through the program until 2027 as well, to plant 67.7 million trees in wildfire-affected areas. Scheiber told CTV News that tree planting in the province peaked in the early 2020s, with around 300 million trees planted annually, and between five and six thousand people employed through planting efforts. “With that number reducing down to where we see it now, at more like around 230 million, you’re going to see a reciprocal reduction in that workforce, and also a reduction in funding for research,” he said. “We basically just have less people working in the forest, and that’ll make it more difficult to do all of the other activities that we’re trying to achieve out there to keep the forest healthy.” Shifting funding and looking ahead Ideally, Scheiber and Betts said, having lumber processing facilities back online would reduce the trickle-down effect seen in B.C.’s forestry sector, return thousands of jobs, and help process walls of wood they expect to be left behind. On the other hand, both suggested the province may have to move to a model in which forest health, activity, and maintenance aren’t strictly funded by harvesting, at least for the time being. “A lot of the reforestation that happens in B.C. is funded from harvesting activities … whenever we have a reduction in harvesting, obviously that cuts down on the activity out in the forest — there’s less work for us — but there’s also less funds available generally to provide restoration activity,” Scheiber said. “We started with a very large, healthy forest across Canada, and we’ve been gradually utilizing that fibre. We need to reinvest if we want to continue to do that.” Betts said that investment could come from anywhere, but stressed the urgency of it all, with fibre projected to build up in B.C.’s forests heavily over the next several years. “For an industry right now, that seems to be running out of wood, there is a wall of wood coming at us very soon, within the next decade possibly,” he said. “We’re in a race with destiny here … to figure out how we can develop a restoration economy built on restoring ecosystem biodiversity through improved forest management.” Betts understands that all of this would need to be paid for, so opportunities would need to be generated for investors in the wood product sector, but, as he explained, a lack of investors translates to a lack of processing facilities, which in turn leaves forest fibres either going to waste or feeding wildfires. “There is a growing demand across large swaths of British Columbia to restore conditions in our plantations so that they’ll be less prone to burning, become more biodiverse,” he said. “If we don’t address it, it’s a larger looming threat to our economy.” “We have an opportunity to convert that wood differently than we have typically … into the economy, or we risk seeing it go up into the atmosphere as smoke and all the other consequences that we see.” These forest fibres wouldn’t just be going to waste though, Betts stressed; they would amount to a “massive, missed opportunity,” when considering all the money and work the forestry sector could gain. He said it’s terrible to see the work he and other tree planters have put in over decades reach a point of uncertainty. “We need to come back and invest public funds in restoring conditions with the best of our technology and scientists’ understanding, while including First Nations values,” he said. “If we don’t, then that’s a double waste because we’ve invested billions of dollars into reforesting these places.”
