Relationship between direct forest industry jobs and volume harvested on all land in BC 2000-2020

THE NUMBER OF DIRECT JOBS created by the forest industry in BC is notoriously low, lower than any other province in Canada. Between 2000 and 2019, direct jobs fell from just over 100,000 to 46,000. In other words, over half of all direct forestry jobs—in logging, manufacturing and related work—were lost.  In that same period, the volume of forest logged declined by only 25 percent. The industry's only argument in support of the vast scale of logging in BC forests is that it produces jobs. But from these numbers we can see that the power of that argument has been cut in half in just 20 years and that the number of jobs created per cubic metre of forest logged is falling rapidly.