David Broadland

The following opinion piece was written by Lori Daniels and Robert Gray, two well known BC experts on forest fires, and was published in the Times Colonist on February 4, 2022. AGAIN, IN 2021, record-breaking wildfires burned in British Columbia, fuelled by the heat dome, drought, wind and excessive forest fuels. Our homes and communities are vulnerable—flammable structures surrounded by forests and mountains with limited evacuation routes made even more hazardous by thick smoke. Entire communities have burned—businesses, homes and, tragically, lives lost. The cascading effects of torrential rain on burned and exposed mountainsides contributed to the catastrophic floods that severed transportation routes and further disrupted lives and livelihoods. The costs are in the billions of dollars, without accounting for the indirect price of trauma and smoke on human health or damages to drinking water and wildlife habitat. Again, we find ourselves calling for urgent transformation of forest and fire management to reconfigure our forests and communities to be resilient to wildfires fuelled by climate change and outdated forest practices. Record wildfires have also ravaged the western United States—sparking action. Last week, the U.S. Federal Government announced plans to spend USD50B over the next decade on wildfire mitigation. Hundreds of millions of dollars are earmarked for forest thinning and prescribed burning on public lands, incentives for private landowners and support for Indigenous communities to enable fuel treatments, and subsidies for bioenergy products from hazardous fuels. Investments are holistic—buffers around communities called the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI for short) supported by strategic treatments of surrounding landscapes. BC sits at a crossroads: do we go big and bold like the US? Or, do we continue with the small-scale, individual-WUI approach that has been in place since 2004? BC’s approach has focused on the narrow buffer of land around communities, minimizing costs and impacts on timber supply. Not all communities benefit. Funding is prioritized on communities with high housing density and in the driest parts of the province—as a result, large communities, often with expensive homes, get the lion’s share of the money. And recently, some funding for proactively treating hazardous fuels has been redirected to education efforts to convince homeowners to take more responsibility to FireSmart (RT) their homes and properties. If 100 per cent of the community fully subscribed to FireSmart, and that’s a very optimistic scenario, physical homes and businesses could survive a fire, but the “community” would not. BC’s WUI-focused strategy surrenders our landscapes to severe fire effects —as we witnessed in 2017, 2018 and 2021. The costs to our society are mounting, as witnessed here in BC and the US, Australia, and other places impacted by extreme wildfires. Each year that hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests burn, BC residents and everyone downwind of us will suffer hundreds to thousands of premature deaths every year due to chronic smoke exposure, not to mention premature births and increased incidence of cognitive impairment. Watersheds delivering drinking water will require expensive rehabilitation and secondary water quality treatment. The timber harvesting land base will continue to shrink, resulting in mill closures, unemployment, and increased resource conflicts. Businesses such as agriculture and tourism will suffer from direct and indirect fire damage. Levels of social anxiety, depression and substance abuse will increase. Increasingly, municipal and provincial budgets will be consumed by reactive fire suppression and rehabilitation expenses. Governments avoid going “big and bold”—it is politically risky. Going “small” spends less money and delivers short-term tangible results within an election cycle. Going “big and bold” requires long-term vision, but the dividends don’t accrue until well into the future. But adapting to wildfire is larger than politics—it is the difference between a future with options and opportunities for our children and grandchildren versus a future of very limited options and few opportunities. Going “big and bold” for BC does not mean spending $50B over 10 years. Instead, it requires a significant shift in wildfire and forest management objectives and a change in priorities. The Province needs to heavily invest in WUI hazard reduction and radically shift landscape management from short-term timber supply to long-term resilience of ecosystems, habitats and productivity. Going forward, we need immediate, sustained, equitable, and large-scale action; we need to go “big and bold.” Robert Gray is an AFE Certified Wildland Fire Ecologist and Dr. Lori Daniels is a Forest Ecologist at the University of British Columbia.

Note to the ministry of forests: Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the current sustained yield timber supply is below 50 million cubic metres per year, right? Logging in the Prince George Timber Supply Area (Photo by Sean O’Rourke/Conservation North) THERE WERE A NUMBER OF DRAMATIC LOGGING-RELATED EVENTS in 2021 that riveted public attention on the state of BC forests. Canada’s largest act of mass civil disobedience at Fairy Creek. Devastating forest fires and pervasive smoke in June, July and August. Flooding of communities and washouts of transportation infrastructure in November. But there was one critical, year-long event that didn’t get any attention at all, and this one event lies at the core of all the catastrophes that did capture our attention. According to the ministry of forests’ harvest record for 2021, logging companies hauled 50.2 million cubic metres of logs out of publicly-owned forests. Given the record high prices for logs and lumber in 2021, we can reasonably infer that number—50.2 million cubic metres—now approximates the upper limit of annual timber supply in BC. If so, that’s a much lower level of supply than indicated by any previous projection by the ministry of forests. For example, it is 38 percent below the ministry’s prediction of timber supply for 2021 that was made in 2004. That’s an astonishing decline in expectation. The difference between the ministry’s 2004 prediction of timber supply and 2021’s actual supply was equivalent to approximately 20,000 direct jobs—or 40,000 “direct, indirect and induced jobs” as the industry might put it. We can expect that over the next few years a raging debate will develop over why this decline has occurred. At the moment, the ministry appears unwilling to publicly acknowledge how far timber supply has fallen; mainstream media seem stuck in the past and misreport the actual case; and industry-friendly reporters seem intent on blaming conservationists for the decline, whatever it is. We will come back to these barriers to public understanding later in the story, but first let’s consider some basic facts about timber supply and how, in practice, it differs from what the ministry of forests refers to as “AAC,” or allowable annual cut. Although the ministry of forests establishes a provincial AAC each year (see graph below), over the last 20 years that level has almost always been well above the actual cut each year. That’s because the official AAC doesn’t reflect just the physical limits of sustained yield. The Forest Act requires that AAC for publicly owned forest be based on sustained yield—the physical limitations to forest growth—but it allows the AAC to be fudged upward for “the economic and social objectives of the government.” That should be read as “for political reasons.” By fudging the official AAC well above the actual cut, the ministry has been able to claim that the actual cut is lower than the allowable annual cut, creating the appearance that the ministry is carefully stewarding BC’s forests. Doesn’t that graph reassure you that the ministry of forests has a conservative approach to managing publicly owned forests? Every year, the industry cuts less than it could. Sadly, that is not the case. The official AAC bears little resemblance to what the ministry has determined could be cut on a sustained yield basis. That disconnect becomes evident when we consider the ministry’s record of timber supply forecasts since 1994, and compare those with its record of allowable annual cuts and its record of actual cuts. The ministry defines “timber supply” as: “The amount of timber that is forecast to be available for harvesting over a specified time period, under a particular management regime.” That definition covers a lot of possible ground, but the Forest Act does stipulate that “sustained yield” needs to be the basis for a determination of timber supply. The ministry defines “sustained yield” as: “A policy, method, or plan of forest management that aims to achieve an approximate balance between net growth and amount harvested.” In other words, a determination of the timber supply available from those BC forests that can be logged involves a determination of the area available for logging and analysis of the factors affecting the growth of trees in that area. From time to time, usually about every 10 years, the ministry publishes a new province-wide forecast of timber supply that generally looks forward at least 50 years. The last published forecast was in 2010. Over the past 35 years, four major factors affecting future timber supply have been acknowledged by the ministry of forests. They are the falldown effect, conservation for non-timber values, the Mountain Pine Beetle epidemic and increased plantation growth above what had been predicted. The first three factors lowered ministry projections of future timber supply. The last factor increased it. The ministry has not yet attributed any substantial influence on timber supply to either forest fires or climate change. To understand why timber supply has fallen as far as it has in the last 35 years, we need to examine each of the four factors that the ministry has said have changed it. In 1994, the ministry’s decadal Forest, Range and Recreation Resource Analysis recorded that “the current harvest level” was 71.6 million cubic metres per year “but would then decline gradually over the next 50 years” to 50-60 million cubic metres. The ministry credited the expected decline to “shifting from old-growth forests to second-growth forests precipitating a falldown to long-term sustainable harvest levels.” “Falldown,” as you may recall, refers to the inevitable decrease in timber supply that would occur as a result of converting BC’s older, higher-volume primary forests to younger, lower-volume plantations through logging. In its current (2021) promotional material, the BC Truck Loggers Association notes that “typical old growth” contains 1500-1800 cubic metres per hectare, while “typical second growth” contains 400-600 cubic metres per hectare. The ministry’s 1994 report also noted that “interest in non-timber resources and values has increased and managing for those values is now emphasized.” In 1994, the expected decline in timber supply out to 2044 as a result of those factors is shown in the graph below: The most conservative estimate of timber supply, from the ministry of forests’ 1994 projection. Note that the most conservative 1994 projection of timber supply estimated there would be 60 million cubic metres available for cutting in 2021. Yet only 50.2 million cubic metres were cut that year, and that followed cuts of 49.6 and 47.9 million cubic metres in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Ten years after that 1994 report, in 2004, with a very different government now steering the ministry of forests, ideas about future timber supply also changed. In The State of British Columbia’s Forests 2004, a report signed by then-Chief Forester Jim Snetsinger, the ministry’s new view of timber supply was made clear: “Recent research shows that many second-growth forests grow faster than previously estimated.” The newly discovered higher growth rate of plantations was so phenomenal, the report implied, that, in effect, it cancelled out the falldown effect. Instead of falling, the ministry’s new forecast showed timber supply would be relatively stable. The graph below appeared in the ministry of forests’ 2004 report, which was approved by Snetsinger. BC Ministry of Forests’ 2004 prediction of future timber supply. The “• Actual cut in 2021” has been added. There are three pertinent observations to make about the claims in that 2004 report. First, the ministry never published any physical research showing that growth in plantations was higher than expected. Second, instead of “recent research,” the ministry appears to have relied on corrupted data and faulty computer modelling in calculating greater plantation growth. Those computer models—and the data they relied on—have been critiqued extensively by foresters Martin Watts and Anthony Britneff. (See attachments at end of story.) Britneff, a 40-year veteran of the BC Forest Service, says “The report referred to ‘research’ but I suspect it was actually referring to unvalidated assumptions about the growth of managed stands, unsubstantiated by monitoring or actual research.” Britneff and Watts have questioned the unvalidated assumptions used in the timber supply determination process—such as genetic gain from select seed—and the unvalidated growth-and-yield computer models, as well as the absence of monitoring of managed stands that would be necessary to ground-truth actual growth. The two foresters have shown that the ministry has actively ignored the monitoring of tree growth that has been done. The third reason to doubt the 2004 forecast is that it didn’t even mention the impact of the Mountain Pine Beetle. At the time, the province was in the sixth year of the epidemic, only a year from its peak. The ministry of forests was well aware of the huge impact that disaster would have on future timber supply. Not including the beetle’s impact suggests the ministry was given instructions to maximize timber supply—at least on paper—rather than accurately reflect all the influences that were, in reality, pushing it downward. Thus the ministry, then operating under the influence of Premier Gordon Campbell, predicted that timber supply in 2044 could be as much as 42 percent higher than the Forest Service had expected in 1994. This sudden and fantastical increase occurred at precisely the same political moment that, at the behest of the logging industry, Campbell was gutting the Forest Service and allowing the logging industry to draft new legislation that would effectively privatize BC’s public forests. In our tally of the factors actually affecting future timber supply, this one stands out like a flashing yellow light. This was confirmed, indirectly, in a follow-up assessment of future timber supply conducted by the ministry in 2010. That report stated: “Recent analysis projects a decrease in timber supply to 50–60 million cubic metres per year by 2025, due to mortality caused by the mountain pine beetle epidemic.” That finding was illustrated in the graph below, which is from that 2010 report. That analysis, then, suggested the impact of the pine beetle on timber supply was to lower it by 10-20 million cubic metres per year by 2025. If we combine the expected impacts of the falldown effect and the losses for conservation and recreation—all assessed in the 1994 report—with the expected impact of the pine beetle from the 2010 report, those factors amount to a loss by 2044 of between 22 and 42 million cubic metres from 1994’s timber supply of around 72 million cubic metres. Taking a conservative view of timber supply—and why wouldn’t government take a conservative view, given the profound physical, economic and social impacts caused by an unsustainable rate of logging—the net loss of supply from these impacts between 1994 and 2021 would be about 30 million cubic metres per year. That would put BC’s current timber supply at about 42 million cubic metres per year. The graph below shows where a conservative consideration of the impacts listed above would put timber supply for the years 2000 through to 2021 (orange line). Note how the actual cut—the light grey line—was much higher than the conservative projection of timber supply, for most of that time. The area above the orange line and below the grey line gives a measure of the extent to which BC forests may have been overcut since 2004. Only the world financial crisis in 2008-09 provided a respite. As mentioned above, the ministry has not yet provided an assessment of how timber supply will be affected in the mid-term by either forest fires or climate change. The numerous large forest fires in each of 2017, 2018 and 2021 impacted a far larger area of BC than any other year in the province’s recorded fire history and the upward trend is clear. The increase in fire hazard created by logging, coupled with the hotter, drier, windier and more lightning-prone weather expected with climate change, will certainly impact timber supply. A 2020 Forest Practices Board investigation into the health of plantations in the southern Interior called on the ministry to start including the “likely consequences of climate change” in its assessments of growth in those plantations. The investigation found that 64 percent of the plantations it examined were in poor or marginal condition. When the impact of fires and climate change are included, how much lower will timber supply fall? The rate of cut since 2004, then, was based on a belief that timber supply was much higher than it actually was, and that belief has resulted in a significant overcut above the sustained yield level. All of 2021’s other major forest-related events in BC—the civil strife at Fairy Creek, the large forest fires in the Interior, the flooding and washouts last November—have been made worse by the over-exploitation that flowed from the Campbell’s government’s decision back in 2004 to ignore the falldown effect and accept unproven computer modelling of growth and yield to determine how much could be cut. Unfortunately, part of the reason such an unsustainable rate of logging has occurred in BC since 2004 has been the absence of accurate, in-depth coverage of the logging industry and its impacts by an informed mainstream media. At least part of the blame for that lies with the ministry of forests. Mainstream media are being misled by ministry officials This epic failure in resource management is hard to sweep under the rug, but the current ministry of forests is trying to do just that. Its reluctance to address questions directed to it at a press briefing last June made that clear. The briefing was held just before the Horgan government released its forest policy intentions paper, intentions that have since led to the recent adoption of Bill 23. In the time allotted for questions at the briefing, Globe and Mail reporter Justine Hunter asked this question: “In terms of the annual allowable cut [sic]—initially there was a 70 million cubic metres estimate, I think that’s down now—where do you get to in the year 2025? How big is the annual allowable cut[sic]?” Notably, none of the ministry officials attending the briefing, which included BC’s Chief Forester Diane Nicholls, answered Hunter’s question. Nicholls hummed and hawed and said how difficult it was to make such a prediction. There was, in fact, an estimate for the AAC for the year 2026 in the intentions paper that was released half an hour later, but either Nicholls wasn’t aware of that number or she didn’t want to use it in front of reporters. Following Hunter’s unanswered question, the Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer took a crack at the same issue: “Correct me on the numbers if I’m wrong,” Palmer requested. “You’re talking about going from 10 percent of the AAC, which is in the ballpark of 70 million cubic metres per year. You’re talking about going from 10 percent of that to 20 percent. So, in all, you would be transferring 7 million cubic metres to First Nations—that’s the target. Have you a ballpark estimate of what it will cost in terms of compensation to take that much tenure away from tenure holders and give it to First Nations?” Palmer had asked the assembled experts to correct him if he was wrong on the numbers, but they didn’t. Presumably, he left the press briefing thinking exactly what he thought before the briefing, which was that the provincial AAC was “in the ballpark of 70 million cubic metres per year.” And since his question was related to the issue of how much compensation would be given to companies from which “tenure” was going to be taken, he didn’t have the most basic information required to report the issue accurately to his readers. The ministry officials present did nothing to relieve Palmer of his misunderstanding about the AAC, or what level of compensation was in play. By not understanding how far the available supply of logs has fallen—and why—Palmer is unintentionally misinforming the public. Remarkably, the forests ministry appears to be okay with reporters not having a clear idea of what’s going on with timber supply. Notably, Palmer and Hunter have never reported on the concerns expressed by Watts and Britneff. We begin to see why, then, the ministry has—officially—kept the AAC much higher than what could actually be cut and, when given the opportunity to clarify this in public, doesn’t bother to correct reporters when they incorrectly refer to the AAC as being “in the ball park of 70 million cubic metres.” The official AAC has become meaningless, and the timber supply reviews conducted by various chief foresters now appear to be besides the point. The ministry has become a facilitator of logging, not a regulator of the industry. To publicly acknowledge how far timber supply has fallen would bring into question how much of the damage done by fires and floods has stemmed from the vast overcut that has occurred since 2004. That overcut has created a far greater area of clearcuts and plantations, both of which create conditions that increase the risk of floods and forest fires. For ministry officials to admit that the ministry badly over-estimated timber supply—and thus amplified the risk of fires and flooding—would leave the officials who made this blunder liable for responsibility for damage caused by both. So—of course—a request to “correct me if I’m wrong” would be ignored by the officials who are currently responsible for over-estimating timber supply. Meanwhile, other media are actively providing disinformation about timber supply The over-estimation of timber supply by a forests ministry acting in lock-step with the short-term interests of the logging industry is not how the industry would like the public to understand the decline that has occurred in BC’s forests and forestry-dependent communities. The industry would rather have the reduced timber supply be blamed on some other group, like conservationists. That framing of the issue by BC media outlets who partner in the forest-industrial complex was evident in 2019 as the uplift in available timber supply—made possible by beetle salvage logging—ran out. In “Why the province’s working forests aren’t working,” a story written by Nelson Bennett for Business in Vancouver in December 2019, an explanation for the numerous mill closures in 2019 focussed mainly on the impact of conservation. Bennett wrote, “One of the biggest problems has become a lack of economically harvestable timber. In a province with 55 million hectares of forest—an area roughly three times the size of the UK—how is that possible? The most visible answer is the toll taken by the mountain pine beetle, and by forest fires. But it’s not just pests and natural disasters that have eaten up BC’s timber supply. Pressure to preserve forests for conservation or yield them to recreation and increased urbanization have resulted in a significant shrinkage of the working-forest land base.” That has been the basic message of industry operatives for many, many years. Note that there is no mention by Bennett that logging itself has been the biggest cause of disappearing timber supply in BC. Over the 20 years between 2000 and 2019, inclusive, logging caused 59 percent of the loss of merchantable volume. The pine beetle accounted for 32 percent and forest fires 9 percent. That inescapable fact can be seen in the graph below of ministry of forests’ data on the relative extent to which the beetle, forest fires and logging have gone through BC’s merchantable timber supply since 2000. To elaborate on the impact of conservation on BC’s timber supply, Bennett reached out to an industry forester. He wrote: “Jim Girvan, an independent forestry consultant, points to the Prince George timber supply area (TSA) as an example. At eight million hectares, it is the single largest TSA in BC. But once all the exclusions for recreation, wildlife habitat conservation, old-growth preservation and other measures are accounted for, it leaves just three million hectares that can be logged, Girvan said.” If I am reading that correctly (please correct me if I’m wrong), of 8 million hectares, there are only 3 million that can be logged and the rest has been set aside for recreation, wildlife habitat conservation, old-growth preservation and other measures. That sounds a lot like 5 million hectares of conservation measures, doesn’t it? Wow, 5/8ths of the areas has been conserved? That’s 62 percent! However, if one were to actually read the ministry’s account of how it determines the area of land that’s used to establish the level of timber supply from the Prince George TSA, one would find that the total area of all land that has some conservation-related objective is 1.8 million hectares, or 22.8 percent of the gross area of the Prince George Timber Supply Area—not the 5 million hectares that Girvan and Bennett seem to claim. Moreover, of that 1.8 million hectares, only a part of that is forested land, and only a fraction of that forested land is feasible and economical to log. Once those considerations are applied (the ministry calls this “netting down”), we find that only 860,000 hectares of forest have been set aside for parks, ecological reserves, protected areas, conservancies, ungulate winter range, recreation, old growth management areas, wildlife tree patches, and riparian retention areas. That amounts to 10.8 percent of the gross area of the Prince George Timber Supply Area, not the 62 percent implied by Bennett and Girvan. Even that number, though, overstates the impact these “conservation” areas have on timber supply since nearly all of these conservation areas in the Prince George TSA had a significant portion of the forested area within them logged before the conservation objectives were established. All of the information needed to determine that no more than 10.8 percent of the total area of the TSA has been set aside for conservation or recreation purposes is publicly available. Bennett and Girvan then went on to elaborate on how the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement has deeply impacted timber supply. Bennett wrote, apparently using information supplied by Girvan: “The coastal cut has shrunk by 8.5 million cubic metres since the 1990s. That is enough to supply 10 coastal sawmills, Girvan said. The Great Bear Rainforest alone took 6.4 million hectares. Only 295,000 hectares were preserved for logging.” Bennett then quoted Girvan: “In that 295,000 hectares, now you’re very restricted on what you can log.” According to the ministry of forests, however, the “295,000 hectares” is actually the new area (made up of 8 separate smaller areas) that “will be off-limits to logging,” not the area “preserved for logging.” Girvan and Bennett got this particular fact inverted. They could have determined the expected impact of the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement on the provincial AAC by comparing the AAC for the area before the agreement (2,543,018 cubic metres per year) and after (1,633,000 cubic metres). They didn’t, but the ministry’s figures indicate the agreement was expected to create a drop in timber supply of about 900,000 cubic metres per year, or roughly 1.4 percent of the provincial AAC. All of those numbers, of course, are subject to the warnings outlined above. In the end, Bennett’s and Girvan’s analysis didn’t provide any insight into why timber supply is so much lower than was predicted in 2004, but provided cover for the most serious cause of the decline. How is that going to help forest-dependent communities understand what they are facing? The good news The best evidence suggests that even 2021’s cut is well above the new, lower level of sustained yield. Unless the public comes into possession of that evidence more broadly through mainstream media, public opinion will continue to think of logging as “sustainable” and overcutting will continue. With continued over-exploitation will come even more serious negative consequences: bigger, more destructive forest fires, larger, more catastrophic floods, worse degradation of ecosystems and increased civil strife. There is an odd twist to this story, which some may see as “good news.” Because of 2021’s extremely high prices, the ministry of forests collected a much higher average rate of stumpage than ever before. For the first time in many, many years, the $1.8 billion collected in stumpage will likely cover more than the cost to the public of managing BC’s forests so the industry can cut ‘em down. However, the higher stumpage will definitely not cover the physical damage done by 2021’s forest fires and flooding, or the economic disruption that accompanied that. Nor can it heal the civil strife that is erupting in BC over the over-exploitation of our forests and the consequential degradation of our life support systems. David Broadland writes about forest-related issues. Britneff-and-Watts-2018-submission-to-the-Forest-Inventory-Review-Panel.pdf

In the last two years, the cost of hidden subsidization of BC’s logging industry has been greater than the industry’s contribution to BC’s GDP. And it's going to get worse. IN 2020 I WROTE A STORY titled “Forestry doesn’t pay the bills, folks.” It looked at the costs and revenues of the ministry of forests over a 10-year period and found that, over that time, the ministry spent about a million dollars a day more than it took in through stumpage revenue and the BC Logging Tax. While many people appreciated that analysis, others found it flawed. The skeptics noted that costs were based on entire ministry costs, not just forest-related costs. The Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development, they believed, had many costs that were not related to forest management. Take those out and the picture would change, they hoped. Others noted that my analysis didn’t include export, corporate or municipal taxes paid by forestry companies or the income taxes paid by forestry workers, and so forth. Others observed that the analysis didn’t include costs such as the $24 million paid by the community of Peachland, which needed to install an expensive water treatment facility to take out the sediment that clearcut logging has introduced to its watershed; it didn’t include the estimated $100 million cost to the community of Grand Forks where flooding attributed to logging in the Kettle and Granby watersheds has cost people their homes and overturned their lives. Nor did it include the cost of fisheries lost as a result of increased sedimentation and rising water temperatures caused by clearcutting over 250,000 hectares of forest each year. And so on. In other words, there were two kinds of objections: 1. You didn’t credit the forest industry for all the revenue it provides for government, and 2. You didn’t include all the costs. This is an update of my first analysis, starting with the objections about not including all the revenue to government that the forest industry generates. I am interested in your objections to this report. I’ll include them when I update this story down the road. So let’s start with a brief reexamination of the numbers in my first report. The forest management subsidy Although the ministry publishes an Annual Service Report that provides generalized breakdowns of costs and revenues, it doesn’t specify which are forest-related expenses and revenues. So I filed FOIs with the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development aimed at clarifying what ministry revenue and expenses were forest-related. The documents released (attached at end of story) show the vast majority of its expenses are forest-related. The ministry’s account of its forest revenues increased the value of those revenues slightly over what I had estimated from their Annual Service Plans. In the graph below I show the net deficit for each year, 2010 to 2019. The cumulative operating deficit of the ministry over 10 years was $3.44 billion rather than the $3.65 billion identified in my earlier story. That works out to $942,466 a day. Taxes paid by workers and corporations don’t pay ministry bills, they pay for services used So what about the question of the personal income taxes paid by forestry workers and the municipal and corporate taxes paid by forest companies? Shouldn’t those be included, somehow, in determining whether “forestry pays the bills”? The ministry of forests, of course, doesn’t include corporate or municipal taxes paid by forestry companies or the income taxes paid by forestry workers in its reckoning of revenue, and for good reason. In each case, the taxes collected by some level of government, like municipal taxes collected from a sawmill operating within a municipality, or income taxes collected from a feller-buncher operator in Quesnel, go to pay for a host of services provided by that government that have nothing to do with the ministry of forests. These are services that are consumed, in part, by that sawmill or that feller-buncher operator. For example, the healthcare services provided to residents of a community with a mill operating in it are paid for by such revenue streams as corporate and income taxes. When the feller-buncher operator needs a hip replacement as a result of a work-related injury, the cost of that surgery is paid for by such government revenue streams. When the home of the head sawyer at the local sawmill is burglarized, the police that investigate are paid for by such revenue streams. The mill manager’s children are educated in a school that is partly funded by property taxes collected by the municipality, including from the mill. Forestry workers, and the companies they work for, aren’t just paying for government services through their taxes. Like the rest of us, they are also consumers of those services. Their taxes pay for their own use of myriad government services, just like every other kind of taxpayer. By the way, for various reasons, people who live in forestry-dependent communities have notoriously high health costs compared with urban populations. In general, all the arguments from the forest industry and its supporters about how much they contribute to the provincial economy are half true; they always fail to include in their analysis all the costs to government that are incurred to keep them housed, warm, fed, clothed, educated, employed, policed, healthy, mobile, governed and defended from enemies, both internal and external. The same principle applies to corporate income taxes. Those taxes go to pay for a host of government services those corporations consume, as well as the cost of the burdens their operations impose on the rest of the community. All workers and corporations in BC pay taxes, not just forest industry workers and corporations. In fact, in 2019, 98.2 percent of the workers in BC who paid taxes were not forest industry workers. Only a tiny fraction of BC companies that paid corporate income taxes were forestry companies. Another aspect of the ministry’s costs that people questioned was the “direct fire management” cost, the cost of fighting forest fires. To what extent is this cost actually attributable to the logging industry? All of BC’s largest fires in 2021 included large areas of clearcuts and plantations. Those clearcuts and plantations raise fire hazard to “high” for up to 30 years. They create fuel conditions in which fires are easier to ignite and harder to control, and so we are experiencing larger fires more frequently than would be the case had there been no logging. Moreover, much of the money spent fighting those fires is paid to logging companies and allied businesses. The logging industry needs to man-up and acknowledge its role in causing and benefitting from these fires. Forest fires destroy structures, damage community economies, harm human health and kill people. None of those costs have been included in the ministry’s accounting of “direct fire management costs,” and so attributing all of the ministry’s cost of fighting forest fires to the logging industry is likely a significant undercount of the true costs. Now let’s consider some of the costs I left out of my first analysis. Here, there’s plenty of room for improvement over my previous assessment. What constitutes a subsidy? First off, let’s define the term “subsidy.” The World Trade Organization does that in detail. Here, I paraphrase that organization’s definition of “subsidy.” A subsidy is deemed to exist when a government makes a direct transfer of funds; or government revenue that is due is foregone or not collected; or a government provides goods or services other than general infrastructure; or a government makes payments to a private body to carry out the type of functions that would normally be vested in government; and, as a result of any or all of these circumstances, a benefit is thereby conferred to an industry. The “forest management subsidy” illustrated in the graph above is an example of government revenue that is due but not collected. The BC government sets stumpage rates, yet those stumpage rates—even after all other sources of forest revenue are included—consistently do not cover the ministry’s operational costs for managing the industry’s operations on public land. As a result of the BC government’s failure to require the logging industry to pay for the cost of managing forest removal on public land, a benefit is conferred to the industry. That constitutes a public subsidy of the industry. Public subsidization of the forest industry’s consumption of electricity Now let’s consider other benefits conferred on the forest industry, starting with public subsidization of the electricity it consumes. Over the 10-year period for which we gathered data, the public subsidization of the cost of electricity used by forest companies amounted to $5.1 billion. You won’t find a record of this public subsidy anywhere in the forest industry’s or the ministry of forests’ public accounts of their operations. It occurs entirely as a result of BC Hydro’s inequitable rate structure. Here’s how we calculated it: Residential consumers of electricity in BC—who, as a class, are BC Hydro’s largest customer—pay a two-tiered rate for electricity. If a residential customer keeps their consumption to less than 675 kilowatt-hours per month, they pay 9.3 cents per kilowatt-hour. If they go over 675 kilowatt-hours, they pay 13.94 cents per kilowatt-hour. The principle applied to residential consumers is this: If you consume more than a set amount, you pay a higher rate. BC Hydro uses this strategy in order to encourage consumers to conserve electricity. Why? Because supplying additional capacity is very expensive. Consider the estimated $16 billion cost of Site C to understand just how expensive supplying additional capacity can be. But this principle of applying a higher rate for higher consumption is flipped on its head when it comes to forest industry consumers of electricity. BC Hydro’s current rate for “Large General Service” users—those customers whose average monthly consumption is at least 45,833 kilowatt-hours, and that would include all BC pulp and paper mills and virtually all sawmills and veneer/panel mills—is currently 5.96 cents per kilowatt-hour, no matter how much electricity is consumed. If a mill uses less than 45,833 kilowatt-hours, they pay a higher rate. Why wouldn’t the same principle of higher rates for higher levels of consumption be applied to the forest industry if the rationale for higher rates for consumers is to get them to conserve expensive capacity? Over the last 5 years, the forest industry has consumed an average of 6000 gigawatt-hours per year of BC Hydro’s output. Site C will generate 5100 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. If the forest industry consumes the equivalent of Site C’s capacity, why aren’t there rates in place that would encourage industry consumers, like residential consumers, to conserve? And why should the industry pay less in any case? This preferential treatment amounts to a public subsidy. The magnitude of the subsidy can be determined from the difference in the rates for residential consumers and forest industry consumers. Since BC Hydro does not apply the same principle to forest product mills as it applies to residential consumers, the forest industry is being subsidized by BC Hydro residential consumers. That subsidy amounted to 4.81 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2010 and rose to 7.98 cents per kilowatt-hour by 2020. We obtained records through an FOI request for BC Hydro records that show the electrical energy consumption of BC forest industry companies for 5 years in that 10-year period (attached at the end of the story). Based on those numbers, and other data that allowed extrapolation for the years we didn’t have, we calculated that the public subsidization of the forest industry’s use of electricity amounted to $5.1 billion. Some of you will question whether the lower electricity rates given to the forest industry by publicly owned BC Hydro can actually be considered a public subsidy. You might point to WTO rulings in the Softwood Lumber Dispute regarding US claims that two BC forest companies were paid excessive rates for electrical energy they sold to BC Hydro. Those claims were rejected by the WTO, but not because differences in electricity rates can’t constitute a subsidy. The resolution of that issue by the WTO, in fact, confirms that electrical rates can constitute a subsidy. But the WTO’s mandate isn’t to consider the public interest. It’s only interest is in promoting international trade. For the average British Columbian, who has long been told by the industry and its promoters that “forestry pays the bills, folks,” the important issue is how much of the logging industry’s electricity bills are actually being paid by the excessively high rates of ordinary folks. Over the past ten years that has amounted to $5.1 billion. Public subsidization of the forest industry’s release of forest carbon emissions When an area of BC forest is clearcut, it is immediately transformed from being a carbon sink into a carbon source. While the forest industry and its supporters argue that the carbon in all forests will eventually return to the atmosphere anyway, the acceleration of this return caused by clearcutting creates an immense surge in carbon emissions that would never have occurred naturally, especially in the time frame in which this is occurring. Moreover, turning primary forests into plantations, where the intention is to log the plantation in 45 to 80 years, creates a large carbon debt that will never be repaid. Carbon that enters the atmosphere as a result of the forest industry’s activities has the same physical effect as carbon coming from a car’s tailpipe; they both cause global heating. In response to the climate emergency, the BC government introduced a carbon tax in 2008 which applied only to fossil fuels. The BC government acknowledged that carbon emissions needed to be reduced in order to avoid damage that could be expected as the result of climate change. They were thinking of such events as those that overwhelmed BC in mid November 2021, in which communities were flooded and transportation infrastructure was badly damaged. The fires in the summer of 2021 caused similar losses, with Lytton burned to the ground. These events will be very costly to BC taxpayers. By not applying the Carbon Tax to the forest industry’s forest-removal activities—which cause far greater carbon emissions than the burning of hydrocarbon fuels in BC—a financial benefit was conferred on the forest industry. That is, the public is subsidizing the forest industry’s carbon emissions. For the period 2010 to 2020, that subsidy is shown in the graph below: We calculated this subsidy based on the rate of the Carbon Tax for each year and the estimated biomass of forest removed in each of those years. We used the ministry of forests’ Harvest Billing System to determine the volume of logs removed from public land for each of the 10 years, and used the results of a scientific study conducted by Suzanne Simard and Jean Roach to estimate the original forest biomass those logs came from. The summary of how that biomass was estimated can be found here. We determined the value of annual forest carbon emissions by using the value of the BC Carbon Tax that was applicable in each of the 10 years. The total 10-year value of carbon emissions subsidization was $31.5 billion, or an average of $3.15 billion per year. In 2019, the BC Carbon Tax was $40 per metric tonne. Since the carbon tax is set to increase to $170 per tonne by 2030, this annual subsidy will rapidly increase in size. Public subsidization of the loss of carbon sequestration capacity caused by the forest industry Lastly, we calculated the subsidy related to the loss of carbon sequestration capacity caused by logging in the period 2010 to 2019. To calculate this subsidy we used the Province’s own account of net carbon sequestration capacity loss and the applicable level of the Carbon Tax for each of those years. Through the 1990s the province’s carbon sequestration capacity—the net amount of carbon BC forests could take out of the atmosphere each year—held relatively steady at about 90 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent. Beginning in 1999, as a result of logging and forest loss from other causes, the capacity of BC forests began to fall. The Province has estimated that capacity each year. Here’s what that decline looks like: To calculate the cumulative amount of this loss, we used the difference between the level in the 1990s and the level estimated by the Province for each year between 2010 and 2019. We then calculated a dollar value for the carbon sequestration that didn’t occur each year, using the value of the Carbon Tax that was applicable in each of those years. That totalled close to $22 billion over 10 years. How much of this should be attributable to logging and how much to the Mountain Pine Beetle and forest fires? We compared the volume of forest lost to each since 1999 and found that logging accounted for about 60 percent of the total forest loss. To be on the conservative side, we dropped this to 50 percent. So we attributed one-half of the cumulative monetary cost of carbon sequestration loss over the period 2010 to 2019 to logging—$11 billion. For those of you who don’t think this is a real cost, consider the efforts of Carbon Engineering, the Squamish-headquartered clean tech company that has created a machine that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—like trees do—and turns that into a hydrocarbon fuel. The goal of the company is to build equipment that can do that at a cost of $100 per tonne. The company’s efforts have attracted investors and media attention from around the planet. The function of Carbon Engineering’s machine amounts to what trees do naturally—for free. In our calculation of the value of lost carbon sequestration capacity, we used Carbon Tax values ranging from $20 in 2010 to $40 in 2019. But at $100 per tonne—Carbon Engineering’s ultimate target—the cost to the forest industry for causing the loss of just this one forest function would be valued at $36 billion over a 10-year period. As noted above, the carbon tax is set to increase to $170 per tonne by 2030, so like the carbon emissions subsidy, the annual carbon sequestration subsidy will rapidly increase in size. If someone destroyed one of Carbon Engineerings’ privately-owned machines, there would be a huge bill to pay. But a logging company destroying a publicly-owned forest that provides exactly the same function? Well the public is paying the logging companies, through the various subsidies outlined here, to do just that. The total cost of all these subsidies is astounding. The graph below shows the total cost by year. The cumulative cost of just these four subsidies is $50.6 billion over those 10 years. The last thing to show you is how the total cost of these subsidies compares with the GDP of the forest industry, which is calculated by the provincial government. You can see in the graph below that in the last two years, the cost of the subsidies is actually greater than the industry’s contribution to BC’s GDP. This may now be a permanent condition since the largest of these subsidies are based on the value of carbon, which is rapidly rising. In 2019 it was $40 per tonne. By 2030 this will rise to $170 per tonne. At that point public subsidization of the forest industry will far exceed the industry’s contribution to GDP. Unless, of course, the provincial government’s approach to managing BC forests begins to recognize the role BC’s forests must play in mitigating climate change. The bottom line, though, is that forestry doesn’t pay the bills, folks. You pay the logging industry’s bills. In the next iteration of this story, we will consider the cash subsidies taxpayers provide the logging industry—like the Bridge to Retirement program and the BC Forest Enhancement Society—as well as offer an estimate of the cost of damage done to communities and public infrastructure by the floods and fires that have been, in part, caused by BC’s over-exploitation of its forests. David Broadland is happy to have finally launched the Evergreen Alliance. He hopes readers will register on the site so they can receive The Forest, the Alliance’s weekly newsletter, which will begin circulating through cyberspace after the new year. Forests ministry response to request for records of forest-related revenue and costs FNR-2020-07123 records.pdf Forests ministry response to FOI request FNR-2021-10554.pdf BC Hydro response to FOI request for energy consumption by forest industry 2021-232_Records.pdf