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The Tyee: BC ‘Going Backwards’ on Ecosystem Protections
Advocates, the BC Greens, and a former cabinet minister take aim at the NDP’s stalled efforts to protect ecosystems, such as old-growth forests.

The Tyee: BC Must Stop Blaming First Nations for Old-Growth Logging
BC is increasing logging while lagging on old-growth protection. Experts say the province should fund First Nations to conserve forests instead.

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2025 Activity Report & Financials
/in Announcements2025 was a milestone year for the Ancient Forest Alliance and the old-growth campaign. Despite the BC government’s backsliding on many of its old-growth commitments, there was still much work to be proud of, including celebrating our 15th year working to protect ancient forests.
Check out our 2025 Activity Report & Financials to see the impact YOU made on 2025, plus, find out what we have in store for 2026!
The Tyee: BC ‘Going Backwards’ on Ecosystem Protections
/in News CoverageApril 27, 2026
The Tyee
By: Sarah Cox
Original article here.
Advocates, the BC Greens and a former cabinet minister take aim at the NDP’s Earth Day message.
Last Wednesday, B.C. Premier David Eby released a statement celebrating B.C.’s wild places and passion for protecting the environment. His upbeat message commemorated Earth Day, a global day of environmental action that began more than 50 years ago following an oil spill in California.
B.C.’s government, Eby said, is “strengthening ecosystems protections” and renewing its commitment to protect “some of the most spectacular landscapes on Earth.”
The problem? Conservation advocates, the BC Greens and a former BC Liberal cabinet minister who led a government biodiversity review said Eby’s claim about strengthening ecosystem protections largely isn’t true.
Ken Wu, executive director of the Endangered Ecosystems Alliance, told The Tyee that after a promising start under Eby’s governance, B.C. has “stalled and started going backwards” when it comes to protecting ecosystems such as old-growth forests.
“They have been failing to move forward with a whole lot of initiatives that they said they were going to do,” Wu added.
Wu said government ministers are “sitting on their haunches” and failing to protect the most endangered ecosystems in the province, including ancient rainforests at high risk of biodiversity loss.
“Where [else] in the world are they logging 500- or 800-year-old trees? This is the last major jurisdiction in the western world logging the forest giants.”
Former BC Liberal MLA Mike Morris, who led a provincewide biodiversity review in 2015, told The Tyee he gives the Eby government “a failing grade” on strengthening ecosystem protections.
Morris, the former B.C. minister of public safety and solicitor general, said biodiversity loss is continuing at unprecedented levels across the province and he’s “gobsmacked” by the premier’s claim.
“Our wildlife populations are down. Salmon and steelhead populations in our rivers and streams are down. We’re having die-offs because the water is too hot in summertime [and] it’s too low.”
The official number of species at risk of extinction in B.C. — an indicator of biodiversity loss — is at an all-time high, with 1,726 species listed as endangered or threatened and 916 additional “ghost species” known to be at risk of extinction that haven’t yet been assessed for placement on B.C.’s red or blue lists.
A recent study published in the journal Facets found at-risk species in B.C. have little prospect of recovery, and genuine improvements in their status are “exceedingly rare.”
The biodiversity review carried out by Morris, “Getting the Balance Right,” examined the impacts of resource development — including forestry, mining and oil and gas — on B.C.’s wildlife and ecosystems.
“The cumulative effects of forestry far eclipsed everything else on the land base,” Morris, a hunter, fisher, trapper and former RCMP district officer, recalled. “The clearcutting that we have been doing since the mid-’60s led to a loss of biodiversity and wildlife.”
Morris said that while he’s not against forestry, the practice of clearcutting — where forests are stripped of all trees and vegetation — needs to stop before biodiversity is further compromised.
“Unless there’s a radical change, very quickly, there’s going to be permanent damage done to the province.”
In 2020, the B.C. government committed to follow all the recommendations made by an old-growth strategic review panel it appointed.
The panel, led by two foresters, found that old-growth forests are irreplaceable and said they should be managed primarily for ecosystem health, not for timber values. It recommended old-growth forests at the highest risk of biodiversity loss be immediately deferred from logging.
But as The Tyee recently reported, the government has been quietly removing ancient forests from its logging deferral list and auctioning them off for clearcutting, including in the Tsitika River watershed on northeast Vancouver Island.
‘Kicking the can down the road’
Eby’s government also promised a more holistic approach to stewarding land and water resources in a draft biodiversity and ecosystem health framework it released in 2023.
The government said conserving and managing ecosystem health and biodiversity would be an overarching priority that would be formalized through legislation.
But the framework has stalled, and the government is “kicking the can down the road,” Morris said.
The premier’s office forwarded The Tyee’s request for details about the ecosystem protections it claimed to have strengthened to the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship. The ministry had earlier told The Tyee it is assessing how to advance work on the framework “to achieve the shared goals of healthy and resilient ecosystems that will support healthy communities and economies, including the forestry sector.”
After publication of this story, a ministry spokesperson told the Tyee via email, “It’s important for us to consider a wide range of perspectives and take the time to get this right.”
BC Green Party MLA Jeremy Valeriote told The Tyee he hasn’t seen any evidence the government is strengthening ecosystem protections, “although we’ve heard some of the right words around it.”
“With a huge deficit, and a premier taking it on the nose from the Conservatives on economic development, there’s a lot of focus on Look West,” he said, referring to the B.C. government’s strategy to deliver major resource projects and grow key sectors such as critical minerals.
“I really do think that the environment is being set aside or put behind,” Valeriote said, pointing to Eby’s claim about ecosystem protections “without a lot of tangible actions” as an example.
Eby’s government also committed to protecting 30 per cent of B.C.’s land and waters by 2030, as part of an international initiative to safeguard nature and reverse biodiversity loss. A landmark global study in 2019 found nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history, “with grave impacts on people around the world now likely.”
Since then, the government has announced new protections in Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island, the inland temperate rainforest in the Incomappleux Valley in southeast B.C. and the expansion of the Klinse-za / Twin Sisters Park in the province’s northeast.
The spokesperson for the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship said clarity about ecosystem conservation “creates certainty for sustainable resource development and long-term prosperity for British Columbians,” adding that land use planning is key to reaching the target.
Wu said B.C. needs conservation targets for different ecosystems to ensure protected areas encompass valley bottoms that are home to a great diversity of life.
If future protected areas mainly safeguard mountaintops, he said, “it’s sort of like sending in the fire brigade to hose down all the houses that are not on fire, while they leave the houses that are on fire to burn down.”
Eby’s government has also failed to advance other initiatives to help the growing number of at-risk species and ecosystems in the province, Wu noted.
He pointed to the government’s policy to allow logging roads to be built through areas that are intended, in the government’s words, “to manage and conserve biodiversity associated with old-growth forests.”
Logging is also taking place in wildlife habitat areas for species at risk of extinction, including in areas set aside for spotted owls, mountain caribou and northern goshawks, Wu pointed out.
“For old-growth-dependent species that can’t survive when you fragment their old-growth habitat, it’s got to be a no-brainer that logging needs to be excluded.”
The Endangered Ecosystems Alliance is advocating for conservation financing for First Nations so old-growth logging can be deferred without nations losing a major source of their revenue.
“The B.C. government needs to get us out of the business of old-growth logging,” Wu said.
The spokesperson for the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship said the government is also advancing conservation and supporting biodiversity and ecosystem health through other initiatives. These include $57 million to help restore watersheds, an additional $100 million in 2023 to restore and build resiliency in watersheds and landscapes and investing $150 million in a conservation fund to protect diverse ecosystems, such as old-growth forests and wetlands. The BC Parks Foundation is contributing matching funds for the conservation fund, the spokesperson added.
The Tyee: BC Must Stop Blaming First Nations for Old-Growth Logging
/in News CoverageApril 23, 2026
The Tyee
By: Ben Parfitt
Original article here.
Instead of subsidizing logging, the province should follow experts’ advice and pay nations to conserve forests.
You would be forgiven for thinking that British Columba’s Ministry of Forests is really the Ministry of Logging.
A recent ministry news release boasts of a 30 per cent increase in timber auctioned, legislative amendments that will result in 17,700 more truckloads of logs coming out of the province’s forests each year, and a new streamlined permitting process that will add another 11,100 truckloads of logs to the mix.
Ravi Parmar, the man overseeing all of this as forests minister, is certainly working hard to meet the mandate given to him by Premier David Eby, one that instructs him to increase logging rates and that sets a numerical target.
But what of old-growth forest conservation, which is also part of Parmar’s mandate? There, Parmar has acted with decidedly less zeal.
‘A moral failure’
In 2021, the provincial government appointed a panel to guide it in protecting more of B.C.’s irreplaceable old-growth forests. The panel delivered a report that recommended 2.6 million hectares of old-growth forests be deferred from logging. But trees have continued to fall, and last month five members of that panel wrote the government, voicing alarm at the province’s lack of progress in conserving British Columbia’s old-growth forests.
The panel members — ecologists Rachel Holt and Karen Price, longtime forester and Tahltan Nation member Garry Merkel, landscape analyst Dave Daust and economist Lisa Matthaus — were blunt.
“Purposely causing extinction is not just a moral failure but also a high economic, ecological and social risk.”
Parmar’s disingenuous response was to say that the lack of progress is effectively beyond the government’s control. The province has referred the proposed deferrals to First Nations and First Nations have rejected half of them, he said.
In an interview with Canadian Press reporter Brenna Owen, Parmar said that the “core” of the province’s old-growth commitments was respecting First Nations’ rights and title and making sure that “they have a seat at the table.”
“We’ve done that,” Parmar said, as if that absolves the government of addressing a biodiversity crisis that it brought into being with its own destructive resource policies.
Parmar’s ministry did indeed refer the old-growth deferral recommendations to First Nations. But those referrals didn’t happen in a vacuum, and therein lies the problem.
Bankrolling logging
For decades, provincial governments have worked diligently to get First Nations more directly involved in logging old-growth and primary forests (forests that have never before been subject to industrial logging activities).
Efforts really took off during Gordon Campbell’s helm as premier in the early 2000s, with the issuance of a raft of new logging licences giving First Nations timber and cash. By 2006, 126 such licences had been awarded.
Since most First Nations — then and now — do not directly own or co-own mills, the trees cut down under those licences ended up being shipped to sawmills owned by a handful of lumber companies that had long ago monopolized the forest industry in B.C. But at least First Nations were being given some stake in profiting from the industrialization of their traditional lands, rather than standing on the sidelines as forests were depleted to the financial benefit of the province and lumber companies alike.
The current government has effectively continued what the BC Liberals started, with Parmar recently announcing that his ministry granted new logging rights to the Fort Nelson First Nation in the remote northeast corner of the province.
Some of the licences awarded under the NDP’s tenure have clearly given the First Nations involved better financial terms than their competitors. In 2022, the McLeod Lake Indian Band logged nearly 180,000 cubic metres of timber under a special permit awarded to the band by the ministry and known as an occupant licence to cut.
A Tyee review of records available on a ministry database shows that the ministry charged the band only 25 cents per cubic metre for the timber cut under the licence. That is the bare minimum “stumpage” fee that logging companies pay the province when they cut down trees on Crown or publicly owned land.
Had the band or the companies to which it sold the logs paid the same as everyone else in northern B.C. who held similar licences that year, the province would have collected over $1 million more in stumpage fees. Those savings meant increased profits for the band.
The provincial government has also entered into revenue-sharing agreements with many First Nations that have had the effect of bankrolling even bigger logging ventures.
In February 2022, the Tsay Keh Dene Nation and the McLeod Lake Indian Band announced that they intended to spend $70 million to buy a forest licence in the Mackenzie region held by Canfor Corp.
Shortly after that, money began pouring into the band and First Nation from the provincial government. A Tyee review of financial statements available on a searchable federal government website shows that provincial funding to Tsay Keh rose from just over $2 million in 2022 to $18 million in 2024. McLeod Lake’s revenues from the province rose from $11 million in 2022 to $55 million in 2024.
Flush with that infusion of cash from the province, the two Indigenous governments ultimately bought Canfor’s forest licence in September 2024, the same year that provincial government contributions to the two Indigenous governments were at their highest levels.
Taxpayers, it could be argued, effectively subsidized a purchase that financially benefited both the First Nation and a forest company that had put thousands of mill workers out of jobs as it shuttered one B.C. mill after another and plowed investment dollars into the U.S. South instead.
Bankrolling conservation?
Parmar and his predecessors have clearly encouraged more logging by First Nations on the grounds that it fosters a long-overdue new relationship with Indigenous Peoples and governments in the province.
But it prompts the question: What meaningful financial assistance has the province offered those First Nations who may wish to conserve forests in their territories or those First Nations who might be persuaded that that is the right and necessary thing to do?
If the provincial government genuinely believes in protecting more irreplaceable old-growth forests — it appointed the panel after all — then what is it doing to make that happen?
Parmar’s claim that more old growth could be protected if First Nations were of a different mind is an insult to all British Columbians, especially when the government is shovelling money out the door at the same time to facilitate the very logging of those forests.
In their letter, the five panel members pointed out that in lieu of logging, there must be adequate conservation financing or funding to assist First Nations who are affected both by the industrialization of their traditional lands and by conservation decisions.
Such funding “has not been part of the deferral conversation” and its absence “leaves First Nations with no real choice,” the panel’s members told the province. “We ask the province to take responsibility for maintaining these exceptional forests and not place the burden of harvesting decisions entirely on Nations.”
Financially compensating First Nations to conserve lands is not a new idea. In 2019, all provincial members of the legislative assembly voted unanimously in support of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which became law on Nov. 28, 2019.
Article 29 of the act states:
“Indigenous peoples have the right to the conservation and protection of the environment and the productive capacity of their lands or territories and resources. States shall establish and implement assistance programmes for indigenous peoples for such conservation and protection, without discrimination.”
Premier Eby has proposed suspending portions of the legislation in response to court rulings, but has backed away from immediate action.
Whether or not Article 29 is among those sections to be suspended remains to be seen. But regardless of what happens, it is clear that all those provincial MLAs who voted in favour of the legislation seven years ago — the current premier among them — believed that First Nations were owed financial compensation to assist in conservation efforts.
In the 155 years since B.C. entered Confederation, governments have collectively taken in hundreds of billions of dollars in “resource rents” from logging, oil and gas, and mining companies.
It’s time some of that money went back to financially compensate those who have paid, and continue to pay, the biggest price as irreplaceable old-growth forests disappear. And that money needs to flow at a rate that is commensurate with or better than the money the government is happily pushing out the door to get First Nations to log instead.