Raw Logs and Lost Jobs: How the BC Government Has Sacrificed Forest Communities
Growing raw log exports mean almost 5,000 lost employment opportunities.
Its members include the most powerful players in the province’s forest industry, companies that do the vast majority of logging on British Columbia’s coast. Its website boasts of “innovative, high-tech” companies whose workers turn out “a growing array of forest and wood products.”
While forest industry manufacturing on B.C.’s coast stagnates, CFPA member companies, including the huge corporations TimberWest, Western Forest Products and Interfor, collectively ship millions of cubic metres of raw, unprocessed logs out of the province each year — a practice the association claims will increase profits, which may one day lead to investments in new sawmills. Included in the export mix are logs from old-growth trees harvested on Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii, the Nass Valley in northern B.C. and up and down the province’s coast, including in the Great Bear Rainforest, B.C.’s much-touted showcase for coastal forest conservation and “ecosystem-based” logging.