SOFT-CV and BC Budget Committee

Presentation re BC Budget, June 2025

"The presentation went well," says Megan Ardyche, who made the presentation on behalf of SOFT-CV. "It was serendipitous that we followed immediately after a logging advocacy group's presentation. The speaker had previously worked for the Truck Loggers Association. Their ask, in a nutshell, was for the province to relax all regulations and not to implement the recommendations of the Old Growth Strategic Review Panel (though he didn't use that name)." She continues, "He gave the GDP figure that I have below as proof of how valuable the industry is to the Provincial government. I had taken the GDP numbers [highlighted below in yellow] out of my presentation due to time restrictions, so I didn't get to clarify that the forestry industry contributes much less to GDP than tourism does."

Another SOFT-CV member who attended says, "Megan did an excellent job, and it was plain the committee was really surprised to hear the statistics, as the truck loggers rep [spoke] about how much [forestry does] for the Province, and that seems to be the standard thinking.  The committee asked for the link to the article, so thank you, Megan, for putting out this effort."

British Columbia promotes itself to the world as Super, Natural British Columbia. 

According to a government website, “tourism is a key driver of the provincial economy. Despite consisting mainly of small businesses, the tourism sector is one of the largest employers in B.C., significantly contributing to economic growth and community well-being.”

What follows is a very brief compare-and-contrast of the economic contributions and costs of tourism versus logging to BC’s economy.

These figures of the logging industry are from 2022 and the tourism figures are from 2022 and 2023, so they are roughly comparable.

• Tourism employed over 125,700 people; logging and related industry employed approximately 100,000. 

• Tourism resulted in $5.9 billion in wages and salaries in 2023, 11.8% higher than in 2022;

• Logging and related industries resulted in approximately $9.1 billion.

There were 16,860 tourism businesses in operation in 2023, mostly in small communities, many of them remote and, increasingly, more of them Indigenous owned. 92% of those are small businesses (employing fewer than 50 employees) and they directly contribute to their local community economies.

Nearly half of tourism businesses (40%) are located outside Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, again benefitting local and often remote communities.

In contrast, logging and related industries total about 1,496 logging or forestry companies and those are primarily large, multinational companies whose profits do not stay in the community, or even in BC.

Tourism contributed $22.1 billion in revenue to the province in 2023, 12.4% higher than 2022; logging contributed $6.6 billion in government revenue.

In terms of provincial GDP, tourism contributed $9.7 billion (3.1%). Forestry, logging, and support activities contributed $5.5 billion.

In terms of reconciliation, a labour market report by Indigenous Tourism BC (ITBC) found that, in 2017, more than 400 Indigenous tourism-focused businesses were operating in the province, which contributed about $705 million in gross domestic output to the provincial economy and more than 7,400 full-time jobs, 48 per cent of which were filled by Indigenous people. These businesses represented $387 million in wages and salaries and more than $39 million in tax revenue.

Conversely, since 2002, the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations has signed forest tenure agreements with 175 of the 203 First Nations in BC. These agreements provide $324 million in revenue-sharing. (https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/forestry-and-reconciliation-focus-on-bc )

In 2021, approximately 5,315 Indigenous workers were directly employed in the BC forest industry, making up about 9% of the total workforce. 

There are also provincial costs associated with clearcut logging, which significantly offset any revenues received. Prime among those costs are … 

• Subsidies: 

  • According to a 2021 article by investigative reporter David Broadland, “over the past 10 years…the cost to the public purse of managing BC’s publicly-owned forests has exceeded all direct revenue collected from the forest industry by $3.65 billion. BC taxpayers are, on average, providing a subsidy of $365 million each year to forest companies that operate in BC.

  • That figure of $3.65 billion is derived from publicly available accounts published by the Province of BC. Those accounts show that, on the revenue side, BC collected $6.41 billion in stumpage between 2009 and 2019. It also collected about $300 million through the BC Logging Tax. Together they produced revenue of $6.71 billion.

  • On the expense side, figures published in annual Ministry of Forests Service Plan Reports over those 10 years show total expenditures of $10,363,595,000.

  • That works out to an accumulated loss of $3,652,460,667.”

    
    

• There are other costs related to increased carbon emissions & mitigation of global warming, contributed to by logging.

• Forests' ability to regulate the movement of rainwater and snowmelt through forested landscapes can be degraded by industrial logging, impacting runoff into creeks, rivers and lakes; and rapid snowmelt resulting in more frequent droughts impacting agriculture, resulting in local food insecurity.

• Communities and ecosystems are more exposed and prone to one of climate change’s most catastrophic impacts: extreme flooding.

• Landslides:

  • Clearcutting forests can degrade forest structure, leading to more landslides. One study finds that nearly half of the around 1,300 landslides that occurred during B.C.'s November 2021 atmospheric river event started in areas burned by wildfire or disturbed by logging.

  • The Ministry of Transportation has estimated that the cost to repair roads damaged by landslides and washouts reached almost $500 million in 2023. Additionally, temporary repairs to highways after the 2021 floods were estimated at $210 million. 

• Wildfires:

  • 2024: The province has invested roughly $387 million into fire suppression, response and preparedness. 

  • 2023: The most expensive and destructive wildfire season to date, the Province spent approximately $770 million. Of course, not all of these ancillary costs are due solely to logging, but they are related.

• Law enforcement : 

  • During the Fairy Creek blockades, the RCMP spent $3.75 million in five months of enforcement. Under the current Provincial Police Service Agreement, BC would be on the hook for approximately $2.6 million. That is over one summer. 

  • Clayoquot Sound: While I don’t have costs for policing at Clayoquot Sound, in 1996 the provincial government covered the extra costs for MacMillan Bloedel to log the territory in an ecologically sound way in a three-year, $9.3 million deal.  

So, in closing, it seems clear that sound fiscal management would dictate that logging of our old-growth forests is an expense that [for] this government - and the people of BC - simply doesn't make economic sense.

Referring back to the beginning, tourism is a key economic driver in BC. Super, Natural British Columbia doesn’t promote clearcuts. People from around the world come to see our incredible ancient trees and the amazingly biodiverse forests. These forests are a renewable resource in the sense that they will persist and continue to thrive without major intervention from humans. Logging, on the other hand, is rapidly depleting a non-renewable resource. The old-growth trees and forests that are cut will never regenerate - at least not in any of our or even our grandchildren’s lifetimes. These forests themselves are thousands of years old, constantly regenerating themselves. Many of the individual huge trees we currently have are a thousand years old - or they were before all the clearcuts. 

When making your budget decisions, we ask that you consider all the benefits of retaining the old-growth forest ecosystems we have left. They are a greater benefit to BC’s economic health than cutting them down is. Simply put, they are worth more standing. 

Remember, the BC taxpayers are actually paying more to the logging companies than the province gets from them.

We aren’t suggesting there should be no logging. There are enough existing clearcuts that can be turned into tree plantations, as many already are. The companies can harvest second- or third-growth trees. And, we would suggest, the companies start supporting themselves, rather than taxpayers supporting them.

And in the end, preserving the remaining old-growth forests is just the right thing to do. Super, Natural British Columbia - let’s make sure it doesn’t disappear altogether.