British Columbia’s forestry sector—facing wildfire losses, pine beetle infestations, the departure of major companies, and now the threat of escalating tariffs—needs to reconsider its logging and exporting model as it seeks financial resilience, critics suggest.

Natural Resources Canada recently provided C$20 million in aid to the sector, which employs 50,000 workers and exported $11.4 billion worth of products in 2024—over half of that to the United States, according to CBC News. The support comes amid “additional unjustified trade barriers” imposed by the U.S., beyond the “unfair and unwarranted” duties imposed since 2017, the Canadian government said in a news release.

Earlier in March, B.C. Premier David Eby denounced the 25% tariff threatened by the Trump administration back then, and the planned tripling of a softwood levy by this summer.

Eby called those measures a “new, massive threat” to the industry.

The U.S. had announced the levy would increase to 20.07%, nearly three times the previous rate—in addition to existing countervailing duties of at least 6.74%. Even higher duties were expected on specific companies. In early April, Forest Economic Advisors reported on plans to impose an 11.87% countervailing duty on imports from integrated forest products company Canfor.

However, on April 9, Trump dropped his country-specific tariffs down to a universal 10% rate for all trade partners except China, and a White House official told CNBC that Canada and Mexico would not face an additional 10% tariff as a result.

Still, pressures continue to mount on B.C.’s forest-reliant communities. Canfor closed its sawmills in Vanderhoof and Fort St. John last September after 85 years in operation, and is now in the process of transferring these operations—though not the 500 workers who lost their jobs—to Arkansas. It still has a mill in operation in Prince George.

Its departure is devastating for the forestry-anchored towns.

“When you lose a sawmill, you’re not just losing a payroll—you’re destabilizing a whole community,” B.C. Treaty Commissioner George Abbott told last week’s annual B.C. Council of Forest Industries convention in Prince George.

Losses—And Opportunities

John Brink, a Prince George business operator who manufactures products crafted from discarded lumber—mostly for the U.S. market—said he isn’t sure he would survive a storm of tariffs.

“A lot of people will get hurt, losing their jobs, losing their businesses,” he told CBC News.

But nestled with Brink’s fears of a decimated economy are hopes that new opportunities could arise: Ottawa may decide to distribute money raised from retaliatory tariffs to small, local, businesses like his.

Brink envisions buying Canfor’s abandoned mills and transforming them “from a multinational, profit-driven enterprise to smaller, community-based businesses that make value-added wood products rather than simply raw lumber,” writes CBC News.

Cameron Beck of Conservation North said the province should seize the moment to build an economy that is not based on forest clearcutting.

“We are destroying the habitat for mountain caribou, grizzly, wolverine, fisher,” Beck told CBC News. “We know we’re driving those animals into extinction. What kind of impact is that going to have on our future, on the future health of our planet and ourselves?”

Beck wants the province to retrain forestry workers in new industries like ecosystem restoration and protection.

Healthy Forests Bring Economic Wellbeing

For trade union Unifor, which represents more than 22,100 sawmill, pulp and paper, and wood manufacturing workers across Canada, counter-tariffs on lumber are “not enough.”

“It’s time to reduce our historic dependence on exporting commodities and focus on what will become the next phase of Canada’s forestry industry,” Unifor said in a release, pitching the use of Canada’s vast lumber resources to facilitate a national affordable home building strategy. “We grow it here. Let’s process it and build here, too,” the union wrote.

But for long-term prosperity, how we harvest our forest resources matters enormously, Michael Polanyi, policy and campaign manager for Nature Canada, told The Energy Mix.

Canada has “clung to a narrative” that its forest industry is sustainable and aligned with its climate targets, but Nature Canada’s upcoming assessment of Ottawa’s recent national emissions inventory counters that claim, he said.

The federal inventory pegs net emissions from forest lands and harvested wood products for 2023 at 18 megatonnes, but a full and transparent accounting that doesn’t ignore emissions from wildfires while claiming carbon credits from natural regrowth would put these “as high as 138 megatonnes,” Nature Canada said in a March 27 release.

Whatever the final number, forest sector emissions are “very high,” says Polanyi, high enough to threaten Canada’s ability to sell wood products to the European Union after its 2023 adoption of a landmark law restricting the import of products that promote forest degradation.

“A competitive and viable logging sector depends on the health of forests, right? So, what we’re saying is don’t react from a position of fear and throw a lot of money to perpetuate a model that’s not sustainable,” Polanyi said.

Instead, Canada needs to “acknowledge that its current approach to logging—the clearcutting of primary forests—is making the sector a high emitting sector, is degrading forests,” he added. The next federal government must “keep that fact in mind when designing support programs, relief programs to put the forest industry on a footing that’s going to be economically viable and environmentally stable long into the future.”