They Mapped the Forests. The Province Kept Logging Them Anyway.

In the autumn of 2021, the British Columbia government released what it called a landmark act of environmental stewardship: a map of 2.6 million hectares of the most at-risk old-growth forests in the province, produced by a five-member expert panel it had commissioned itself. The message from Victoria was clear — these are the forests that matter most, and we are going to protect them.

This week, every single member of that panel sent a letter to Premier David Eby, Forests Minister Ravi Parmar, and Resource Stewardship Minister Randene Neill. The province, they wrote, is continuing to approve logging in the very forests the panel identified. Long-term plans remain unfinished. And the window to prevent what they called 'ecosystem extinction' is closing.

The five signatories — ecologists Rachel Holt and Karen Price, landscape analyst Dave Daust, veteran forester Garry Merkel, and economist Lisa Matthaus — are not activists. They are the government's own appointed scientists. When they say the process 'has not worked as intended,' that is not a protest slogan. It is a professional indictment of the people who hired them.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY AT STAKE — IN WILDLIFE TERMS

Before we get to the politics, let us be direct about what is being lost, because the animals do not speak at press conferences. British Columbia's old-growth forests are among the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth. Before industrial logging began, the province supported roughly 25 million hectares of ancient forest. Today, approximately 11.1 million hectares remain — and critically, only about 415,000 hectares of that consists of high-productivity old-growth, the towering valley-bottom stands where the largest trees grow and the richest concentrations of wildlife live. On Vancouver Island and the southwest mainland, over 80 per cent of productive old-growth has already been logged, including more than 90 per cent of valley bottoms.

The Northern Spotted Owl is Canada's most endangered bird. Its historical population in BC once numbered around 500 adult owls. As of the federal government's amended 2025 recovery strategy, only 19 individuals remain — and no wild owl has been sighted in BC since 2023. The species' collapse is directly attributable to the systematic logging of its old-growth habitat over decades. A captive-breeding program exists, but there is nowhere to release the owls if the forests that would receive them are cut down first.

The Marbled Murrelet is a seabird that nests exclusively in the large, flat branches of old-growth trees — it does not nest in second-growth plantations. Listed as threatened under Canada's Species at Risk Act since 2003, the murrelet's nesting habitat is directly overlapped by active BC Timber Sales cut blocks on Vancouver Island.

Southern Mountain Caribou depend on old-growth forests for the arboreal lichens they eat in winter. With roughly 1,900 animals remaining across North America, BC approved logging in over 5,700 hectares of their habitat in 2025 alone. In February 2026, a legal challenge was launched over the federal government's 11-year delay in protecting their critical habitat.

The panel's letter to Premier Eby put the moral weight of these losses plainly: 'Purposely causing extinction is not just a moral failure but also a high economic, ecological and social risk.' That sentence was written by scientists. We at Wildlife Wise Canada are here to say it plainly: it is also a political choice, and specific politicians are making it.

THE VALHALLA WILDERNESS SOCIETY'S WARNING: PARKS ARE NEXT

The threat does not stop at the edge of the deferral zones. The Valhalla Wilderness Society — a BC conservation organisation operating since 1975 — has documented a second front: BC's parks and protected areas are now being targeted by industrial logging interests under the guise of wildfire mitigation. The province's own over-logging has created the conditions for increased wildfire risk, and that risk is now being used as justification to enter the protected areas that were meant to be off-limits. As Valhalla puts it, the logging industry has 'pushed itself to the brink by over-logging,' and is now attempting to solve the crisis it created by logging even more — this time inside parks.

THE RECORD VS. THE RHETORIC

The BC NDP promised in the 2020 election campaign to implement all 14 recommendations of the Old Growth Strategic Review. On the five-year anniversary in September 2025, none of the 14 recommendations had been fully implemented. In a legislature exchange last month, Minister Parmar told The Canadian Press that 'one of the first things that we did as a government was defer 2.6 million hectares of old-growth.' That statement is factually incorrect. The province announced deferrals for just over 350,000 hectares in September 2020. The 2.6 million hectare figure refers to the panel's mapping of at-risk forests released a year later — forests that have never been fully deferred.

Meanwhile, a Sierra Club BC report published in November 2025 found that in the four years following the 2021 deferral announcement, approximately 113,000 football fields' worth of old-growth deferral zones were logged. When The Tyee asked Parmar why massive old-growth trees are still being logged, he replied: 'My government, since 2017, has done more to protect old growth and biodiversity than any government in the history of British Columbia.' He then said he was 'very proud' of the record. The Union of BC Indian Chiefs, in a formal resolution passed in February 2026, used different language — condemning the provincial government for its 'ongoing failure' and stating that the province has 'stalled or abandoned' the key recommendations and continues to 'misrepresent the status of old-growth management to the public, to First Nations, and to the international community.'

Perhaps the most damaging finding in the panel's letter is this: conservation financing — money paid to First Nations in lieu of foregone logging revenues — 'has not been part of the deferral conversation.' The panel writes that the lack of alternatives 'leaves First Nations with no real choice.' The province has been able to shift responsibility by pointing to Indigenous rights and title when a First Nation does not support a deferral. But if the province never offered financial compensation for the economic loss that a deferral represents, then the choice was never genuinely free.

WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN

Wildlife Wise Canada does not accept the false binary between 'shut down the entire forestry sector' and 'log the last 3 per cent of high-productivity old-growth.' That framing is a rhetorical device. The panel's scientists, the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, the Valhalla Wilderness Society, and a growing body of peer-reviewed ecology all point to the same concrete actions: provide conservation financing now; halt BC Timber Sales cut blocks in panel-mapped areas; accelerate and fund Forest Landscape Plans; stop misrepresenting the statistics; and answer the panel's letter publicly.

The Wilderness Committee's Tobyn Neame put it succinctly in February 2026: 'The problem isn't caused by a lack of reports or recommendations or incomplete data, but by the fact that the province won't limit logging in the most at-risk forests.' BC has now had the Old Growth Strategic Review for five years. The Northern Spotted Owl has gone from 500 individuals to 19 in that time. The animals in those forests are not waiting for the next review. They are living, right now, in forests that have proposed cut blocks on them. That is the story. And the people responsible for it have names.

Wildlife Wise Canada encourages readers to contact Premier David Eby's office at [email protected] and Forests Minister Ravi Parmar's office at [email protected] and ask them to respond publicly to the advisory panel's letter.

Media Contact

Gerald Shaffer — Wildlife Wise Canada
Email: [email protected]
Web: wildlifewise.ca