Source coverage: Tree Frog Forestry News (Kelly McCloskey, Editor)
There is a phrase Susan Yurkovich used at this week’s COFI convention in Vancouver that is likely to stay with the people who heard it.
“BC used to be the last” standing in a downturn. “Now it’s the first down.” The president and CEO of Canfor told delegates.
It was the clearest encapsulation of an opening day of frank, at times sobering, but ultimately purposeful conversation — an industry that has looked honestly at how badly things have deteriorated, and arrived at a shared diagnosis of what it will take to recover. Day 2 proceedings were still ahead as this report was filed.
The 2026 BC Council of Forest Industries Convention opened to a sold-out crowd at the JW Marriott Parq Vancouver on Thursday — the first of two days — with a theme, “Forestry is a Solution,” that doubled as a province-wide public campaign. By opening morning, more than 1,860 people had signed the petition at forestryisasolution.com and more than 1,000 letters had gone to local MLAs, the minister of forests, and the premier. The sessions that followed covered everything from global oil prices to the future of the working forest land base. Across all of it, a picture emerged of an industry that has reached an inflection point — one that could go either way.
The numbers that tell the story
Bryan Yu, chief economist at Central 1 Credit Union, opened the convention’s macroeconomic session by describing Canada as navigating an “era of poly-crises.” Oil prices have surged to $144 spot as Middle East conflict threatens the Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly 20% of global oil supply — a reminder, as Resource Works has long argued, that energy security is not an abstraction but a physical fact with economic consequences. The US tariff and trade environment remains unresolved. Canada’s GDP growth has slowed to 1.3% and may be revised further downward. Two months of job losses have put roughly 100,000 Canadians out of work nationally.
For BC, the picture is sharper. A province that was growing at 2.5% to 3% annually as recently as 2023 lost approximately 20,000 jobs in February alone. Population is expected to contract — Central 1 projects negative growth of between 0.2% and 1% annually for the next two years, with BC more exposed than most provinces given its high share of temporary residents.
Against that backdrop, Yu offered a number that puts the forestry sector’s challenges in long perspective: its direct contribution to BC’s economy has fallen from roughly 3.5% two decades ago to between 1.5% and 2% today. This is not a cyclical problem. It is a structural one, decades in the making — and it is precisely the kind of trend Resource Works was founded to surface and address.
The CEOs on stage knew these numbers by feel. John Mohammed of A&A Trading said conditions are the worst he has seen in a career spanning more than three decades. Steven Hofer of Western Forest Products said this is the most challenging business environment for a BC forest products company he has encountered in 33 years. Sean McLaren of West Fraser said the current moment is every bit as difficult as the 2008–09 recession — with the critical difference that the rest of the world is carrying on while BC companies face the convergence of market access barriers, fibre supply constraints, and cost structures that have outpaced every other jurisdiction.
Mohammed described the financing environment without softening: commercial banks now treat forestry as a four-letter word. Outside of Export Development Canada, private financing for the sector is effectively closed.
What’s broken
The convergence of voices on the causes of the problem was striking. The CEOs named it. Minister of Forests Ravi Parmar acknowledged it from the stage. Even BC Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee, in the convention’s opening keynote, cited 15,000 jobs lost in BC since 2022 and 21 permanent or indefinite mill closures since 2023 — before arguing that the path forward runs through full implementation of Indigenous rights frameworks, not around them.
The core issue is fibre access and land certainty. BC’s annual allowable cut is set at 60 million cubic metres. The province harvested around 30 million last year. The trees, as Yurkovich put it, are there. The issue is access.
For capital investment, the math is unforgiving. A new mill represents a US$200-million commitment with a 20-to-25-year payback horizon. Making that decision requires reasonable confidence that fibre will be available across that entire period. In BC right now, that confidence does not exist. Yurkovich noted that Canfor alone has invested $900 million in BC since 2019 — most of it sustaining existing assets rather than building new capacity.
Regulatory cost reinforces the problem. Tenure obligation costs have risen more than 50% since 2017. Deputy Minister Makenzie Leine, joining Parmar on stage, said the ministry has been conducting a detailed analysis of those costs — including inconsistencies in what is charged across district offices — and that an action plan is coming in weeks.
The policy window
Public opinion researcher Bruce Anderson, chief strategy officer at Spark Advocacy and a veteran of the forestry sector’s public affairs battles since the mid-1990s, told delegates he has never seen a federal government more preoccupied with natural resources or more interested in finding new markets for resource sectors.
He also offered a reframe the industry would do well to absorb. The sustainability debate, he said, is effectively over. Forestry has what he called “millennial social licence” — it worked through the certification battles and environmental conflicts of earlier decades and came out with public credibility intact. What people want to hear about now is thriving economic opportunity, good-paying jobs, and the ability for workers and families to build lives. It is a shift Resource Works has been advocating for years: from social licence as a defensive posture to prosperity as an affirmative one.
Anderson illustrated the stakes with a single figure. A middle-class home in Vancouver, adjusted for inflation from a century ago, should cost roughly $85,000. It now costs $1.1 million. A century ago, a forest worker had a 70% to 80% chance of affording such a home. Today, the odds are zero. This is not abstraction. It is the lived reality of the communities forestry is supposed to sustain — and the kind of people-first framing that should be at the centre of how the sector tells its story.
Fresh polling presented at the convention showed BC residents cite tariffs and regulations equally as causes of the sector’s challenges — 35% apiece. The finding matters because tariff relief requires US cooperation that may not come. Regulatory reform does not.
Anderson’s advice to the sector on Ottawa: arrive with specific, outcome-oriented asks — not process requests. Bandwidth at the federal level is scarce, and it goes to urgent problems with a clear business case. The Get It Done BC ethos — concrete solutions, not position papers — applies here as much as anywhere.
The working forest and the 45-million target
Parmar used his convention address to lay out what he described as a new vision for BC forestry: a defined, protected working forest land base, analogous to the Agricultural Land Reserve or provincial parks, characterized by certainty and long-term predictability. The concept, he said, must be built with First Nations as stewards of the land.
Bill 14, introduced in the legislature the week of the convention, projects to unlock approximately 800,000 cubic metres of additional fibre through expanded BC Timber Sales contracting, faster salvage of fire-impacted timber, and full-rotation stewardship for BCTS tenures. BC Timber Sales has already seen a 30% volume increase compared to the same quarter last year.
The number every speaker returned to is 45 million cubic metres — the harvest target in Parmar’s mandate letter. Hofer put a government revenue figure on it: reaching that level would generate $700 million in direct revenue to the province at a time when BC urgently needs it. Mohammed proposed a parallel target — $5 billion in new capital invested in BC forestry by 2030, which he called “five by 30.”
Parmar was direct about the gap. Budget 2026 projects 30 million cubic metres over the next three years, a number set by the Ministry of Finance, not Forests. His goal is 45 million. The working forest concept, he said, is how BC gets there.
One angle that has not yet received the attention it deserves: Hofer noted that mass timber now accounts for more than 10% of all mass timber construction projects in the global data centre sector. At a moment when digital infrastructure is a national priority — and when the Canadian Coalition for Digital Infrastructure is actively making the case for Canada’s competitive advantage in this space — the connection between a working BC forest and the infrastructure underpinning the AI economy is more than a talking point. It is a supply chain.
The reconciliation dimension
Teegee’s keynote was the convention’s most layered address. He began by acknowledging the economic reality — the job losses, the mill closures, the fibre constraints — and argued, with precision, that the path through runs alongside First Nations, not around them.
Nations, he said, are no longer on the margins of the industry. “We elbowed our way and brought ourselves into these positions.” The First Nations Forestry Council has been brokering partnerships between nations and forestry operators, leading trade missions to Japan and Korea that have already generated new investor interest, and building a business connect registry linking nations to forestry opportunities across BC.
This trajectory is exactly what Resource Works has documented year after year through the Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase — nations moving from consultation to ownership, from the margins to the value chain. The COFI convention made clear that this is not a peripheral story. It is the central one.
Teegee was unequivocal on DRIPA: First Nations leadership across BC is not supporting any amendment, repeal, or suspension of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. A proposed “pause,” he said, amounts to a repeal for three years. His framing — that free, prior, and informed consent is not a barrier to development but the condition that allows development to proceed in a way that holds value over generations — deserves more attention than it has received outside the room.
Parmar’s own position aligned more closely with Teegee’s than surrounding media coverage has suggested. He said there is no intention in forestry to walk away from reconciliation, and that doing so would leave the sector in a worse position, not a better one.
What Day 1 made clear
Day 1 of the 2026 COFI convention established one thing beyond doubt: the sector has stopped describing the problem and started presenting the bill. The diagnosis is shared across industry, government, and First Nations leadership. The 45-million-cubic-metre target is the accountability metric. The working forest is the policy vehicle. The window, according to the public opinion data, is open.
What remains is execution — and the political will to see it through. Day 2 coverage to follow.
Ian Biana writes for the Resource Works Accelerate team and can be reached at [email protected]. Reporting with AI tools from the 2026 COFI Convention, JW Marriott Parq Vancouver, April 9–10, 2026. Source coverage: Tree Frog Forestry News (Kelly McCloskey, Editor).
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