It’s one of the great paradoxes of B.C.’s declining forestry sector. Large forestry companies continue to divest from B.C. and shutter sawmills and pulp mills, largely due to a lack of access to affordable fibre.
Meanwhile, in Coastal B.C., there seems to be plenty of timber available, mostly in the form of second growth.
In 2025, only half of the 15 million cubic metres of the coastal available cut was harvested, according to the Truck Loggers Association.
Nearly a third of that timber is owned or controlled by Coastal First Nations – about 4.6 million cubic metres.
Those nations are now banding together with the ambition of building their own sawmill somewhere on the coast to provide a market for that timber.
Iskum Investments, a consortium of 16 coastal First Nations, is looking to build a new, state-of-the-art sawmill capable of milling second growth hemlock and fir, at a cost of about $100 to $150 million.
The consortium recruited Rick Doman to help them execute the plan, and recently received $1.3 million from Natural Resources Canada’s Indigenous Forestry Initiative to conduct a feasibility study.
“We haven’t really had any new sawmills built in coastal B.C. that I’m aware of for decades,” Doman told me.
“We have to, of course, study it, make sure it makes economic sense and so on, and then the board of Iskum and its investors will decide if they want to proceed.”
Value-added manufacturing and Indigenous ownership
Robert Dennis Sr., former chief of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, which has a long history in the logging industry, has been one of the key players in forming Iskum Investments.
The Huu-ay-aht alone own or control about 190,000 cubic metres of timber through two Crown tenures, a community forest licence and treaty land woodlands.
The Huu-ay-aht also own 35 per cent of TFL-44, along with Western Forest Products – a company that was, incidentally, spun out of Rick Doman’s family business, Doman Industries.
Dennis said he came to realize that, if First Nations want to maximize benefits from their own forests, they need to start investing in value-added businesses, like sawmilling.
“If you look back at the COVID years, we saw a dramatic rise in the price of lumber, but I wasn’t seeing a rise in the price of the timber. That got me thinking: we’re missing out on an economic opportunity. Maybe we should be involved in the manufacturing side of things.”
He visited other coastal First Nations communities and helped put together a coalition of Nations willing to invest in a new coastal sawmill.
According to Iskum Investments, First Nations on the coast hold more than 200 forest tenures, with up to 4.6 million cubic metres of allowable annual harvest.
Iskum brought Doman aboard to service as chairman, due to his background in forestry and intimate knowledge of the B.C. coastal forest sector.
A global export vision for second-growth wood
Doman’s education in forestry was a baptism by fire. In 2001, he was obliged to step in to take over Doman Industries when his father, Herb Doman, had a stroke and later died. He was stepping in at a time when the company was in serious financial trouble, due to being over-leveraged.
Eventually Doman Industries was acquired by Western Forest Products and Doman left B.C. to start his own company in Eastern Canada.
He founded EACOM Timber Corporation, later acquired by Interfor, and spent several years living in Montreal.
He later co-founded GreenFirst Forest Products, and moved to Alberta, where he still lives.
He is spending more time back in B.C. these days though, having been appointed last year as chairman of the Forest Innovation Investment, a B.C. Crown corporation.
The sawmill Iskum Investments is considering would be designed to process second growth hemlock and fir. It would be designed to cut in both imperial and metric dimensions. The idea is to target mainly the non-U.S. market with hemlock and fir products.
“We really believe that, with the new technologies and so on, you can design a very high productivity sawmill, low cost, and one that can really compete in global markets,” Doman said.
“We can’t just rely on the United States. We intend to sell our products in Canada and countries in Europe, the United Kingdom, also North Africa, the Middle East, Australia, Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, India. We’re really looking at the global markets.
“We’d also make products that could be used for engineered wood products,” Doman added.
Capital investment and workforce impact
The capital cost of a new sawmill would be $100 million to $150 million. First Nations would be majority owners. The nations belonging to the consortium range from Powell River to Vancouver Island, down to the Lower Mainland.
The new sawmill would employ roughly 700 people in total – including in the logging sector – and would be designed to operate two shifts, Doman said.
“It would be majority First Nation owned, so the majority of the financing would have to come from the First Nations,” Doman said. “But we can still look for outside capital too.”
A site for the new mill has not yet been determined.
“We have three sites that we’re looking at that we think make a lot of sense for coastal BC.”
With the $1.3 million it is getting from NRCan, Iskum Investments will be working out things like logistics, costs and potential wood markets.
“We hope within six months we can have a site detailed plan for the sawmill, and then it’s up to the Iskum investors to make a decision if it makes sense to proceed,” Doman said.
Nelson Bennett’s column appears weekly at Resource Works News. Contact him at [email protected].
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