A town shaped by working forests
Ron Woznow arrived in office with a background in strategic leadership, academia and innovation. Elected mayor of Powell River in 2022, he brought a broad policy lens to a town long shaped by resource development. He says the town was built around a pulp mill in 1910, but its identity reaches beyond industry.
He knows a lot about the history of the town, and its community, recalling details about the people who worked at the mill. “The manager of the pulp mill loved male choirs,” he said, recollects how workers were recruited from Europe, adding cultural texture to the small mill town.
And forestry remains central there. “Forestry is very important.” He says, tying that to the town’s effort to revive its idled mill and to the wider ecosystem of contractors and suppliers that depend on fibre moving.
His point is larger than employment numbers. He sees forestry as a system. Roads, equipment, accommodation, transportation and maintenance all depend on it. When harvesting slows, those ripple effects reach far beyond the bush.
That wider economic web, he argues, is often poorly understood in urban British Columbia.
More than jobs
Like many leaders in forestry communities, Woznow doesn’t believe forestry and conservation sit in conflict. He sees the relationship as practical, saying “Forestry and environmental considerations go hand in hand.”
He points to Powell River’s volunteer-built trail network as evidence of this symbiosis. Residents use working forests. Families explore them. They see second and third-growth stands and learn stewardship in practice.
Woznow also believes forestry is more than an economic engine, it’s civic infrastructure supporting recreation, community identity and a sense of continuity.
“Managed properly, our forest industry will be here 100, 200, 300 years from now.”
That long view is an important perspective. It frames forestry less as extraction, and more as intergenerational management.
A message beyond Powell River
Woznow reserves some of his sharpest comments for policy-makers and what he sees as regulatory excess. His concern isn’t with environmental rules in principle, but he emphasizes the need to “ensure that we’re not over regulating to death this key industry.”
It’s a familiar concern in resource communities, but it’s important to also ground it in a broader provincial argument. Forestry, Woznow says, matters as much in Vancouver as in Powell River, even if urban residents don’t always see it. But law firms, builders, traders and manufacturers are part of the same value chain.
That may be his core message. Forestry is not a peripheral industry serving remote towns. It remains woven into British Columbia’s economy.
For Woznow, the case is simple. Protect the resource. Trust sustainable management. And treat forestry as a long-term solution, not a legacy sector.
Ian Biana writes for the Resource Works Accelerate team and can be reached at [email protected].
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