File photo (image credit - CFJC Today)

By Michael Reeve

BC ELECTION 2024

‘Certainty of supply’; BC Conservatives unveil election policy on forestry

Sep 16, 2024 | 6:45 PM

KAMLOOPS — The BC Conservative Party is starting to lay out major policy initiatives ahead of next month’s provincial election.

The Tories unveiled their forestry plan over the weekend, entitled ‘Saving BC Forestry: For Workers, Communities and Biodiversity.’ One of the key planks of the plan is to remove the current stumpage system and replace it with a value-added product tax. How that change could affect dealings with the U.S. and a softwood lumber deal are yet to be seen.

“What we want to be able to do is look at the value of the entire tree and then be able to expropriate that into credits, and that is how those costs are going to be realized,” said BC Conservative candidate for Kamloops-North Thompson Ward Stamer. “Simplified system — one project, one permit, less paperwork. Streamline the process for getting permits and logging and have certainty of supply for all our manufacturing facilities.”

The BC Conservatives are pledging to improve access to fibre through permitting changes and ensuring that burnt timber from wildfires is harvested quickly before it loses viability. The party is also promising to keep just shy of two-thirds of the forested landscape in BC free of industrial scale forestry activity.

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“Approximately 64 per cent of BC’s area is forested — or about 60 million hectares. The Conservative Party of BC will continue to ensure that nearly two-thirds of BC’s forested landscape will remain in its original forested state and will never see industrial-scale forestry activity. The remaining forested landscape (about 22 million hectares) will be managed to achieve supply chain stability in BC’s forest sector as well as to enhance biodiversity and ecological qualities,” reads a BC Conservative press release.

“The other thing we have to be focused on is the health of our forests,” said Stamer. “We have got many areas of this province where the trees are dead and dying and we have a significant wildfire risk. We want to be able to identify those areas, get ahead of that, continue our fire mitigation and fuel reduction efforts in those areas to reduce the risk and protect what we still have.”

British Columbians are expected to head to the polls on October 19.