The province's main forestry trade body has raised objections to a government move, timed ahead of an election, that would place a ceiling on payouts to forest tenure holders when land transfers to First Nations under reconciliation agreements.
Internal documents obtained by reporters this week — a briefing paper and an accompanying presentation, both marked confidential — contain a pledge to hand 400 Crown land parcels over to First Nations. Proposed amendments to the Forest Act, detailed in the planning documents, would place a ceiling on payouts owed to timber-rights holders on those parcels — a move the government attributes to ongoing budgetary pressures.
Prior to the election, Kim Haakstad — chief executive of the Council of Forest Industries — put government officials on notice that her organisation stood against any reduction in compensation for timber cutting rights, citing an array of pressures already bearing down on the forestry sector. She also told those officials that the proposal had come to her attention in early August, at which point the parties involved had entered into non-disclosure agreements surrounding it.
Her decision to speak about the matter at that point, she explained, followed the release of those documents to the public by a legislative reporter based in Victoria, with Northern Beat being the first outlet to carry the details.
Haakstad noted that COFI and a number of its member organisations had access only to what appeared in the briefing document and an accompanying presentation — the latter carrying a date of Sept. 10, arriving fewer than two weeks ahead of Premier David Eby's announcement of a snap election.
Eby, speaking in his role as NDP Leader, left unanswered which of the 400 Crown land sites would be affected, how much land those properties collectively cover, and what any compensation framework might entail. During a media availability, Eby told reporters that the list draws from agreements with treaty First Nations that had been openly negotiated and publicly documented, with a number of those deals having been put in place by earlier administrations more than ten years prior.
Eby described the documents as addressing ways to lower the expense involved in those land transfers, and noted that even B.C. Conservative Leader Lorne Doerkson shared his view that agreements with First Nations represent a meaningful path forward for the province — one of the few areas where the two find common ground. He added that when such agreements involve transfers of Crown land, reducing the financial burden on taxpayers forms a central part of making those deals work.
Running under the B.C. Conservative banner, McInnis took issue with the proposal on two grounds — that it had been drawn up without any input from the public, and that it amounted to a betrayal of a forest industry he said had repeatedly approached government for action and financial support, only to receive word that no compensation would accompany the land transfers at issue.
McInnis expressed backing for partnerships aimed at improving the lives of Indigenous people in the province, though he noted that residents draw a line at arrangements reached without public visibility. Eby, for his part, pointed to instances where land transfers remove obstacles for forestry operations — particularly those involving First Nations entities — explaining that legal challenges to forest tenures and cutting permits had brought industry activity to a halt, which was the rationale behind deals struck under both the preceding administration and the current one.
Vancouver-based lawyer Wes Mussio, whose practice encompasses forestry law, indicated that such measures would expose government to a range of legal disputes, framing the proposal under the doctrine of constructive taking — a form of expropriation that carries a compensation requirement — and noting that government does not hold the authority to simply appropriate property without consequence.
Eby put forward that the policy lacks meaningful parallel in legal frameworks beyond places like Indonesia or Papua New Guinea, and that characterising it as an obstacle to forestry operations misrepresents what the measure actually achieves — specifically, lowering the cost burden carried by the public purse. In a separate development, a background document distributed without attribution by NDP campaign staff set out that the proposal would permit compensation to be waived in cases where a transfer left no more than five per cent of a licence holder's timber harvesting entitlements affected.
Of the parcels reviewed, roughly half were found to carry any meaningful forestry-related implications, according to the same source.
Haakstad noted that the forestry sector accepts the need for reconciliation, while pointing to the provincial government's 2003 reallocation of 20 per cent of Crown timber tenures over a decade — a process that established B.C. Timber Sales — as a model for how compensation ought to work. She stated that contractors and licence holders alike received payment for lost access at that time, and that any reconciliation agreements reached with Nations should carry funding to cover losses borne by those who no longer hold opportunity on the land base.
