BC’s Forests Minister Ravi Parmar met with Prince George City Council this afternoon, to discuss challenges and opportunities within the forest sector.
“The message that I hear loud and clear from British Columbians, people here in Prince George and all across this province, is what steps are we taking to ensure we’re increasing the value of our product, getting as many jobs per cubic metre,” Parmar told reporters following his meeting with City Council.
Parmar added he’s looking forward for the opportunity to work with Mayor Yu to explore bringing more modular housing facilities to BC, including in Prince George.
“The Mayor and I both agree that we talk about forestry often in the challenges, but there is still so much hope, and we need to deliver that hope, not only for the workers in this industry, but for all those that are directly and indirectly impacted, like communities as well,” Parmar said.
In terms of supporting communities through curtailments, the Province is focused on ensuring they can keep operations going.
“We’ve taken a number of steps to be able to help get fibre into the hands of those companies whenever possible, but also find opportunities through programming that we have in the Provincial Government to be able to help diversify, so many of these companies are less reliant on the United States for trading partners,” Parmar said.
“I think it’s important to mention that the duties and tariffs environment is challenging, but really one of the biggest challenges that we’re facing right now here in British Columbia is the fact that our lumber prices are really low, and the futures don’t look great for the first quarter of 2026, so we’re hoping in the second quarter things will pick up.”
During the BC Natural Resources Forum in 2025, a review of BC Timber Sales (BCTS) was announced.
Recommendations from the review were presented in September, which Parmar said his team has been reviewing.
“We have accepted all of those recommendations or developing an action plan that we’ll be rolling out in the weeks ahead,” he said.
“In the interim, what I’m really proud to share is, because of the hard work of the public service, in particular, the forest service in places like Prince George, Vanderhoof and elsewhere, we have seen a 30 per cent increase year-over-year of BCTS sales, nearly 30 per cent, I think it was about 28 per cent in total”
Parmar said with the environment forestry is operating in with tariffs, duties and more, a near 30 per cent increase is pretty incredible.
He added over the next year the province will be taking some steps to better position resources for the BC Wildfire Service to ensure the service can respond to fires better.
“We’ll continue to make investments, and I think there’s a particular focus that we’re giving to Prince George as a real economic hub, but also as a central hub for us to be able to position our resources, position our people, to be able to help fight fires, predominantly in the northern part of our province, which has certainly been giving us challenges, in particular in the north east, where we’re dealing with year after year of droughts,” he said.
Parmar will be speaking at the BC Resource Ministers’ Breakfast on Thursday morning as part of the BC Natural Resources Forum.
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