Forests minister in the Okanagan as industry braces for tariffs

Forests minister Ravi Parmar is in the Okanagan this week meeting with an industry under siege.

Longtime systemic challenges facing the forest sector have been exacerbated by escalating tariffs on softwood lumber by the Trump administration.

Parmar, who took over the forests portfolio in November 2024, has spent the months since travelling the province.

“It was really important for me as a new minister to be able to be on the ground,” he said Monday. “It's one thing to sit in Victoria in my office, talking about forestry, it’s another thing to be on the ground, meeting people in mills.”

Parmar toured the Gorman Brothers mill in West Kelowna Monday, met with the leadership of the WFN-owned Ntityix Resources and flew over the McDougall Creek and other wildfire sites.

The threat of rising U.S. tariffs is at the front of everyone’s mind, said Parmar.

Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Commerce has announced it’s planning to almost triple the anti-dumping duties on Canadian softwood lumber bringing total levies to almost 27 per cent.

And that’s before any additional economy-wide tariffs the White House could layer on.

Shortly after taking over as Minister of Forests, Parmar ordered a review of BC Timber Sales, the government agency that manages 20% of the province's annual allowable cut.

Mill owners have been critical of BCTS for failing to get timber to market and not meeting its quotas. Parmar says he’s been tasked with getting the province back up to a harvest level of 45 million cubic metres annually. The province harvested 35 million cubic metres in 2023.

“I think we can do that without a doubt,” he said, acknowledging that permitting is only half the battle. “Market conditions play a role.”

“A lot of people think it's just permits that are holding us back from a strong and vibrant forest sector. And if that was the case, I think we could address the problem fairly quickly, to some extent. But it's broader than that.”

B.C.’s forestry sector boomed and mills opened during the pine beetle epidemic amid a rush to process pest-infested forests in the early 2000s. More than half of B.C.’s merchantable timber was impacted and the hangover now hitting mill towns was predicted a decade ago.

Foresters are having to climb higher up mountains and build roads longer than ever to reach harvestable forests as geography—rather than annual allowable cut quotas—becomes the primary factor slowing the flow of logs to mills.

The days of harvesting operations taking place 20 minutes from mills are long gone.

“There are companies, long standing ones here in British Columbia that were here during the good times, that took advantage of the opportunities to make a buck, and in some cases, make billions of dollars in profit,” Parmar said.

“And now that the times are tough, they're not investing those billions of dollars in profits here. They're investing them down south and elsewhere, instead of investing them here to be able to get to what they often refer to as non-economic fibre,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the people that pay the price are communities and workers.”

In response, Parmar said the province is working to address overall transportation costs in the north and Southern Interior.

“But also, I know of some mills that have been going down because of softwood, lumber duties continuing to go up, and the threat of tariffs as well. There's a combination of things that are impacting this sector.”

“I certainly got my work cut out for me.”

With the wildfire season a few months away, Castanet News asked Parmar when the province would start investing more in wildfire mitigation.

The province, through the Forest Enhancement Society of BC, has spent just $80M since 2016 on community wildfire projects. For context, one super scooper firefighter aircraft costs $30M.

“I've tasked my ministry to work to find the solutions, to be able to better understand the resiliency work we have to do across the province,” he said.

Fire-proofing the province, Parmar said, would cost “billions and billions of dollars,” but he says he would “love nothing more” than to be able to pitch the Minister of Finance on increased mitigation measures.

“Instead of costing, to fight fires, over a billion dollars, why don't we spend a couple hundred million more doing this wildfire mitigation and developing that plan.”

“It's one of the things that now I've been tasked with, is implementing that — we’re going to be doing that work.”