“If the government doesn’t wake up to the extreme urgency of what’s going on, you will see one to two pulp mills shut every year.”
—Joe Nemeth
The abrupt closure of Canfor’s Northwood pulp mill in Prince George this week was the latest in a long line of preventable tragedies in the forest sector that have cost thousands of people their jobs, say workers and industry leaders.
And without a major course correction from the provincial government, it’s going to get worse.
There were 17 pulp and paper mills in B.C. five years ago, just before Premier David Eby took over leadership of the NDP government. Now 11 remain, with Northwood’s closure.
“I believe if the government doesn’t wake up to the extreme urgency of what’s going on, you will see one to two pulp mills shut every year,” said Joe Nemeth, director of the BC Pulp & Paper Coalition.
“It’s preventable. That’s the bottom line.”
More than 300 people will lose their jobs at Northwood, due to what Canfor says is “a structural shift in global pulp markets” combined with “persistent challenges accessing fibre.”
“These factors have resulted in a prolonged period of unsustainable financial losses for Canfor Pulp,” the Vancouver-based company said in a news release announcing the wind-down of the mill by the end of this year.
“With no foreseeable improvement in the outlook, Canfor has made the difficult decision to close its Northwood facility.”
‘It’s devastating’
At the site in Prince George, many workers simply walked off the job after hearing the news, said Gavin McGarrigle, Unifor’s western director.
“It’s devastating,” he said in an interview. “We’re left with a lot of questions and a lot of finger-pointing, as usual.
“We’ve been calling that forestry is in crisis for years. We’ve been talking about government action, both provincially and federally, that has been occurring, but too slow, and too focused on the medium and long term and not addressing the crisis that everyone knew.”
Nemeth urged the B.C. government to force BC Hydro to pay market rates for the excess power produced by pulp mills, which would help the mills generate as much as $1.5 million in revenue a month.
More than 20 sawmills and pulp and paper mills have closed in B.C. during the last two years, creating a knock-on effect. Fewer trees cut mean fewer in-the-woods jobs, fewer truck loggers, fewer suppliers and ultimately fewer sawmills, which then starve pulp mills of the wood waste needed to operate. Fewer pulp mills then mean fewer customers for sawmills, as part of a kind of interlocked death spiral for the industry.
Fix permitting, pause Indigenous land use agreements, says forestry exec
The NDP government has long blamed US softwood lumber tariffs, global market dynamics and forest companies more interested in investing elsewhere than B.C.
Canfor, for example, announced a $68 million purchase of a wood facility in Calgary last month. Canfor reported a $73 million loss in its first quarter of 2026.
The forestry sector counters with complaints about the NDP’s ever-changing provincial policies, fewer trees due to old growth protections, delays caused by First Nations reconciliation requirements, high stumpage fees, bureaucracy, and onerous permitting requirements.
Forests Minister Ravi Parmar has offered some provincial reforms, but they don’t go far enough, said Kim Haakstad, CEO of the BC Council of Forest Industries.
“What they’ve been able to achieve so far does not move the dial enough for what we need,” she said in an interview.
Parmar has touted progress reducing cutting permit times down to around 25 days, but Haakstad said it does not account for two to three years of preparation work required by companies just to meet government’s onerous regulatory requirements before even applying.
“We’ve got to fix the permitting system,” said Haakstad. She cited recent government reforms to mining and energy permitting to fast-track that process in the name of economic development and questioned why forestry can’t be treated the same.
“We need to look at long-term changes for the sector, but first we’ve got to stabilize.”
Kim Haakstad
The province needs to implement recommendations made this year by the Forest Sector Transformation Task Force, she added.
Parmar has said structural reforms are coming to forest permitting. But the government has struggled to get First Nations to sign off on forest landscape planning tables that were supposed to identify large areas of agreement for logging.
In the meantime, the NDP government also needs to take a pause on signing massive Indigenous land use and conservation agreements that lock up Crown land from the potential of logging, said Haakstad.
“We need to look at long-term changes for the sector, but first we’ve got to stabilize,” she said.
Uncertain access escalates costs, says critic
Opposition BC Conservative forestry critic Ward Stamer said the government has moved too slowly to reduce delays and costs for the sector, resulting in thousands of job losses. What was an industry that brought in $2 billion in revenue just a few years ago now contributes less than $500 million to treasury, he said.
“Without certainty of supply and the fact that we’ve got the most expensive cost for fibre in North America, it makes it very hard for us to compete not only on a world market but even on a domestic market,” Stamer told Northern Beat.
“We’ve basically costed our way right out of the market with everything from access to fibre, the cost of the fibre, all the policies and regulations that the NDP’s piled on top of us, and it just makes it uneconomical to move forward in a lot of these instances.”
“We’ve basically costed our way right out of the market.”
Ward Stamer
It also hurts the widening rural-urban divide in the province, said Stamer.
“It’s unfortunate that people in other regions of the province, say the Lower Mainland, that really don’t truly appreciate what we’re talking about, because everyone’s affected by this not just the revenue that comes into the provincial coffers but all the other subsidiary jobs that are related to this industry,” he said.
“Everyone’s touched by forestry in this province… and it’s been driven right into the ground.”