Millions in Forest 'Enhancement' Funds May Be Spurring More Logging Millions in Forest 'Enhancement' Funds May Be Spurring More Logging Do transport payments subsidize logging? Canfor receives the most subsidies Subsidies reduce log-burning, companies say Fewer mills lead to longer hauls Are the logs really 'low-value'?

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BC subsidizes trucking logs far distances. Some worry it leads to cutting down remote, rare forests.
Ben Parfitt
22 Jun 2026
22 Jun 2026The Tyee
Ben Parfitt is a reporter at The Tyee covering forestry and related issues.
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BC subsidizes trucking logs far distances. Some worry it leads to cutting down remote, rare forests. … Article written by Ben Parfitt.
British Columbians are subsidizing the province's forest companies to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year under a government program that defrays the cost of shipping logs from remote forests to distant mills.
In 2023, the most recent year for which there is a published record, logging companies received nearly $33 million in public funds to underwrite the costs of hauling "low-value" logs to wood pulp and pellet mills. Unpublished figures obtained by The Tyee show those subsidies continue, albeit at a lower level, with some paying to ship logs hundreds of kilometres from increasingly rare coastal temperate rainforests to southern pulp mills.
The subsidies are enumerated in a document posted online by the Forest Enhancement Society of BC, or FESBC, an organization created and funded by the provincial government and that reports to Forests Minister Ravi Parmar.
The society's mandate includes "preventing and mitigating the impact of wildfires" and "improving habitat for wildlife." But many FESBC funds simply underwrite the increasing costs of hauling logs. Those expenses have been marching upward as logging activities push farther into the hinterland.
That has some questioning whether the funding is accelerating the logging of forests, rather than enhancing them.
The Forest Enhancement Society of BC was created in 2016 with a major focus on reducing wildfire risks and lowering greenhouse gas emissions. But Conservation North director Michelle Connolly says the subsidies could be facilitating the logging of remote and high-elevation forests that might otherwise go untouched.
"FESBC's stated purpose is partly to 'improve wildlife habitat' and they are instead doing the exact opposite — subsidizing the logging and shipping of the best wildlife habitat to pulp and pellet mills," Connolly told The Tyee. "There is no 'forest enhancement' happening with this program."
Connolly said many of the trees being cut down and transported at taxpayer expense originate in primary or natural forests. Although some trees may be dead, she said, they remain critically important for biological diversity.
Large, older trees along with dead trees play an outsize role in ecosystems. For example, they are magnets for woodpeckers that bore holes creating vital habitats for nesting or denning birds, ducks, bats, insects and mammals like martens and fishers.
"'Low-value' is a euphemism for dead or other commercially challenging trees," Connolly said.
According to FESBC records, more than $7.1 million went to 15 companies in 2023 to lower the costs of shipping logs — sometimes whole, sometimes pre-chipped — to the Harmac, Crofton and Howe Sound pulp mills on B.C.'s south coast. Crofton has since closed, in part, because it had become too expensive to obtain enough logs to stay afloat.
Another 21 projects funded by FESBC in 2023 benefited pulp mills, wood pellet mills and wood-fired energy facilities in the Interior of the province. The combined value of those subsidies was $25.2 million. They benefited Canfor's three pulp mills in Prince George and Skookumchuck, a West Fraser pulp mill in Quesnel, another Quesnel pulp mill operated by Millar Western, Kruger's pulp mill in Kamloops and Mercer's pulp mill in Castlegar.
Other beneficiaries included the Houston wood pellet mill, one of many in B.C. owned by U.K.-based Drax Group, and BioNorth Energy, a F...