Trees to pellets? Fort Nelson’s future hangs in the balance


The residents of Fort Nelson know the harsh economic realities of resource dependency better than most rural British Columbians.

It is now 13 years since the forest industry ditched the community in dramatic fashion when Canfor Corp. ceased local operations and closed its plywood and oriented-strand board mills on the outskirts of town. Between them, the two wood panel mills had employed 600 men and women.

The community then enjoyed a brief economic resurgence as fossil fuel companies swept into the region during a short-lived natural gas fracking frenzy. Many laid-off forestry workers found new jobs and the community’s service sector took off. At one point, so many outsiders were flocking into town that three 737 passenger jets came through its tiny airport in a single day.

But as detailed in a previous Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives brief, the bust that followed was devastating. It left behind a sprawling network of deteriorating natural gas industry processing plants and other industry infrastructure, and it’s anybody’s guess who will clean up and at what eye-popping cost.

Such stories of fleeting economic benefits and crippling liabilities are familiar to many rural British Columbians.

Yet, once again, forces are aligning to push for another major resource industry play in the Fort Nelson region. Forest exploitation plans are back on the front burner, with the services of a former provincial chief forester and a well-placed former NDP cabinet minister turned lobbyist (among others) there to advance corporate interests.

The scale of what is proposed is dizzying.

  • Logging the region’s hardwood aspen trees and softwood spruce trees at a pace never before seen, with about 100 square kilometres of forest to be cut down each year.
  • Converting virtually all of the logged aspen trees into wood pellets at what would be the largest wood pellet mill in Canada. While wood pellets are technically a “forest product,” they represent only a marginal improvement over cutting down trees, turning them into logs and then exporting all that raw, green gold in the holds of freighters bound for China.
  • Send many, if not all, of the highly-valuable logged spruce trees out of the region by truck to Fort St. John, a five-hour drive south down the Alaska Highway, or other points even further beyond, where a well-established sawmilling industry, dominated by Canfor, would turn the logs to lumber instead of the logs being turned into lumber and other products in Fort Nelson.

None of the above is a certainty. But a pivotal decision is imminent.

First, in order for these plans to go ahead the provincial government must agree to transfer access rights to the region’s forests from Canfor, which still holds significant logging rights in the region despite having shuttered its mills, over to Peak Renewables, which is spearheading the pellet plan.

Second, the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Fort Nelson now co-own the largest community forest licence in the province. They have a direct stake in what is about to unfold and can, if they choose, work together to ensure that the forests under their control deliver the maximum benefits to local residents and businesses.

And third, having been burned twice by big resource industries sweeping into town with grand plans to cash in on the region’s natural resource wealth, there is at least some opinion in town that what’s good for one company may be a big risk to the community.

With that said, let’s take a look at what brought Fort Nelson to this pivotal point and what may lie ahead.

Cutting down more and more trees

In July 2019, the provincial government announced a new maximum logging rate for the Fort Nelson Timber Supply Area, the second largest such administrative unit in the province. The decision dramatically increased the Allowable Annual Cut to 2.6 million cubic metres of trees per year, up from 1.6 million cubic metres.

The decision was justified partly on the grounds that Canfor Corp. had not done any logging of consequence in the region’s forests since 2008, when it closed its local mills.


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