21 dead BC mills, and the old growth still falls

Twenty-one lumber mills permanently or indefinitely closed since 2023, and around 15,000 forestry jobs gone since 2022.^⁠[1] Those are the industry council's counts, and the towns they map onto are Vanderhoof, Houston, Chetwynd, Fort St. John and Prince George.

The harvest explains the mills. BC's allowable annual cut is 60 million cubic metres. The actual cut in 2024 and 2025 was about 32 million, against the government's own target of 45 million.^⁠[2] Budget 2026 plans on 29 million cubic metres a year, a number that treats the collapse as permanent.^⁠[3]

The roll call

Canfor alone closed Chetwynd and Houston in 2023, about 490 jobs,^⁠[4] then Plateau and Fort St. John in 2024, about 500 more.^⁠[5] The Northwood pulp mill in Prince George followed in July 2026 and took another 300.^⁠[6]

In 2025 alone BC lost three more major operations: the Crofton pulp mill on Vancouver Island, West Fraser's sawmill in 100 Mile House, and a Drax pellet plant in Williams Lake. On the coast, 10 mills have closed for good since 2018, taking 5,800 jobs with them.^⁠[2]

Each closure notice gives the same reason: "persistent challenges accessing economically available fibre."^⁠[5]⁠[6] The trees are there. The permits are not, in a province that is two-thirds forest.

Teal Jones, the coast's largest private forestry firm, entered creditor protection in April 2024.^⁠[7] San Group's Port Alberni operations went insolvent and were sold off in 2025.^⁠[8] Western Forest Products has curtailed sawmills across Vancouver Island, blaming duties and log supply.^⁠[9]

COFI asks for a predictable 45-million-cubic-metre harvest, which it says would return about $600 million a year to the treasury.^⁠[3] Its diagnosis has not changed in years: permitting that drags on for years, punitive stumpage, shifting old-growth definitions, and tenure uncertainty.

And the old growth still falls

Here is what all that pain supposedly bought. Eby's own strategic review recommended immediate deferral of at-risk old growth in 2020.^⁠[10] Four years later The Narwhal found 2 of 14 recommendations near complete, and at least 31,800 hectares of forest recommended for deferral had been logged anyway.^⁠[11]

A Sierra Club analysis went further. Over four years, logging inside recommended protection zones ran at four times the rate outside them. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip calls the record "a profound betrayal of trust."^⁠[12]

So the environmentalists got continued old-growth logging, the workers got dead mills, and the mill towns got hollowed out. His forestry policy reliably delivers process, in the form of deferrals, reviews, and permitting queues, and both the forests and the jobs disappear into it.