British Columbia’s wildfire emissions in 2023 exceeded those of seven of the world’s ten largest national emitters. Canada’s wildfires that year released nearly 480 megatonnes of carbon—approximately 2.4 gigatonnes of CO₂ equivalent—nearly four times the emissions of global aviation. In 2024 and 2025, wildfire emissions remained among the highest on record. At the same time, policy has systematically reduced the managed forest harvest, deferred logging across millions of hectares, and shuttered 21 mills since 2023, eliminating 15,000 forest sector jobs.
These two developments are not unrelated. The policy of locking forests away from active management—while presented as environmental protection—is contributing to the very climate outcome it claims to prevent.
The workforce that understood how to manage forests—the fallers, the machine operators, the silviculture workers, the fire suppression crews drawn from the same labour pool—is dispersing. When a mill closes, the skilled workers leave. They do not come back when fire season arrives.
The argument for locking forests away from harvest assumes that standing forests are always a carbon sink—absorbing more CO₂ than they release. True for young, actively growing forests. Not true for old, decadent stands.
The wildfire emissions from a single bad season dwarf decades of industrial emissions reduction effort.
When those forests burn—as they did in 2023, 2024, and 2025—they release carbon on a scale that makes every other climate policy in the country irrelevant. Canada’s 2023 wildfire emissions alone exceeded the combined total of every industrial emissions reduction the country has ever achieved.
https://www.todayville.com/burning-...licy-is-making-canadas-climate-problem-worse/
Still wondering about the hundreds of lost jobs at Crofton Pulp Mill for lack of available wood chips. Have to stop asking government to solve anything and go direct to the industry who live in the midst to do what's needed. Canada needs buyers abroad, Mr. Carney for the wood taken to clear tens of thousands of kilometres of firelanes in Canada.