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With the B.C. government’s promise of tens of thousands of jobs in a new liquefied natural gas industry in tatters, the province’s long-neglected forest industry has the potential to help close the widening employment gap between heavily populated areas like the Lower Mainland and the rest of the province.

The provincial government regulates this industry, but for the past four years it has offered no substantive policies to stimulate job growth in the sector that has historically been the economic backbone of many rural communities in B.C.

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The most visible consequence of this laissez-faire approach is the rising wave of raw, unprocessed logs that leave the province annually, resulting in an ever- shrinking number of jobs per trees cut.

Since 2013, the year Premier Christy Clark led her government to re-election, nearly 26 million cubic metres of raw logs with a combined sales value of more than $3 billion were shipped out of the province. Last year alone, nearly 6.3 million cubic metres of logs were exported, enough to build 134,000 houses, or roughly half of Vancouver’s standing single-family homes. In recent years, well over half of all exported logs came from public or Crown lands, rather than private lands, as was the historic norm. In other words, most of the exported raw logs originated on lands under provincial jurisdiction.