PART 2 of Budget estimates for the Ministry of Forests – Wildfire Timber Salvage (from Tues March 10th, 2026) WARD STAMER: Let’s just move on a little bit from that to wildfire. We can talk about this. If we can, let’s ask a couple of questions around salvage. We know full well that we’ve lost an incredible amount of fibre in the last five years, ten years, on wildfire. I’m looking at the information in front of me, when it talks about the minister’s…. It’s the manual for wildfire recovery. In that document, it specifically says that we have specific timelines when it comes to salvaging fibre from a wildfire. There are implications, even in the minister’s numbers, saying that the expectation is only 10 percent… Ten percent is the number to recover wildfire fibre. Now, there are many of us that would disagree with that number. Part of the reason, I believe, that we’re having that low number is it’s taking an incredibly long period of time to be able to access th...
WARD STAMER -- It sounds like we’ve gone almost full circle and we’re going to be having the same conversation again (Part 1)
Estimates on the Ministry of Forests operations with Forest Minister Ravi Parmar, for forestry critic Ward Stamer – budgeted with $406,398,000 RAVI PARMAR: It’s an incredible team that I’m responsible for and get the opportunity to work with as well. I just wanted to give them a shout-out as they support me over the course of the next six hours. I’m looking forward to the discussion. Ward Stamer ... it sounds like we’ve gone almost full circle and we’re going to be having the same conversation again. Part of that was when we looked at the current data and how many direct jobs that we had in our industry, we had approximately 56,000 direct jobs with anywhere between 150,000 and 200,000 other jobs that were tied directly to the forest industry, and that we had lost approximately 10,000 jobs in the previous year. That was previous 2025. I would suggest that we’ve lost probably somewhere in that neighbourhood again last year in 2025. So, let’s get right to the crux of some o...