RYAN PAINTER: It’s time to choose workers over bureaucrats, communities over activists, and BC over the NDP

The Vancouver Sun says it plainly: BC’s forestry industry is on its knees.

As someone who worked in forestry - whose family depended on it - I’m going to break down this piece and show why the NDP’s red tape & ideology are killing our jobs.

This collapse isn’t just about U.S. tariffs.  As Kim Haakstad of the Council of Forest Industries (COFI) told the Sun: “wood availability is at historic lows, permitting systems are gridlocked, and investment is retreating.”

That’s failure made in Victoria.

The “War in the Woods” of the 90s gave us a bureaucracy that’s only grown fatter. 

Politicians tied hands with the Forest Practices Code, and every government since has piled on more rules.

The result? 40,000 good jobs are gone -- families gutted.

I worked in forestry. My family lived off forestry. I know the pride of a hard day’s work.

Today, people like me are watching while their way of life is strangled by paper-pushers who’ve never swung an axe, never set foot in a mill, and never cared about rural BC.

The warning is clear!

Without bold change, this won’t be a slow decline. It will be mill closures, layoffs, and the permanent collapse of an industry that BUILT this province.

And the NDP, the supposed party of labour and industry, will be the ones who let it happen.

“Promises” from BC Premier David Eby, and BC Forests Minister Ravi Parmar, mean nothing. Raising annual cuts on paper doesn’t reopen mills. Workers don’t need words - they need action:

✅ Cut the red tape
✅ Streamline approvals
✅ Give certainty to investors & communities

Conservatives stand with forestry workers. Not the bureaucrats. Not the activists who sneer at rural BC and drive the NDP's grassroots.

We stand with the families who built this province and are being abandoned by the NDP.

Let’s be clear ... forestry is BC’s backbone. Without it, towns collapse, families collapse, and we lose not just jobs, but also our identity.

It’s time to choose workers over bureaucrats, communities over activists, and BC over the NDP.


Ryan Painter:  On January 27, 2023, I cancelled my membership to the NDP provincially and federally and resigned from all my positions.
That day, I embarked on a journey to converse with people, discovering what drives their interests, influences their political engagement, and guides their passions. 

Hence, the Political Pulse was born