The Forest Was the Fortune: Who Cut Canada—and What Did It Cost?

The forest built the country

Before oil, before the glass towers, there was wood. It became homes, ships, railways, paper, paycheques, ports, family fortunes and mill towns. In 2024, Canada’s forest sector still contributed $30.7 billion to GDP, directly employed 194,040 people and exported $37.2 billion in products.

The industry fed families and funded public services. More than 40% of its workers live in rural or remote places; Indigenous participation exceeds the national workforce average. Reducing those lives to a historical mistake would be as dishonest as reducing a forest to merchantable volume.

But before a tree became a log, it was also a soft dam against rain, a column of carbon, a nesting platform, shade over a salmon stream, a pantry, a pharmacy and sometimes a witness older than the country. Canada counted the timber. It rarely invoiced the disappearance of the forest.

We did not merely cut trees. We liquidated time—then called the first harvest “wealth” and left the rest off the books.

The public forest, the private fortune

British Columbia makes the machinery unusually visible: roughly 95% of its timber is publicly owned. Most companies do not own the land they cut. The Crown grants tenures—specific harvesting rights, often large, long-term and replaceable—in exchange for obligations and stumpage.

Canada harvested nearly 670,000 hectares in 2023. On public land, 86% of harvested area was clearcut, compared with 70% on private land. Natural Resources Canada defines the method plainly: almost all commercially valuable trees in a stand are removed.

Yes, public-land harvesting generally carries a regeneration requirement. Yes, fire and insects transform forests too. But planting seedlings does not instantly rebuild an ancient canopy, complex soil, hollow tree or fungal web. “Forested” is a land-cover category. “Old forest” is a living relationship.

The names on the gates

The names matter—not because one family cut Canada, but because they show how public timber becomes private power, and then civic memory.

1. 1919
   H.R. MacMillan

   B.C.’s first chief forester went on to establish an export company. A 1951 merger with Bloedel, Stewart & Welch helped create MacMillan Bloedel, a Canadian giant.

2. 1939
   Leon and the Koerners

   A Jewish refugee from the Nazis, Leon Koerner revived a defunct New Westminster mill. Alaska Pine became one of the province’s largest manufacturers. Koerner also introduced unusually strong worker benefits and advocated reforestation.

3. 1955
   Sam, Bill and Pete Ketcham

   The brothers paid $60,000 for a 12-person planer mill in Quesnel. It became West Fraser, now one of the world’s largest wood-products companies.

4. 1999
   MacBlo → Weyerhaeuser

   The province approved control of four replaceable forest licences, two tree farm licences and more than 240 timber licences—together carrying rights to cut 5.6 million cubic metres a year.

5. 2025
   Canfor

   The company reported roughly 8.1 million cubic metres of annual harvesting rights in Canada. Its predecessors began in 1938; its current footprint crosses B.C., Alberta, the U.S. South and Sweden.

MacMillan’s name sits on a UBC building his family helped fund. The Koerners funded university centres, arts and social programs. Those gifts did real good. They also converted forest wealth into enduring prestige while the source forest slipped out of frame.

The point is adult accounting. Workers built the mills. Communities absorbed the cycles. Governments granted and transferred the tenures. Executives and shareholders accumulated the capital. The architecture outlived every lumber baron.

When constitutions became collections

In the 1950s, the same forest establishment joined another kind of “preservation.” The B.C. Totem Pole Preservation Committee—supported by the lumber and fishing industries—set out to acquire poles it considered no longer in use. H.R. MacMillan and W.C. Koerner funded the purchase and transport of poles from coastal villages to Vancouver and Victoria.

Institutions called them totem poles. But a monumental carved pole is not oversized décor. Depending on the Nation and the pole, it can carry names, mourning, lineage, law, title and territorial memory. When it leaves the village, it does not merely change address. It enters another system of power.

UBC’s own record refuses a tidy story. A living relative had first objected that permission had not been sought; discussions and a Skidegate Council resolution followed. Elsewhere, at Gitanyow in 1958, hereditary chiefs refused to sell their poles. They negotiated exact replicas in return and the publication of their histories, territories and laws. It was an agreement—inside a colonial world, but one that explicitly recognized their authority.

Two lies should be refused: that every object was simply stolen, and that a salvage form erased the power imbalance. Institutions can preserve cedar while displacing the living law it carried. Repatriation does not destroy history; it returns history to the people whose history it is.

A gallery can shelter cedar from rain. It cannot replace the place, people and authority that gave a pole its full life.

A clearcut is not a forest

From the air, a clearcut makes clean geometry: road, block, edge, plantation. On a spreadsheet, the land may become “forest” again as trees return. For living systems, the clock moves differently.

A plantation can grow useful timber and take up carbon. It does not recreate large snags, hollows, fallen logs, layered canopy and centuries-built soil in a few decades. A young, uniform stand carries different vulnerabilities to fire, drought and pests. Roads fragment what remains and keep the landscape open long after the machines leave.

A richer answer permits harvest while respecting what it cannot replace. Wood can displace more carbon-intensive materials; forest trades matter; some forests evolved with fire and disturbance. Regenerated volume is still not full repayment for an ancient ecosystem.

When the sponge is gone

An old forest is water infrastructure. Canopy catches rain and snow. Shade slows melt. Roots, soil and fallen wood hold and release water. Remove enough cover in the wrong places, add roads and ditches, and rain or meltwater reaches the channel faster.

In two snow-dominated B.C. watersheds, UBC researchers associated clearcutting 21% of the basin with an average flood-size increase of 38% in the Deadman River and 84% in Joe Ross Creek. Those are not universal multipliers; that is exactly why decisions must be made watershed by watershed, not cutblock by cutblock.

Eroded soil does not stop at the tenure line. Sediment can bury spawning gravel and suffocate eggs. Lost shade can warm streams. Fewer returning salmon then carry fewer marine nutrients back into the forest. Drinking water, roads, bridges, fish and downstream homes become the beneficiaries—or casualties—of a decision made up the slope.

The forest held water for free. The taxpayer discovers its value when concrete has to hold back the flood.

The animals pay in silence

A bird cannot read a reforestation plan. It only knows the branch where it nested is gone.

The tragedy is not only the final extinction. It is the contraction before it: fewer calls, fewer tracks, less migration, less chance of return. A valley goes quiet long before the last animal receives an official notice.

An isolated green patch is not always enough. The owl needs connected territory. Caribou need room to avoid repeated encounters with roads and predators. The murrelet needs the ocean and a coastal tree old enough to hold a moss platform. Habitat is not a collection of green dots. It is the ability to live between them.

The groves at the edge

Big numbers can soothe. B.C.’s technical panel estimated roughly 25 million hectares of old forest historically and 11.1 million hectares remaining on public land. But old forests are not interchangeable. Large-tree stands are naturally rare, were heavily targeted and are now very rare relative to their historic distribution.

By February 2025, the province reported about 2.4 million hectares protected or deferred since November 2021, on top of nearly 3.7 million already protected. That is consequential. But the province says it plainly: a deferral is not permanent protection. It buys time for a decision.

Time is exactly what an old forest does not have in reserve. A logging decision is executed in weeks. The return of old structure is measured in centuries—if climate, fire, roads and the next rotation permit it. A few accessible groves become the display windows for a landscape whose cathedrals have mostly left the map.