Over 700 local, provincial, federal, Indigenous and forestry leaders will meet starting tomorrow (April 10) at the annual BC Council of Forest Industries convention.
Chief Economist Kurt Niquidet said a number of topics will be covered from workforce development to new approaches to managing our forests for wildfire prevention as well as his new impact report that was just released.
“The focus of our report was for 2022 so that was a year where markets were pretty good,” Niquidet said, “and in 2023 the markets really turned. We’ve also been having a lot of challenges with accessing fibre. There has been a significant downturn and we’ve seen some job losses and that’s why we need to work together to resolve these fibre supply issues.”
After the convention ends we asked Niquidet what the next steps are that the BC Council of Forest Industries takes.
“Ultimately working with Government, it’s a very complex issue, there’s no real silver bullet. We were happy to see that Minister Mercier has been appointed to focus in on some of the fibre supply challenges and so I think it’s a matter of working together to be creative and come up with solutions.”
President and CEO of Council of Forest Industries, Linda Coady stated in a release the province’s forest industry is in transition and this years COFI convention will focus on what we need to do differently to move forward from here.
“We know that there has been some declining access to fibre,” Niquidet said, “we’ve also seen markets changing. Over the longer term we’ve also expect that there are going to be opportunities for new products and so with our changing fibre supply base and sort of the new demands for different types of products going forward we need to adjust to those new realities.”
Niquidet said over the longer term they (COFI) think that there are a lot of opportunities in the forest sector, global demand for forest products is going to be strong it just depends won how BC responds to play a part in that marketplace.
The Cariboo is a major forestry dependent Region with about twenty-two percent of the jobs being forestry related.