Forest Act – Provincial Forest Lands

B.C.’s Forest Act, administered by the Ministry of Forests, sets out who can use B.C.’s forest lands.  It allows the Ministry to grant licences to use the timber, but also allows the Ministry to create administrative boundaries, as well as some powers to define where and how logging shall occur.  These powers complement the broader powers given to the Ministry in the Forest Practices Code.

The Provincial Forest

The Forest Act creates a number of administrative boundaries and divisions to clarify who manages the forests.  These include:

·         The Provincial Forest – Public land that the government has declared is best used for forestry or wilderness protection.  The working forest is supposed to be managed for “integrated use” of the forest by many different users.  The Provincial Forest designation may soon be replaced by a “working forest” designation.

·         Timber Supply Areas – An administrative area for which the Chief Forester (an employee of the Ministry of Forests) will set a level of timber to be cut.  Note that some types of licences will require the level of cut (or Allowable Annual Cut) to be set for the individual licence, while in others (volume-based licences) several licence holders will get portions of the cut for a Timber Supply Area. 

·         Forest Districts – The Ministry of Forests divides up the province into districts, with a district office of the Ministry being responsible for most decisions under the Forest Act and Forest Practices Code within that area. 

·         Forest Regions – The Province is divided up into 6 Forest Regions: Vancouver, Prince Rupert, Prince George, Nelson, Kamloops and the Cariboo.  They are responsible for developing regional programmes and policies that inform the work done at the district level.

Wilderness Areas

Wilderness areas are designations made by the federal Cabinet under section 6 of the Forest Act for areas within provincial forests.  The wilderness area designation was first introduced in 1987 to provide the Ministry of Forests with an opportunity to broaden its mandate to include conservation of wilderness in addition to the management of provincial forests.

The wilderness area designation prohibits logging, but does not close the door on other types of development, such as mining and associated roads. 

By policy, the Ministry of Forests has adopted the following definition:

Wilderness is an area of land generally greater than 1,000 hectares that predominantly retains its natural character. It is an area where human impact is transitory, minor, and in the long run, substantially unnoticeable.

Historically, five wilderness areas were designated, although there is only one today. The remaining wilderness area is a small 582 hectare area on Slesse Mountain, near Chilliwack, which commemorates a plane crash site.  This designation is rarely used, with most governments preferring to designate protected areas as parks. 

Designated Areas

Under Part 13 of the Forest Act the provincial cabinet may “designate” an area of provincial forest, and in doing so cancel, vary, suspend or refuse to approve government approvals to log and tenure agreements.  The main purpose of the designations are to allow the Minister to have flexibility in approving (or not approving) logging in areas that are being considered for protected area status or some other status which is incompatible with logging.

The designated area status allows the Chief Forester to temporarily reduce the AAC in tree farm licence areas and timber supply areas to avoid the consequences of not logging the volume required by tenure agreements and the Forest Act. It also gives the Minister of Forests broad powers to suspend or vary various permits or plans made under the Act or Code, or to restrict the issuance of such permits or plans.

The designation has been used as part of land use planning, where the government wants to avoid a “talk and log” situation, and to preserve the status quo on the land base until final land use decisions can be made.   It has only been used in a handful of high profile cases, and generally only where the licensees in question have been unwilling to voluntarily log in other areas. 

Designated areas may be specified by Cabinet for any area of Crown land on which it believes it “is in the public interest to do so.” The power to do so has been time-limited so that it can only be exercised until January 1, 2006. Designated areas all expire at that time as well, unless the Order-in-Council passed by Cabinet specifies an earlier expiry.

 

Related Guide Pages:

·         Forest Act

·         Forest Act – Timber Tenure

·         Forestry

 

For more information about Provincial Forest Lands and the Forest Act:

·         The Electronic Text of the Forest Act;

·         Administrative Designations portion of West Coast Environmental Law’s Guide to Forest Land Use Planning; (note: The last update to the Guide occurred before a series of changes to provincial forestry legislation). 

·         Ministry of Forests website.