You would be forgiven for thinking that British Columba’s Ministry of Forests is really the Ministry of Logging.

A recent ministry news release boasts of a 30 per cent increase in timber auctioned, legislative amendments that will result in 17,700 more truckloads of logs coming out of the province’s forests each year, and a new streamlined permitting process that will add another 11,100 truckloads of logs to the mix.

Ravi Parmar, the man overseeing all of this as forests minister, is certainly working hard to meet the mandate given to him by Premier David Eby, one that instructs him to increase logging rates and that sets a numerical target.

But what of old-growth forest conservation, which is also part of Parmar’s mandate? There, Parmar has acted with decidedly less zeal.

In 2021, the provincial government appointed a panel to guide it in protecting more of B.C.’s irreplaceable old-growth forests. The panel delivered a report that recommended 2.6 million hectares of old-growth forests be deferred from logging. But trees have continued to fall, and last month five members of that panel wrote the government, voicing alarm at the province’s lack of progress in conserving British Columbia’s old-growth forests.