When mills close, the story is always the same – but it doesn’t have to be.
The shutdown of Interfor’s Grand Forks mill is another chapter in a long pattern: corporate consolidation, dwindling logs, and global market swings that leave small towns carrying the losses. Decisions made in boardrooms thousands of kilometres away erase local livelihoods overnight.
This moment could mark the end of an era – or the start of something better.
The New Forest Act, developed by the Boundary Forest Watershed Stewardship Society, offers a concrete, made-in-BC solution. It re-centres forestry around community stability, ecological integrity, and regional economic strength through the PRH (Protect–Restore–Harvest) framework:
- Protect: Primary forests – our natural infrastructure – are permanently protected to secure water, flood protection, and climate stability.
- Restore: Damaged landscapes become the backbone of a long-term local economy – road removal, slope repair, reforestation, and hydrology restoration – creating steady public and private-sector jobs.
- Harvest: Logging continues, but in smaller, selective operations under Nature-Directed Stewardship. Regional log sort yards ensure public timber benefits the public – not just shareholders – while supporting small mills, local manufacturers, and secondary local businesses.
This is how Grand Forks can build economic strength from the ground up:
- Jobs in restoration, milling, monitoring, and value-added production.
- Decision-making led by local Community Forest Boards.
- A shift from dependence on multinational markets to locally controlled, steady employment tied to the health of our watersheds.
For decades, industrial forestry has drained our natural wealth and left communities vulnerable to boom-and-bust cycles. The New Forest Act charts a path out – toward genuine security rooted in the land itself.
Grand Forks knows better than most that forests are not just scenery or “resources.” They’re infrastructure that protects our homes from floods, sustains our water, and anchors our economy.
If we want resilience, it starts by changing the laws that decide who controls our forests – and for whose benefit.
Learn more and download the full proposal: https://boundaryforest.org/the-new-forest-act-proposal/