Foster Creek Shows the NDP’s Old-Growth Deferrals Had No Teeth

The NDP’s old-growth promise has reached the stump. In Foster Creek, between Revelstoke and Valemount on the Kinbasket Reservoir, Wildsight says logging is underway in rare old and ancient inland rainforest that British Columbia’s Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel had previously recommended for immediate deferral.

The numbers are not vague. Wildsight says the three Foster Creek cutblocks cover 120 hectares. More than 100 hectares overlap the panel’s recommended deferrals. According to Wildsight, provincial Vegetation Resource Inventory data puts trees in the blocks at 350 to 367 years old, with some cedars measuring about two metres across.

That should have been enough to trigger the clearest possible public explanation from Victoria. Instead, Wildsight says BC Timber Sales, a provincial agency within the Ministry of Forests, confirmed this spring that the blocks had been field-verified as meeting old-growth deferral criteria, then removed the deferrals from the provincial database after Wildsight’s own field verification. Wildsight says BCTS auctioned the blocks in June, sold them in early July, issued cutting permits shortly after, and logging has now begun.

Those are serious claims, and they point to a policy failure larger than one valley. The NDP leaned on “deferrals” as proof it was protecting at-risk old growth. But Wildsight’s release states the quiet part plainly: deferrals were temporary, many were never fully implemented beyond mapping, and the NDP did not convert them into permanent protection.

That is the accountability issue. A deferral with no durable legal force is not a shield; it is a pause button someone else can release. If a stand can be recommended for immediate deferral, field-verified, removed from a database, auctioned, sold and cut, then the public was sold process instead of protection.

The ecological context makes the process failure worse. Wildsight says the blocks sit within a six-square-kilometre patch of old and ancient forest extending toward Foster Arm Protected Area, and that new or reactivated logging roads add pressure in Columbia North caribou habitat. Its action page calls the Columbia North herd the southernmost viable deep-snow caribou herd on Earth and warns that old-growth road access harms habitat connectivity.

None of this requires speculation about motives. The record is damaging enough. Wildsight says it warned the NDP government this spring, including the deputy minister of forests, that BCTS was removing deferrals, and says it received no reply. Now the group is asking the incoming government to halt work on the Foster cutblocks, defer timber sale TA2933 under the Forest Act, and implement the Old Growth Strategic Review.

British Columbians were told old-growth deferrals were an emergency response to the most at-risk forests. Foster Creek shows the loophole: temporary maps, no permanent legal protection, and a Crown timber system still capable of moving ancient trees toward the mill. The NDP did not need another promise. It needed teeth. Foster Creek is what happened when it did not supply them.