One of the fundamental purposes of the Forest Practices Board is to encourage continual improvements in forest and range practices. The purpose of this special report is to provide independent observation, based on Board work, on how well the regulatory system is working and to identify opportunities for improvement.

The Forest and Range Practices Act (FRPA), along with the Wildfire Act, regulates the activities of forest and range licensees operating on Crown land. When it was introduced in 2004, replacing a Forest Practices Code that had been in place since 1995, it was understood that adjustments would be necessary as circumstances changed and practitioners gained experience with the new approach. Now, a decade later, the Board finds that the system is generally working but that implementation is incomplete and some aspects need to be refined or adapted to changing circumstances. The Board decided to report on how well FRPA is working after nearly a decade of experience.

Forest and range practices on provincial land in BC are regulated by the Forest and Range Practices Act and the Wildfire Act. One way these laws are enforced is through the use of administrative penalties, which are issued by government officials, rather than by the courts. They provide an efficient way to enforce legislation, if appropriately used. Compared to the court process, administrative penalties can be faster and are less formal. Also, decisions are made by officials who are familiar with the forestry context, rather than by judges, who may not be.

The purpose of this report is to provide information to the public, forest and range agreement holders and government officials about administrative penalties related to forest and range practices, including the size of penalties, statutory defences such as due diligence, and the types of activity that give rise to penalties.

British Columbia is in the midst of a large-scale salvage program, the likes of which has never been seen. There is nothing sustainable about this harvest; this is a one-time activity initiated by the province to recover value from the trees killed by the mountain pine beetle epidemic and to speed regeneration of affected areas. Once those trees no longer have any economic value, salvage will stop and the province will need to sustainably manage the harvest of the remaining live trees. The issue, simply put, is that the more live trees that are harvested now, the lower the sustainable harvest level will be after the salvage program is finished. A report on the forest industry’s harvesting of beetle-killed timber confirms that industry has been meeting government’s expectations for concentrating harvesting on dead pine trees, but says the harvest of other kinds of trees is increasing more than expected in some areas of the province.

This special report takes a look at the results of Board audits under the Forest and Range Practices Act and the Wildfire Act over the last seven years, specifically focusing on forestry roads and bridges. For all compliance audits carried out between 2005 and 2011, most roads and bridges met the requirements of the Forest and Range Practices Act, but a surprisingly large number did not, especially since 2009.

More than 55 percent of the issues found in audits since 2005 involve roads and bridges. The other 45 percent involve regenerating harvested sites, reporting information to government, and a few findings involved soil disturbance, protection of fish streams and range practices. This report focuses on road and bridge practices because poorly constructed or maintained roads and bridges create the highest risk to the environment and to safety for road users.