The ministry told its auditor the deactivation rules were fixed. Then it tendered Rady Creek.

Almost everything written about Rady Creek turns on one document, and almost nobody has read it. The Auditor General’s audit of forest service roads is fifty-six pages long, it is five years old, and it describes in the ministry’s own data exactly how a public road ends up being removed rather than repaired. It is not a document about Trout Lake. It is the document that explains Trout Lake.

So here it is in full: what was audited, what was found, what was recommended, what the ministry said it had done about it, and what all of that means for 4.4 kilometres of road above a village of fifty people. Every figure below is the auditor’s or the ministry’s, with the page it sits on.

Section 01What was actually audited

Management of Forest Service Roads is dated 29 November 2020, and was released on 19 January 2021. It was conducted under section 11(8) of the Auditor General Act, it covered the period 2016 to 2019, and it was transmitted to the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly over the signature of Michael Pickup, Auditor General, in January 2021.⁰¹ The body audited was the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development — the ministry that is today the Ministry of Forests. Same Engineering Branch, same natural resource districts, same funding policy.

The audit asked one question: did the ministry manage safety and environmental risks by inspecting, maintaining and deactivating forest service roads as required by legislation and policy? The answer, printed three times in the report’s own front matter, was no.

We concluded that the Ministry… did not manage safety and environmental risks on FSRs in accordance with its policies.

Office of the Auditor General of British Columbia · Management of Forest Service Roads, p. 25

One limit on that conclusion belongs up front, because it also limits everything built on it. The auditor says plainly: “We did not assess in the field whether roads were safe and environmentally sound.”⁰¹ This is an audit of records, data and policy compliance. It does not say a bridge is about to fail. It says the ministry could not demonstrate it knew.

Section 02The network, and the category Rady Creek falls into

British Columbia has approximately 58,000 kilometres of forest service road. The natural resource districts are responsible for 38,000 kilometres of it and BC Timber Sales for 20,000; around 30,000 kilometres of the total is maintained by industrial road use permit holders rather than by the ministry directly.⁰¹

Inside that network sits a smaller category, and it is the one that matters here. The audit defines it at page 23:

FSRs that provide access for communities (of 50 or more year-round residents), rural residences or “high-value” forest recreation sites and trails or “important” recreational areas… are financially capitalized by the ministry. These FSRs are referred to as “capital roads.”… They are therefore unlikely to be deactivated by the ministry and require continual maintenance.

Management of Forest Service Roads, p. 23 · approximately 12,000 km of the network⁰²

Read the test rather than the label. Fifty or more year-round residents. Or rural residences. Or high-value recreation sites and trails. Trout Lake’s own recreation club counts just over fifty full-time residents, and the corridor above it is the way in to the area’s recreation. That is two of the three limbs of a test written by the ministry now paying to remove the Rady Creek road.¹³

Whether the ministry has in fact designated this road as a capital road is a question only its own register answers, and that register is not public. The question is worth putting to it directly, because on the ministry’s own definition a road like this one is unlikely to be deactivated.

Section 03The money: a rising ask against a flat cheque

Districts do not set their own maintenance budgets. They identify what their forest service roads need, request it, and the Engineering Branch allocates. The audit put three years of those requests beside three years of those allocations.

The request rose by 41 per cent across three years. The allocation moved by $100,000, and moved down. In 2019/20 the districts received 14 per cent of what they had told the ministry the roads needed.⁰³

That is the figure most often quoted from this audit, and on its own it is the least useful one in it, because it says nothing about what the money was for.

Section 04What the money was for

Exhibit 9 breaks the 2019/20 capital-road request into its three parts — the roads that carry communities, the roads that carry rural residences, and the roads that carry recreation.

High-value recreation roads accounted for $8.5 million of a $21.5 million request — forty per cent of it, and within $700,000 of the community-access category. Recreation is not a fringe of this programme. It is most of it. The whole capital-road request was funded at 26 per cent.

Break the same exhibit down by area and the picture sharpens again.

In the South — the area that contains the district now tendering Rady Creek — the single largest category of capital-road request was not community access and was not rural residences. It was high-value recreation, at $3.1 million of a $4.5 million ask. The area received $1.7 million against it.⁰⁴

Section 05Six thousand six hundred and forty structures

Money is abstract. Bridges are not. There are 6,640 crossing structures on the province’s forest service roads — bridges, major culverts and log culverts — and 6,569 of them sit on active crossing sites. The audit followed each one through the ministry’s own Corporate Bridge Registry.⁰⁵

Three of those rows deserve reading twice. High-priority repairs were overdue on 3,178 structures — 48 per cent of every crossing structure in the province — by an average of 851 days. Replacement was overdue on 583 by an average of five years. And on 585 active structures the ministry had reduced the load rating, which is the engineering way of saying a bridge can no longer carry what it was built to carry.⁰⁵

Seventy-two structures had not been inspected at all in ten years, despite no access obstacle — no boat, no helicopter, nothing to stop anyone driving to them.⁰⁵

Section 06Who these roads actually carry

The audit is unusually direct about what is riding on all this, and it is not timber.

The seventy deaths and the 499 accidents are at page 21. On the same page, the auditor records that “an all-terrain vehicle accident on the Foley Creek FSR near Chilliwack resulted in two fatalities.”⁰⁶

At page 19 it describes the Finlay FSR, the longest in British Columbia at around 420 kilometres: the only road access to the remote Kwadacha and Tsay Keh Dene Nations, and “the only land-based escape route in the event of flooding or wildfires.” At page 41 it describes the Zeballos and Fair Harbour network — the only road access for two communities and three First Nations — where washouts have left those communities “isolated for significant periods of time,” and where the steep, narrow linking section carrying the community school bus sits under a road permit the ministry does not maintain at all.⁰⁷

And then the gap the Auditor General put to legislators himself, as the second of three questions he suggested they ask government: how will the ministry balance public expectations to keep forest service roads safe for public use, “with a mandate that does not require it do so”?¹⁴ Forest legislation requires permit holders to keep these roads safe for industrial purposes. It does not require anyone to make them safe for the public that drives them.

Section 07The filing cabinet

The auditor sampled eight of the province’s twenty-three natural resource districts. Six tracked maintenance at varying levels of detail in Excel spreadsheets. Two kept no tracking of any kind, which the report states means there was no record of required maintenance being completed. Of the responsibility-designation lists reviewed, one had last been updated in 2010, another in 2013, and two in 2014.⁰⁸

None of this was news to the ministry. The audit records that its findings are “consistent with the findings from a 2008 Internal Audit & Advisory Services report — that documentation processes were informal and inconsistent, and that the ministry couldn’t ensure that risks were mitigated.” Twelve years, and the same finding.⁰⁸

On the ministry’s own trading arm, BC Timber Sales, the audit found approximately 40 per cent of roads not inspected as frequently as required, and its system showing only 43 per cent of planned maintenance activities completed between January 2016 and June 2019. One business area had entered no planned maintenance at all; another had completed four per cent of its.⁰⁹

Section 08What the deactivation rules actually say

This is the part of the audit nobody quotes, and it is the part that decides Rady Creek.

Three rules govern when a forest service road is destroyed, and the audit sets out all three.¹⁰

First, deactivation is never mandatory. In the auditor’s words: “there is no trigger or timeline for deactivation. FSRs can remain open indefinitely if they are maintained as wilderness roads.” There is no clock on the Rady Creek road. Nothing in policy requires that it be removed this year, or ever.

Second, the Engineering Manual requires the deactivation decision to weigh future access. When no longer required, roads “will be deactivated in a planned manner that considers future access needs, road user safety, cost efficiency and values at risk of damage or loss.” Future access needs is not a courtesy. It is a required input, and it cannot be weighed by a district that has held no meeting with the people whose access it is.

Third, the funding policy turns the shortfall into the reason. The Engineering Program Funding Policy “advises districts to deactivate roads that they are unable to maintain at the wilderness standard in order to mitigate risks and manage roads within available maintenance funding.” Read that beside Exhibit 8. The ministry funds fourteen cents on the dollar, and its own policy then treats being unable to maintain the road as grounds to remove it.

And there is a fourth line, in the auditor’s description of what deactivation physically is, which sits awkwardly beside what is planned at Rady Creek:

Road deactivation includes removing bridges and stream culverts, stabilizing the road prism, and barricading the road surface width in a clearly visible manner to prevent access by motor vehicles (other than all-terrain vehicles).

Management of Forest Service Roads, p. 47

The Auditor General’s description of deactivation preserves ATV access. So did Cooper Creek Cedar, the logging company that built the road, which said on its way out that it would “attempt to maintain at minimum ATV access.” The prescription for Rady Creek does not.¹³

Finally, the scale. Deactivation by districts is a small programme, and the audit measures it.

One tender, on one road above one village — the Rady Creek road above Trout Lake — is 3.8 per cent of everything the province’s twenty-three districts deactivated in six years.

Section 09Nine recommendations, and where they stand

The audit made nine recommendations — six to the ministry, two to BC Timber Sales, one on road use permit oversight. The ministry’s responses are printed in the report itself, and they are not uniform: four are accepted outright, and four accept only “the intent of the recommendation.”¹¹

Five years later, the Office of the Auditor General published its October 2025 follow-up, reviewing the ministry’s own progress report as at 31 March 2025. Of the nine, five are complete and four are not.¹²

Status as reported by the ministry as at 31 March 2025 and reviewed by the Office of the Auditor General, whose review report for this audit is dated 14 July 2025. The four outstanding recommendations are each marked “intend to complete,” with anticipated dates running from September 2025 to 2026.¹²

Section 10Marked complete

Of the five closed, two are the two that decide what happens at Trout Lake. Both were closed on the ministry’s own account of its own work, and both are worth reading in the ministry’s own words.

Recommendation 3 — the deactivation rules. Marked complete as of 30 November 2022. The ministry reported that it had “reviewed and reconciled the discrepancies between the Engineering Manual and Engineering Program Funding Policy,” and that this had “eliminated the conflicting guidance for FSR inspection frequency, timing of maintenance works and deactivation.” The policy was renamed the Engineering Roads Funding Policy.¹²

So on the ministry’s own account, the rules governing when a public road is destroyed have been consistent and unconflicted since November 2022. Rady Creek was prescribed, tendered, and re-tendered after that date.

Recommendation 6 — the money. This was the auditor’s instruction to reconcile the gap between what policy requires for maintenance and what the ministry actually does, given what it allocates. It is the starve-then-cite loop, named by the auditor and handed back to the ministry to fix. It is marked complete, on this basis:

As of November 30, 2022, the Ministry has secured or requested funding needed to undertake the $21.5 Million of maintenance on priority capital forest service roads that provide access to communities, rural residences and high value recreation sites in 2022/23.

Ministry of Forests progress report, in the Office of the Auditor General’s October 2025 follow-up, p. 49¹²

Two things about that sentence. The first is the figure: $21.5 million is exactly the capital-road request from Exhibit 9 — the one the audit recorded being funded at $5.5 million. The second is the verb. Secured or requested. Requesting the money is what the districts were already doing in 2017/18, 2018/19 and 2019/20, when they received twenty, fifteen and fourteen per cent of it. A recommendation about the distance between asking and receiving is reported closed by a sentence that does not say which one happened.

Section 11Rady Creek, against the audit

Set the tender beside the document, line for line.

None of that is a legal finding, and none of it is an allegation. It is the ministry’s own audit, its own policy and its own tender, put side by side. On every line the document points one way and the contract goes the other.

There is one more sentence in the audit that explains why this keeps happening, and it comes from ministry officials rather than from the auditor. Districts can close or restrict roads where maintenance obligations are not met. They rarely do:

officials told us that closing roads is not ideal and rarely happens because of economic and social pressure to keep them open.

Management of Forest Service Roads, p. 45¹⁴

Pressure from the public keeps roads open. That is the ministry’s own description of the force it is working against. At Rady Creek the same district wrote into its tender that the project is “contentious and well known to the public,” budgeted round-the-clock security against that public, and held no meeting with it.¹³ Handled that way, the pressure never has to be answered. It only has to be guarded.

Section 12The question the Auditor General left behind

Michael Pickup closed his comments by suggesting three questions legislators might put to government. The third was this:

How will the ministry assess which roads to deactivate to reduce maintenance costs, safety risks and environmental impacts when pressure exists to keep them open?

Auditor General’s comments, Management of Forest Service Roads, p. 6⁰¹

That question was asked in November 2020 and has never been answered in public. The Selkirk Natural Resource District answered it in practice on 9 September 2026, with a twenty-seven page tender, a contractor, a fixed completion date, a security budget and no meetings.

Minister Parmar’s ministry told the Auditor General that the rules for deactivating roads were reconciled and consistent as of November 2022, and that the money for roads carrying communities and recreation had been secured or requested. Rady Creek is what those two closed recommendations produce on the ground. If that is the system working as intended, the audit that produced it deserves reopening. If it is not, one road can be paused with one sentence while the difference is worked out.

Pause the Rady Creek deactivation. Publish the capital-road designation for the Trout Lake–Rady Creek forest service road, and the record of what the district considered under “future access needs.” Bids close at 1:00 PM on 24 September 2026.