The NDP calls outdoor recreation rural British Columbia’s future while its own Ministry of Forests tears out the roads it runs on.
Brittny Anderson, the Minister for Rural Communities, is nowhere to be seen for even her own rural community.

01 What the Province says this is worth

On 21 May 2026 the Province published Look West: B.C.’s Outdoor Recreation Strategy. The then Minister of Jobs and Economic Growth put a number on the thing it was protecting, and the number is not small: outdoor recreation contributes $4.8 billion annually to British Columbia’s economy and supports more than 1,400 businesses and communities provincewide.⁰² The Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport has a target to double tourism revenue to $48 billion by 2036. Since 2022 the Rural Economic Diversification and Infrastructure Program has put $156.5 million into 525 rural projects⁰².

None of that is in dispute, and none of it is ours. It is the Province describing its own policy in its own releases. We went looking for the same commitment somewhere it obliges somebody — a service plan, a mandate letter, a budget line — and that is where the story is.

02 Look West diagnoses the problem correctly

Target 8 of that strategy is “A modernized framework for high-value recreation access and resource roads.” Under the heading why this matters, the Province writes:

Recreation access in B.C. depends heavily on resource roads, which provide the primary routes into much of the province’s backcountry. As shifts in the forest sector accelerate and the industrial base that has historically funded road maintenance continues to shrink, new solutions need to be explored.

And earlier in the same document, more plainly still:

As forest companies reduce operations and road maintenance at an accelerating pace, communities risk losing valuable recreation access and the economic benefits that flow from it.

That is the government naming the exact harm, in a strategy carrying a minister’s signature. Target 8 is one of only two of the seventeen targets with no “what’s in place” section⁰¹. It names no lead ministry, carries no funding, and sets no date.

Open the page

03 What the documents that bind a minister contain

A service plan is the document a ministry is held to. A mandate letter is the document a minister is given. Between them they are the government’s own account of who is responsible for what. We read each of these in full.^{05, 06, 07} Every figure below is a count over the whole text, not a sample.

The control that makes those zeros mean something. The government’s own news index returns thirteen results for “deactivation” and nine for “road deactivation” — every one of them from Forests or Transportation, between 2011 and 2020. The vocabulary exists in the Province’s own writing. It has simply never met these portfolios.

Target 8 has also never been announced, funded or spoken to. Searches of the government’s own news index for its own phrases — “modernized framework”, “high-value recreation access” — return nothing on point.

04 What the Premier actually asked her to do

Brittny Anderson’s title is Minister of State for Local Governments and Rural Communities, and she was appointed to it on 18 November 2024⁰⁴. The post sits in the Office of the Premier rather than under a line ministry, which she has described herself, in the House:

We’re a really small team in my portfolio as the Minister of State for Local Government and Rural Communities. We primarily work with IGRS, but we also work across all of the ministries, which is a really new and unique position.

The official form is plural — “Local Governments” — in the cabinet release, the mandate letter, the ministry page and Hansard. She herself, UBCM and her own newspaper columns use the singular. Quotes below keep whatever form the speaker used.

A mandate letter is not a speech. It is the list a Premier gives a minister of what that minister is to do — the whole list, in writing, signed. Hers is dated 16 January 2025 and runs to three pages⁰³. Here is the only part of it written for her:

Open the letter — all 3 pages

Every one of the four hits for “access” is housing or health — homes people can afford, family doctors, the care they need, addictions treatment. Two of the three for “rural” are in the address block.

Transcribed, the two bullets read:

The rest of the letter is the four-priority block that appears in every 2025 mandate letter — jobs, costs, health care, community safety — plus the Green accord, conflict-of-interest and tariff passages. There is no third bullet.

So the minister whose title contains the words “rural communities” is asked, in writing, to be a point of contact for local governments and to identify what small communities need. She is not asked to do anything about the forest service roads those communities reach their economy on. That is not a word missing from a document. It is a duty that was never assigned — and the letter is the document that assigns duties.

For completeness, across the whole three pages: “recreation”, “road”, “trail”, “tourism” and “forest” do not appear at all. “Access” appears four times, every one about housing or health care. We downloaded the letter and counted it ourselves.

05 A full parliament of Hansard

There is no working public full-text search for British Columbia’s Hansard. The Legislature publishes it as per-sitting PDFs with per-sitting indexes and no cumulative one. So we crawled them: 754 candidate URLs, 187 retrieved, issues 1 to 188 present except issue 115⁰⁸.

She appears in the index 39 times. 35 of those are “Introductions by members” — the formality of welcoming visitors to the gallery. Her entire substantive indexed record for the parliament is four items:

Not one of them concerns recreation, trails, backcountry access, tourism, roads, resource roads or forest service roads. There are no “oral questions (response)” entries against her name anywhere in the parliament.

A consumer bill, a tribute to a mayor in the northwest, a budget speech and an assessment bill. Her riding’s economy runs on trails, roads and backcountry access, and across every opportunity a full parliament gave her, she rose on none of them. No question answered on the subject, and no members’ statement made about it.

She did say the word once. Read in full, because the context is the point:

In one of the communities I was in, I commented on how every small community is like a snowflake because they are so unique and special. Even in two communities that might be neighbours, their industries can be different, and they can be quite culturally different. Their facilities, their recreation — it’s all unique.

That is a remark about small communities being distinctive, not a statement of policy. It is here because it is the only time the word appears in a full parliament, and a reader is entitled to see what that one time was.

For contrast, from the same index we crawled:

06 She is quoted on money that is not hers, and silent on the thing that is

None of the money below came from her. REDIP is run by the Ministry of Jobs and Economic Growth. The ORV Trail Fund is user-funded — administered by Recreation Sites and Trails BC and paid for out of riders’ own ICBC registration fees. In every one of these releases she is quoted as the member for her riding, not by her ministerial title¹¹, because the decision was never hers to make. A reporter wanted a local voice and she supplied one.

That is the pattern worth noticing. Where there is a ribbon, she is available. Where there is a fight with another ministry, she is not. Not one of these appearances mentions the forest service roads that every one of these projects is reached by.

Four appearances about getting people into the backcountry, across three years, in a riding whose economy depends on it. Not one mentions a road. None of the money was hers. And on the one question that is squarely hers — whether rural communities keep the forest service roads their economy runs on — there is nothing.

The warmest she has ever been about the backcountry in public was before she had any power over it — a 2022 trail announcement and a 2023 search-and-rescue release, both as a backbench MLA. Since being given the portfolio that covers every rural community in the province, she has announced money for backcountry access and said nothing whatever about losing it.

07 Nine weeks

Then put three dates next to each other.¹⁵

One arm of this government is paying to bring visitors to the backcountry economy. Another is removing the Rady Creek road they would drive in on. Both know what the other is doing. Neither has been made to answer for it, and neither has volunteered.

And the Province has already contradicted itself in writing on precisely this point. On 26 May 2026 the Ministry of Environment and Parks funded a Valemount trail association and said, in its own release, that the money “helps keep a forest service road connection open to a managed trail system.”¹² Thirteen months earlier the Ministry of Forests had written that forest service roads “are designed and built for industrial use, not public access.”¹³ Both sentences belong to the same government. Neither is in a service plan.

There is a comparator for what this costs to undo. REDIP paid almost $400,000 to the McBride¹⁰ Big Country Snowmobile Association for a new bridge, “re-establishing access to the Renshaw snowmobile area” — in the same calendar year the Ministry of Forests refused to transfer Rady Creek. The Renshaw bridge came out after an inspection found it on the verge of structural failure, so it is not evidence of anyone intending to close anything. It is evidence of the price: the community reported a seventy per cent drop in riders, and the local Chamber projected a $3.15 million loss.²⁰

08 The same government sells the recreation economy and destroys the forest service roads it runs on

This is one government taking credit twice. It announces the recreation economy as rural British Columbia’s future and puts money behind it, and it tears out the forest service roads that economy depends on — and it does both in the same year, about the same roads, in writing. Brittny Anderson’s side makes the promise. Ravi Parmar’s ministry breaks it.

On 26 May 2026 the Ministry of Environment and Parks paid a Valemount trail association $25,000 and wrote, in its own release, that the money “helps keep a forest service road connection open to a managed trail system” — thirteen months after the Ministry of Forests had written that forest service roads are not for public access. Both sentences belong to the same government.

Every name in both columns is from the same party. This is not two parties arguing. It is one government, one caucus and one cabinet holding both positions at once, and taking the credit for each.

So one of two things has to be true. Either the recreation economy is what rural British Columbia is being offered after forestry, in which case the Ministry of Forests cannot keep removing the roads it depends on. Or the roads go, in which case the $4.8 billion promise is not a plan for rural communities and should stop being sold as one. Both cannot hold.

Settling that is exactly the job of a Minister of State for Local Governments and Rural Communities — a portfolio that sits in the Premier’s office and, in her own words, works “across all of the ministries”. It is the argument she exists to have with the Minister of Forests. We can find no evidence she has had it.

And Parmar’s stated reasons do not survive checking

On 28 September 2026 he answered a delegation on camera about this exact road. We transcribed it and checked every claim. Thirteen were scored against the statutes, the Estimates and his own ministry’s files: seven were false, three misleading, one contradicted itself four minutes later. Two held up. The full check is here.

These are the reasons the Rady Creek road is being destroyed, and the Province’s own records are what show they are wrong. If the minister responsible for rural communities had contested any of it, there would be a record of her doing so.

09 It is already happening inside her own riding

Rady Creek sits just outside Kootenay Central. The same thing is happening inside it.

Sitkum Creek Forest Service Road, file 0235, is a 14.2 kilometre road held by the same Selkirk Natural Resource District that is removing Rady Creek. It runs into a community watershed above the West Arm of Kootenay Lake, inside Kootenay Central, and the Province has deactivated it before: in 2014 it pulled the bridge at about the eight-kilometre mark and, in the words of a resident writing to the Nelson Star, destroyed hundreds of meters of road on either side of the creek with it. The public paid to put that access back. It is on the list again.

And the places she has turned up for are the places those roads reach. Kaslo, Nelson, Nakusp, the Lardeau Valley, Nakusp Hot Springs — every one in Kootenay Central, every one reached by the kind of road her government is removing. She has been photographed at the destinations and has said nothing about the way in.

And the riding is not the defence

It will be said that Rady Creek is not hers. It is not — it sits in Columbia River-Revelstoke, and we checked that twice against the Province’s own gazetted boundaries so that nobody can wave this away on a technicality. But her title is Minister of State for Local Governments and Rural Communities, not member for Kootenay Central. The portfolio sits in the Premier’s office and works, in her own words, across every ministry. Whose riding a road sits in does not decide whose job it is.

This is the part we got wrong first, and nearly printed. The Trout Lake–Rady Creek Forest Service Road is in the Lardeau valley, and Brittny Anderson’s riding covers most of that valley. It is an easy inference and it is false.

We settled it against the Province’s own gazetted data, twice, by two different methods. First, the gazetteer point: BC Geographical Names holds one official feature called Rady Creek, adopted in 1956, recorded at its mouth¹⁶. Run against the gazetted electoral boundary layer, it falls in exactly one district. Second, the road itself: the forest tenure layer gives road 0321 section 02, “TROUT LAKE-RADY CR”, 4,396 metres of active road, as 724 separate points. All 724 are in the same district, and it is not hers.¹⁷

Place	Map sheet	Electoral district
Rady Creek	82K/11	Columbia River-Revelstoke
Trout Lake	82K/12	Columbia River-Revelstoke
Gerrard	82K/11	Kootenay Central
Lardeau	82K/2	Kootenay Central

Rady Creek and Gerrard sit on the same map sheet, nine kilometres apart, in different ridings. The boundary runs between them, across the south end of Trout Lake. Nelson and Revelstoke were run through the same test as controls and both landed where they should.

So the road belongs to Columbia River-Revelstoke, whose member is Scott McInnis of the Conservative Party of BC — and he is the MLA who went to Trout Lake, heard the users, and tabled the petition in the Legislature. The only Hansard entries on a Kootenay forest service road deactivation in the whole parliament are his, on the last sitting day before dissolution. In the BC Snowmobile Federation’s own article on Rady Creek he is named five times. Brittny Anderson is named none.

That changes the shape of this, and not in the government’s favour. Columbia River-Revelstoke is the one riding of the three touching this story that the NDP does not hold. It went Conservative in 2024 by 670 votes, and the candidate who came within those 670 votes is running again. The Province is removing the Rady Creek road in the seat it most wants to win back, while funding the recreation economy that road serves.

Her position is still worth stating, precisely. She was copied on the 15 September letter confirming the deactivation, as a minister of the Crown.¹⁴ The $86,000 for Nakusp Hot Springs is in her riding⁰⁹. Rady Creek is not.

10 Her own party will not stop talking about recreation. She is the exception when it counts!

Talk is the one thing this government has never been short of on outdoor recreation, and none of it has ever been made to bind anybody — least of all her, in the one place where it would have cost her something to say it.

The province’s own Outdoor Recreation Strategy, published 21 May 2026, states the problem in plain terms at Target 8 — Recreation access in B.C. depends heavily on resource roads… as the industrial base that has historically funded road maintenance continues to shrink, new solutions need to be explored. That target names no lead ministry, no funding and no deliverable date, and it is one of only two of the seventeen carrying no “What’s in place” section at all. The Ministry of Forests, which holds these roads, publishes a service plan for 2026/27–2028/29 in which recreation access, resource roads, deactivation and Target 8 do not appear.

So the problem is written down by one arm of the government and owned by none of them. That is precisely the gap a minister of state for rural communities exists to close, and her mandate letter says so in terms: her work runs “across all of the ministries”. It is the one job in the cabinet that cannot be excused by saying the file belongs to somebody else, because her file is the space between files.

She was copied on the 15 September letter. She represents the riding the same district is deactivating roads in. She holds the only portfolio written to reach across ministries. Every condition that would make this her business is met, and there is no record of her acting on any of them.

11 What she was actually asked to do, and what she did with it

She cannot sign a road closed. That power sits with the Minister of Forests and with the district manager who signs the prescription. That is the whole of what is not her responsibility, and it is not a defence, because nobody asked her to sign anything.

Her mandate letter of 16 January 2025 gives her two priorities. This is not a summary of them. It is both of them, in full:

“Serve as the key point of contact for local governments bringing concerns, suggestions, or feedback to government. Work with Ministerial colleagues to address issues proactively and ensure that local government advice informs government initiatives.”

“In particular, work with rural and remote communities, regional districts, municipalities, and First Nations to identify the unique needs and opportunities these smaller communities need to grow and thrive.”

That is the entire job. A regional district brought the concern and tabled the petition. The ministerial colleague who could address it proactively sits in her own cabinet. The rural community is six kilometres from her riding boundary, and the next road on the same list runs into a watershed inside it. There is no reading of those two sentences that does not put this squarely on her desk — which is why the absence of recreation, roads, trails and forests from the rest of that letter is not an excuse. Her two priorities are written broadly enough to cover exactly this, and that is the point of a minister of state.

And one of them is wrong. The Ministry of Forests has put in writing that forest service roads are not for public access. Her own government has put in writing, in the Outdoor Recreation Strategy, that recreation access depends heavily on those same roads and that the economy they carry is rural British Columbia’s future. Both documents are current, both carry a minister’s name, and they cannot both be right. Settling which one the government actually means is the proactive work with ministerial colleagues her letter describes, and there is no record that she has attempted it.

She was copied on the 15 September letter in which the Selkirk district refused to transfer the Rady Creek road and committed to destroying it. She did nothing. She did not reply on the record, ask the Minister of Forests in writing to pause it, raise it in the House, or answer any of the seven news stories. What each of those costs is a letter.

And she is not alone in it. Four ministers put their names to the recreation economy — Jobs and Economic Growth on the $4.8 billion figure, Environment and Parks on Look West, Tourism on access to the outdoors, the Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development on what it means to the Kootenays. Every one of them watched the Ministry of Forests write that forest service roads are not for public access and move to destroy one. Not one of them said a word in public to bring that ministry into line. They are all in the same caucus and the same cabinet, and they meet every week.

It is sometimes argued that this is a gap in the paperwork rather than a choice. The paperwork is real: no service plan and no mandate letter makes anyone answer for it. But a minister does not need a mandate letter to object to something happening to the communities she is named after, and a cabinet does not need a document to tell one of its own ministries that it is destroying the thing the rest of them are selling. They had the standing and the meeting and the whole of a parliament to use them. They chose not to.

12 Ask them to put it in writing

A news release obliges nobody. A mandate letter and a service plan do. So the ask is not for a comment — it is for two commitments short enough to answer on a doorstep and specific enough to be read back in a year: give Target 8 an owner, a budget line and a date, and stop deactivating roads for liability alone while that framework is written.

It goes to Brittny Anderson directly, and copies the four ministers in her own party who have been selling the recreation economy while the Ministry of Forests removes the roads it runs on. One person is asked the question; the people who should be asking it with her are watching.