Doerkson’s plan would write backcountry access into law. But it has no budget line for the roads and trails that get you there.

The people who hunt, sled, fish and ride reach British Columbia’s backcountry on forest service roads, and this year they have watched those roads and riding areas close. The Ministry of Forests tendered Rady Creek above Trout Lake for deactivation, and it closed the Walker FSR, the only B.C. road to Kakwa Park, over five unsafe bridges. In the South Peace, the Province closed snowmobile riding areas indefinitely for caribou.

Four days after the BC NDP’s two-page costing, and two days into advance voting, the Conservatives answered with 71 pages.^1,2 On page 46 is, in our view, the clearest promise on public access that any party has put in a platform.

01 Doerkson’s plan would put public access to Crown land into law. The NDP’s plan makes no such promise.

Lorne DoerksonInterim leader, Conservative Party of BC³

“Restore equal access to Crown land and provincial parks: guarantee public access to Crown land, beaches and backcountry for all British Columbians in law, subject only to legitimate conservation and safety requirements.”

The promise is a statute. A Conservative government would guarantee in law that every British Columbian can enter Crown land, provincial parks, beaches and the backcountry, limited only by “legitimate conservation and safety requirements.” In our view a right written into law is much harder to close quietly than a policy is.¹

It is not a campaign invention. The party’s 2025 Policy Declaration said British Columbians “deserve guaranteed access to public lands and wild areas,” and the platform now puts that idea in front of voters, under the heading “Protect Private Property Rights.” The NDP’s two-page costing makes no access promise at all.^2,4

02 The costing has no budget line for the roads and trails. Target 8 stays unfunded.

The costing at the back of the same document does not pay for any of the roads that access depends on. This is the part of its spending table where a backcountry line would sit.¹

Conservative plan, Appendix B, p.64

No budget line for
roads or trails

A right to enter Crown land is worth what the road to it is worth, and much of the backcountry is reached by forest service and resource roads. The phrases “forest service road,” “resource road,” “Recreation Sites and Trails” and “Look West” do not appear in the plan, and Target 8, the province’s own goal for “high-value recreation access and resource roads,” gets no money.^1,5

• Resource and forest service roadsmaintenance, bridges, keeping routes open$0 · not in the costing
• Recreation Sites and Trailsthe agency that runs the province’s rec sites and trails$0 · not in the costing
• Trailsbuilding or maintaining them$0 · not in the costing
• Look West, Target 8“high-value recreation access and resource roads”$0 · not in the costing

The only backcountry line in the costing is $7 million a year for “Pride in our parks,” which pays for enforcement against dumping and vandalism and for more conservation officers. It does not reverse Budget 2026’s cut to the division that runs BC Parks and Recreation Sites and Trails, which fell to $93.0 million this year.^1,6

03 Target 8 is the province’s own plan for these roads. No ministry owns it, and no budget pays for it.

• The roads

  Ministry of Forests

  Its natural resource district managers answer for about 38,000 km of forest service road. Maintenance was $16.5 million in 2025/26.^7,8

• The sites and trails

  Recreation Sites and Trails BC

  An agency of the Ministry of Environment and Parks, inside a $93.0 million division it shares with BC Parks.⁶

• Target 8

  Look West, May 2026

  “A modernized framework for high-value recreation access and resource roads.” No lead ministry, no budget, no date.^5,9

Target 8 sits in Look West, the outdoor recreation strategy that Tamara Davidson, the Minister of Environment and Parks, signed in May 2026, and it is the only one of its seventeen targets about the roads.^5,9 The roads belong to one ministry and the recreation to another. Ravi Parmar, the Minister of Forests, told the legislature in 2025 that his road money is “not for rec sites or for recreation,” and Recreation Sites and Trails BC’s money stops at the site.¹⁰

In our view the target needs three things the strategy leaves blank: a lead ministry, a list of the recreation roads that count as high-value, and a maintenance budget tied to that list. The Auditor General’s own test already points the way. Roads that serve communities or high-value recreation are “unlikely to be deactivated by the ministry and require continual maintenance.”⁷

04 A budget line for the roads is small next to the plan’s own numbers. By our estimate it is about $30 million a year.

In 2020 the Auditor General found that the districts were given $5.5 million of the $40.2 million they said forest service roads needed, 14 cents on the dollar. High-value recreation roads were $8.5 million of a $21.5 million priority request. The ministry’s funding policy then “advises districts to deactivate roads that they are unable to maintain,” so the shortfall becomes the reason to close.⁷

$ millions a year. The estimate is ours. It sets a 2019/20 request beside a 2025/26 spending figure and does not adjust for inflation or for work done since, so it is a scale check, not a costing.^1,6,7,8

Spending has risen since. Forest service road maintenance went from $6.1 million in 2022/23 to $16.5 million in 2025/26, by Parmar’s count, while the Province has paid $19,973,741 on 111 contracts to deactivate forest roads since 2012.^8,9 A line that closes the remaining gap would be about four times the plan’s $7 million parks-enforcement envelope, and about 1.5 per cent of the $2 billion a year it takes out of the contingency fund.¹

05 A right to enter does not keep a road open. Roads close by district order, and the safety clause may not stop one.

Roads close through the Ministry of Forests’ district managers. A district can deactivate a forest service road by pulling its bridges and culverts and barricading the surface, and the Auditor General found there is “no trigger or timeline” that requires it. About 30,000 km are maintained by industry under road-use permits, for industry’s own purposes.⁷

The guarantee would apply “subject only to legitimate conservation and safety requirements.” The Walker FSR shows the limit. On 22 July 2026 the Prince George district closed it because five bridges were rated able to carry no load, a safety requirement on any reading, and a right of access does not rebuild a bridge. At Rady Creek the district has given at least seven different reasons over five years. In our view the clause would help most there, by making a district name one reason and defend it.^1,9

Liability is the reason heard most often, and the Legislature answered it in 2012. Section 3.1 of the Occupiers Liability Act deems anyone who uses a resource road to have “willingly assumed all risks,” and the Province said at the time that the change “will help keep more backcountry roads open.” At Rady Creek the Trout Lake Recreational Club offered to take on the liability itself, and Recreation Sites and Trails BC declined.^11,12

06 Two-thirds of the new money goes to health and social programs. The backcountry gets $7 million, for enforcement.

New operating spending at full annual cost, $1.425 billion, reached in 2030/31. Appendix A, Part 8, and Table B1.¹

At full cost the plan adds $1.425 billion a year of new operating spending, phased in over the first term. Health care, seniors, disability and treatment take $975 million of it, and public safety, including a $100 million wildfire innovation fund, takes $223 million. Forestry gets $30 million, to extend the BC Manufacturing Jobs Fund.¹

07 The plan’s real road policy is a bigger harvest. More logging keeps more forest roads open, though the plan never says so.

The forestry chapter would permit a harvest “with a floor of 45 million cubic metres,” against the 29 million the budget assumes, and it books $351 million of extra stumpage over three years. Most forest roads were built for logging and stay open while there is wood to haul, so in our view a bigger harvest keeps more of them drivable. The plan does not make that connection itself.¹

That is the road question at riding level. A Conservative candidate is promising to fund one forest service road, outside a costing that funds none. Her pledge is not in the plan’s numbers.

08 The NDP plan has no access guarantee. Its 2024 promise on access roads was partly kept, then dropped.

The BC NDP’s 2024 platform promised to “develop and improve access roads, trails and infrastructure.” Road maintenance did rise, then Budget 2026 cut the division that runs BC Parks and Recreation Sites and Trails, and the 2026 costing does not mention roads, trails or parks. Our side-by-side reading of both plans has the detail.^6,8,14

09 The deficit falls every year, to $10.8 billion. The plan names no year of balance.

Operating deficit, $ billions, Table B4 of the Conservative plan. *The NDP’s costing stops at 2028/29; its 2029/30 figure is the Conservatives’ extension.^1,2

The plan starts where the NDP’s does, from the Ministry of Finance’s September forecast adjusted for the paused PST expansion. Its deficit falls from $13.7 billion this year to $10.8 billion in 2029/30. That is higher than the NDP’s own figures in the two middle years, and it comes with no debt path and no year of balance.^1,15

It pays for a $2.9 billion-a-year income-tax cut mostly by cutting the contingency fund from $5 billion to $3 billion a year, and by counting on growth of 2.5 to 3.2 per cent, above the Bank of Canada’s national forecast.^1,16 Independent estimates of the tax cut are lower than the plan’s own: about $2 billion from Ross Hickey, an economist at UBC Okanagan, and upwards of $2.5 billion from The Globe and Mail.^17,18

10 What a Conservative first budget would need to make the promise real. Four asks, in our view.

1. Put a road line in the first budget.

   Fund forest service road maintenance for recreation access at the scale the Auditor General found missing: by our estimate about $23.7 million a year on top of today’s $16.5 million.^7,8

2. Reverse the cut to parks and rec sites.

   Restore the $5.9 million Budget 2026 took from the division that runs BC Parks and Recreation Sites and Trails.⁶

3. Give Target 8 an owner and a date.

   Name the Ministry of Forests as answerable for the roads, publish the list of high-value recreation roads, and set a delivery date.⁵

4. Write the access law so it bites.

   Define “legitimate conservation and safety requirements,” require a district to offer a public-use road to a recreation partner before deactivating it, and pause pending deactivations, such as the Rady Creek tender, until the law passes.^9,12

The first two asks together come to about $29.6 million a year by our estimate, roughly 1.5 per cent of the contingency money the plan already proposes to free up. The other two cost little, and they decide whether the access law changes what happens on the ground.

11 Our view: the access promise is right, but it needs money behind it to solve Target 8.

The plainest access promise of any party. Now it needs a budget line for roads and trails.

Before you vote, ask your Conservative candidate one question: where is the budget line for the forest service roads and trails that make the access guarantee real?

A guarantee in law opens the gate. The forest service road behind it still has to be graded, bridged and kept open, and on this plan’s numbers no one is paying for that.

Photos: Lorne Doerkson by RoyalObserver via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped; Tracy St. Claire courtesy of the Conservative Party of BC.