It was never the caribou. The Ministry of Forests said so itself, in writing, in 2021.

Ask why the Trout Lake–Rady Creek Forest Service Road is being destroyed and you will be told about caribou. It is the reason that travels furthest, because it is the one that sounds least like a choice. Protecting mountain caribou would be a defensible thing for a government to do.

This government has not managed it. As this is written, the Province is deciding whether to carry on with recovery for this herd in its own range, move the penned animals to a breeding centre in Alberta, or stop maternity penning and predator management altogether.¹⁸

None of that has anything to do with this road. And on this road, the Ministry of Forests does not make the caribou claim at all. It withdrew it five years ago, in writing, to the public, and it has never reinstated it. What it has done instead is offer a different reason roughly every time it is asked.

Section 01Two Selkirk District sentences on Rady Creek, five months apart

On 11 May 2021, Bettina Zimmermann — who signs as Tina Zimmermann, RFT, Engineering Technician, Selkirk Resource District — wrote to the people the district treated as stakeholders on the Rady Creek road. The subject line was an amendment to the deactivation works. The content was a reversal.⁰¹

On 26 October 2021 the ministry’s answer to the public went out through the constituency office of Katrine Conroy, then Minister of Forests. The covering note says what it is: “a bit of what has been sent to most people who have written.” It is not a private reply. It is the standard answer.⁰²

Those two passages cannot both be the reason. One of them was given to industry and to two private residents; the other was given to every member of the public who took the trouble to write a letter. The second is the one the Ministry of Forests chose to put its name to in public, and it says caribou is not why.

Nothing here argues that caribou do not matter, and the people who use this road have already proved they think otherwise. In February 2021 the two Trout Lake clubs signed a stewardship agreement with the Ministry of Forests and gave up riding area in caribou habitat. The parties to it are the Ministry and the two volunteer clubs, and nobody else.⁰³

So the people who ride the Rady Creek road gave ground for caribou, in writing, and were not told that the access they were bargaining around was already being taken. The point in this piece is narrower still, and it is the Ministry of Forests’ own: caribou is not the reason it gives for removing Rady Creek.

Section 02B.C.’s caribou programme says it did not identify Rady Creek

There is a way to settle this that does not depend on reading two ministry letters against each other. Ask the caribou programme.

In October 2023 The Narwhal put the question to Aaron Reid, a provincial caribou biologist, for a story about backcountry roads being closed in the name of wildlife. Rady Creek was one of the roads it was about. His answer was one sentence.¹⁵

The caribou program didn’t identify that road.

Aaron Reid, caribou biologist, Province of British Columbia · The Narwhal, 30 October 2023

The same article goes further, and it is worth quoting exactly: Reid “says he didn’t ask for those roads to be closed in the name of caribou; the decision had already been made by the time it got to him.” And on what actually drives these closures: “It wasn’t a decision driven primarily by ecological concerns; the province closes roads that are no longer being used for industry based on one reason above all others: liability.”¹⁵

In the same story, a government spokesperson confirmed that “the primary reason the Rady Creek and Healy Creek roads are being shut down is public safety.”¹⁵

So the position is not in doubt and never has been. The biologist responsible for caribou in this region says the caribou programme did not identify the Rady Creek road and that the decision reached him already made. The Ministry of Forests’ standard letter to the public says the decision is not based on caribou habitat. The ministry’s spokesperson to a national outlet says the same. Three independent statements, three audiences, one answer.

The only document that puts caribou at the centre of this decision is an email from a district engineering technician to six private addresses, and it was written thirteen days after the same person promised the opposite.

There is a postscript to that, and it is happening now. On 27 August 2026 the Arrow Lakes Caribou Society — which runs the maternity pen for this herd near Nakusp — announced that it was holding fifteen caribou in the pen past their usual July release at the request of the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, to allow for First Nations consultation and a decision on three options: continue the recovery programme in the herd’s native range, transfer the penned animals to the Jasper National Park Conservation Breeding Centre in Alberta, or release them with no further maternity penning or predator management. The decision was expected in mid-September — now.¹⁸

On 1 June 2026 the Syilx Okanagan Nation petitioned the federal government for an Emergency Protection Order covering southern mountain caribou in its territory.¹⁸

So while one arm of this government weighs whether to give up on the herd or move it to Alberta, another is spending money to destroy a road it told the public was not being destroyed for caribou — on the strength of an email that said it was.

Section 03Thirteen days between keeping ATV access on Rady Creek and ending it

The caribou reason has a birthday, and it is worth knowing how recent it was.

Two weeks before that 11 May email, the same author wrote to the same list with the opposite position.

Thirteen days separate “every effort will be made to maintain ATV access” from “NO ATV ACCESS LEFT OPEN.” Nothing on the ground changed in those thirteen days. No survey was run, no report was commissioned, no slide occurred. The 11 May email says so itself, acknowledging the reversal in the previous breath: “In the previous referral to you shown below, it was stated we would attempt to leave ATV access open at the expense of stability.”⁰¹

What changed was the paperwork. The deactivation prescription for Rady Creek is dated 7 October 2020, and its header then read “Access Level Remaining after Deact: ATV.” Its instructions told the operator to “pull as much fill as possible while still leaving an elevated ATV trail on inside” and to “construct ATV’able barricade.” The header on the copy that governs the work today reads “NO ACCESS.” The file’s own embedded properties record it as printed 27 April 2021 and modified 11 May 2021 — the same day as the email.⁰⁴

The outcome was not reached. It was substituted, and the caribou were brought in to carry it.

Section 04Who Selkirk District told about Rady Creek, and who it left off the list

The 11 May email went to six addresses. None of them was a government address. None of them was the Trout Lake Recreational Club — the organisation whose members use this road, and which had signed the caribou stewardship agreement with this ministry three months earlier. Recreation Sites and Trails BC, the one agency that could have designated these routes for recreation, was not on it either.⁰¹

The list was a heli-ski operator, a province-wide off-road riders’ organisation, a guest ranch, a wood products company, and two private residents. That is who was told the Rady Creek decision was about caribou. The people who actually ride the road learned it was going from a third party.

Five months later the public got the opposite answer, and got it at scale. The question the Ministry of Forests has never answered is which group it was telling the truth to.

Section 05Seven reasons for destroying Rady Creek, and who gave each one

Seven reasons have been given for destroying Rady Creek since 2020. They are not variations on a theme; several are incompatible with each other, and every one of them is answered somewhere else in the Ministry of Forests’ own record.

Read down the ledger and the pattern is not a ministry defending a decision. It is a ministry looking for a decision that will hold. When caribou stopped working, safety arrived. When safety was traced to forty-two metres, the engineer arrived. When the engineer could not be produced, the funding policy arrived.

Section 06Three credentials for one Rady Creek switchback, and no report

The claim that an engineer prescribed the Rady Creek deactivation is the one the Ministry of Forests has repeated most often in public, and it is the easiest to check.

It has been described three ways by two officials. To a provincial recreation federation and to the Minister of Forests’ office, Garth Wiggill called it “a professional engineer.” To the Trout Lake Recreational Club, District Manager Tara DeCourcy called it “the recommendations of a geotechnical engineer.” In her own briefing note up the chain to Wiggill, she called it “the recommendations of a professional geoscientist.”⁰⁷ Those are three different regulated credentials. Whichever it was, the review covered one switchback — not the whole of Rady Creek, and not the prescription.

On 9 November 2021 Jeanine Ross of the Trout Lake Recreational Club asked for the engineer’s report by name. “This is the report The Club needs.” Sixty-nine minutes later she had her answer.

There is a report now. It was commissioned in 2026, five years later, from a different professional — a geoscientist, not an engineer — and nothing in its forty-two pages mentions the 2021 review. Its own background list records the Ministry of Forests’ earlier Rady Creek deactivation document as “not dated.” It also records the instruction it was given before anyone walked the ground: “The MOF has indicated that the road is intended to be deactivated to a permanent standard, and that post-deactivation vehicular access is not required.”⁰⁸

That is not an engineer reaching a conclusion. That is a conclusion being handed to an engineer.

Section 07Selkirk District would not walk Rady Creek with the Trout Lake club

All of this could have been settled on the ground in an afternoon, and the Trout Lake Recreational Club said so.

On 23 June 2021 at 3:25 PM, District Manager Tara DeCourcy offered a meeting, with the Regional Executive Director present: “I am able to meet with the club, if a representative could get in touch with me I will try to find a time that Garth and I are available.” Garth is Garth Wiggill, the Regional Executive Director.⁰⁹

Two hours and nineteen minutes against seven days. That is the whole relationship in one exchange, and it is the closest anyone has come in five years. In the same month a provincial recreation federation asked to meet the prescribing engineer and review the plan, with the stated goal of deactivating Rady Creek and keeping access. That meeting never happened either. The prescriber’s name reached the club a year later, on a document.⁰⁹

An official who will not spend an afternoon on a road is not in a position to tell the public that Rady Creek is too dangerous to keep. Nobody from this district has ever walked it with the people who use it. And the refusal was not buried in a private exchange: the Minister of Forests was copied on both messages, so the department knew in June 2021 that its district would not go and look.

Section 08“Just create a stock response” — the district on the Rady Creek letters

Two weeks after declining to walk Rady Creek, the same Selkirk District officials discussed what to do about the people writing in. The thread was released under freedom of information, at pages 428 and 429 of a 1,410-page package.¹⁰

CLIFF is the government’s correspondence tracking system and the RED is the Regional Executive Director, so the sentence is capable of an innocent reading: the district’s own copies are surplus because the answer is written elsewhere. What is not open to interpretation is the posture. Three months of public objection had produced, by 13 July 2021, a decision to stop reading and start issuing.

The stock response is the document in Exhibit 02. It is the one that says caribou is not the reason, that says an engineer prescribed the work, and that promises consultation. Of those three statements, one contradicts the district’s own email, one could not be produced when asked for, and one has never happened.

Section 09Selkirk District documents five deactivations. Rady Creek is the sixth.

Here is the part that decides whether any of the above is carelessness.

Thirty kilometres from Rady Creek the same district office is deactivating another forest service road — the Incomappleux, FSR 3397. Same district, same years, same decision-maker. Whether that removal is the right call is contested too, and plenty of people in this valley say it is not. The comparison here is narrower: what the district published about it.¹¹

It is not an isolated comparison. In July 2022 the same prescriber who wrote the Rady Creek document posted field signs a year ahead of works on four other roads in this district — Blazed, Jersey, Heights and Akokli — each with a written comment deadline and a fact sheet at the district front desk. Rady Creek is not on that list. The district’s published listing for the Heights road even states plainly that “there will be no ATV access after completion of deactivation” and that “notice of proposed deactivation signage has been posted.”¹²

And it is not two roads. The Province publishes a live list of every deactivation this district has in hand. On the day this was written it carried six, and it is worth reading as a set, because the district documents five of them and does not document the sixth.¹⁹

Road	What the district published	Works
Incomappleux FSR 3397 posted 3 Nov 2025	Draft prescriptions for Branches 01, 03 and 04; two prescription map PDFs; a bridge deactivation appendix; a published FAQ. Branch 02 drafts “will be posted once available.”	planning
Heights FSR 0237.04 posted 6 Jul 2026	“Notice of proposed deactivation signage has been posted” — a year ahead — and a written warning that “there will be no ATV access after completion of deactivation.”	Jul 2027
Sitkum Creek FSR 0235.01 posted 6 Jul 2026	“Notice of proposed deactivation signage has been posted” — a year ahead.	Jun 2027
Kuskanax Creek FSR 0042.05 posted 3 Nov 2025	Planning underway, and an alternative stated on the record: the road “may be fully rehabbed if incremental funding is available.”	2026
Tangiers River FSR 6139.01 Oct 2020	Already deactivated. A 2002 complaint to the Forest Practices Board about this same watershed came from a trapper who said bridge removal would cut off his access.	done
Trout Lake–Rady Creek FSR 0321.02 posted 13 Nov 2025	One sentence: “Road has been posted for deactivation in the field. Deactivation planned for 2026.” No prescription. No map. No FAQ. No comment period.	2026

Five roads get documents, maps, signage a year ahead, a published FAQ, or an alternative to destruction written into the record. The sixth gets a sentence and a contractor. The sixth is the one where people wrote in.

The same page carries the other half of the picture. Under closures and restrictions it lists road after road shut to the public and left there — Bayonne Creek, Blaeberry, Big Mouth, Burrell–McFarlane, Burrell–Tenderloin, Goat/Kamma Creek, Halfway River North, Idaho Lookout, Leake Creek, Powder Creek, Rendell Creek, Wilson Creek West, Woodbury Fletcher — most of them carrying the same four words: “No planned repair date.” One of them, Goat Range Park Branch FSR 7051.02, sits four and a half kilometres from Trout Lake and is the way into the Healy Creek watershed — the other road named alongside Rady Creek when this was reported nationally in 2023. It has been closed at its first bridge since June 2025 for “deteriorated bridge deck conditions,” with no planned repair date.¹⁹

That is what the Auditor General’s fourteen cents on the dollar looks like in one district: a network of public roads closed because the structures on them were never repaired, and a deactivation programme that converts the consequence into a permanent removal. The cheapest way to stop being liable for a bridge is to delete the road that needs it.

So this district can publish an FAQ. It can put draft prescriptions and maps on a public web page. It can post signs a year ahead and tell people in writing that access will end. It did all of that on other roads, in the same years, under the same management. None of that makes those removals right — it makes them visible, and visible in time for somebody to object.

It did none of it here. That is not a resourcing problem and it is not an oversight. It is a different standard, applied to Rady Creek, and the only thing that distinguishes it from the others is that people objected to it.

There is no law that required the district to consult here, and that is the point rather than the defence. The Forest Practices Board established it twenty-one years ago, in a special report on access management: “The deactivation of existing roads does not require a permit, or any public or other resource user consultation.” The Board found that “many people want input on decisions to develop new roads, restrict public access, and whether to maintain or deactivate existing roads,” and recommended that government legislate to “address the lack of consultation on creating and deactivating roads.” It asked for a progress report by 31 December 2006.¹⁶

Two decades later there is still no duty to consult, which means every one of those five steps on the Incomappleux was discretionary. The district chose to do them there. It chose not to do them here. The absence of a legal obligation does not make the difference innocent — it makes it deliberate.

Nor is this the first time the Board has been asked about a road in this district. In 2002 a trapper complained that deactivation in the Tangier River and Woolsey Creek watersheds, including removal of a bridge, would cut off safe access to his registered trapline and that he had not been given enough time. In 2018 the Board investigated road maintenance at Little Cayuse Creek and found that “government enforcement was not appropriate” because it had not done sufficient work to establish whether the licensee had complied with the law.¹⁶

The Trout Lake Recreational Club has asked the Forest Practices Board to look at Rady Creek. The Board has confirmed it “has received multiple submissions” which “are being assessed through the Board’s public complaints process” — while noting that it “cannot direct the Province to keep the road open, pause the work or make a particular recreational-access decision.” No Board report on Rady Creek has been published.¹³

Section 10Who let Selkirk District run Rady Creek this way

A district office can behave like this for five years only if nobody above it is checking.

In November 2020 the Auditor General of British Columbia audited the whole forest service road network and concluded that the Ministry of Forests “did not manage safety and environmental risks on FSRs in accordance with its policies.” He found districts funded at 14 per cent of what they asked for, high-priority repairs overdue on 3,178 of 6,640 crossing structures, and seven of eight districts sampled unable to produce an inspection record. Nine recommendations followed. Five years on, four are still not complete — and the two that are closed are the one covering the rules for deactivating roads and the one covering the money for roads carrying recreation.⁰⁶ Both were reported complete by the ministry itself. Rady Creek is what those two closed recommendations produce on the ground.

The direction was not invented in Nelson. It is printed inside the audit itself, in the Ministry of Forests’ own response to the Auditor General.

That is the instruction. What Selkirk has added to it is the part the ministry never wrote down: run the process where nobody objects, and skip it where they do. The district that published draft prescriptions, maps and an FAQ for the Incomappleux, and posted signs a year ahead on Heights and Sitkum, gave Rady Creek one sentence on a web page and a tender. Both behaviours come out of the same office, in the same years, under the same managers.

On 4 September 2026, fifteen forest-sector organisations wrote to Premier David Eby asking for a crisis group “led by the Premier’s Office.” They did not write to the Minister of Forests. He appears on page five, first of eight ministers copied in.¹⁴ When an industry writes past a minister to his boss, it has already answered the question of whether he is running the file.

Ravi Parmar has been Minister of Forests since 18 November 2024. The Rady Creek tender was re-issued on 9 September 2026, under his signature authority, by a district that told the public one thing and industry another, that could not produce the engineering it cited, that would not walk the road, that decided to “throw those ones away,” and that has run a full public process on four other roads in the same years.

He asked for this portfolio. He can stop Rady Creek with one sentence while the rest of it is examined. He has not. A minister who will not correct a district that has given seven different reasons for the same decision is not overseeing that district — he is relying on it not being read.

Ravi Parmar should resign as Minister of Forests. Before he does, he can do one useful thing: pause the Rady Creek deactivation, publish the engineering the ministry has cited since 2021, and give this road the same documents his own district put on a public web page for the Incomappleux. The tender closes on 24 September; once a contractor is engaged the machines are scheduled before the snow, which is why that sentence has to come before then rather than after.