The NDP government pulled McBride’s backcountry bridge, its ministers blamed each other, then it paid almost $400,000 toward a new one.

McBride sits on the Yellowhead Highway in the Robson Valley, about 210 kilometres east of the city of Prince George.⁰¹ In January 2024 the Ministry of Forests zero-rated the bridge into the village’s best-known snowmobile area, and that December the Province pulled it out. In May 2026 the Province put almost $400,000 toward a new one. Between those dates, two ministers each told the Legislature the bridge belonged to the other’s ministry. This is the record of who decided, who paid and who said what.

01 A town that had already lost its mills

The village’s own economic development plan, written by consultants in 2018, sets out what happened to McBride’s first economy. The Zeidler sawmill and veneer mill, TRC Cedar and Castle Creek Forest Products all operated in the McBride area. As those mills closed and logging was mechanized, the plan says, local employment declined significantly. Over the same years the Province pulled its own offices out of the village.⁰¹

The plan named outdoor recreation as the foundation of the visitor economy that was meant to take forestry’s place. One of its objectives reads differently now: the maintenance of backcountry logging road access. It also said plainly what would happen if nobody took that on:

Without industrial permit holders to maintain them, they risk being decommissioned, which in some cases may strand critical tourism assets.

The plan put that risk down to a lack of provincial funding, direction and legislation.⁰¹ That was in 2018. What follows is what a stranded tourism asset looked like in McBride six years later.

02 The bridge at kilometre two

The Renshaw is a snowmobile area in the mountains above McBride, reached by a forest service road along the McKale River. The first crossing on that road, about two kilometres in, carried the sleds and groomers that went up. This is its record, as the public sources set it out, from the first repair to the grant:

The club hopes to have the Renshaw open for the 2026–27 season. Other bridges beyond the first still need work, and the warm-up cabin thirty kilometres up the trail has not been maintained since the closure.¹¹

03 McBride already had the recreation-road fix

The Renshaw road was not a forgotten logging road. It was the arrangement other towns are still asking for. In 2012 the company that held the McKale road permit said it had planned to close it, and that because of the high number of recreational users, “the government said they would take over responsibility.” Recreation Sites and Trails BC confirmed the handover in its 2024 letter to the village: it had taken on the Renshaw alpine access trail in the early 2010s, when nobody else stepped forward to pay for maintenance.^13, 03

The weakness was written into the deal. The agency’s commitment, it said, was “only to provide use of structures for their lifespan providing 14 years of access to the backcountry.” When the first bridge failed, the same agency told the village it “does not have the expertise nor the resources available to undertake road and bridge maintenance,” and that the whole road would need a complete overhaul to stay viable for the long term. That December it pulled the bridge out.^03, 06

McBride tried the same approach on its other roads. In 2018 the chamber’s tourism committee applied to take on the last five kilometres of the South Dore road under a licence of occupation, in a deal under which the Province would help maintain the rest for non-industrial traffic and keep three bridges in place. The chamber said it had negotiated with the Ministry of Forests for more than two years; the ministry said the application was being processed. We found no public record that it was granted. In 2023 the ministry moved to deactivate the upper South Dore and its bridges, and scaled the plan back after a petition. In 2024 the Dore road was closed when the ministry condemned a bridge.^{14, 15, 16}

What this record does and does not show. It shows that the Province took responsibility for the Renshaw road for recreation, and limited that responsibility to the life of the existing bridges. It does not show a signed agreement that the Province broke, and we found no road-maintenance agreement for McBride in the public record that was made and then dropped. In May 2026 the mayor told council the Ministry of Forests was now offering a longer bridge, provided the club maintained the road, which is the same kind of arrangement again.¹⁷

04 Who decided, who paid, who said what

Two ministries share this road. The Ministry of Forests owns it and its engineers rate its bridges. Recreation Sites and Trails BC, in the Ministry of Environment and Parks, took on the snowmobile access trail to the alpine in the early 2010s. In April 2025 a Conservative member asked both ministers about the McBride bridge in budget estimates, a day apart.^{03, 07, 08}

This particular bridge that the member is talking about would be under the Ministry of Forests.

This is a Rec Sites and Trails…. Rec Sites and Trails doesn’t exist in the Ministry of Forests.

Both statements have something true in them. The bridge was a Forests structure on a Forests road, and the trail it served was in Rec Sites and Trails’ care. Davidson added that her ministry would work with Forests and the jobs ministry on solutions. Parmar said the decision to remove the bridges was his engineers’, and that he would work with the mayor. Thirteen months later the money came from the jobs ministry’s rural fund. This is everyone the public record puts in the story:^{07, 08, 12}

Read the table fairly. The bridge came out because its pier was failing, and closing an unsafe bridge is an engineer’s call. Nothing here shows that any of these people wanted the Renshaw closed. Every “no statement found” covers only the sources named in its note. The mayor’s account of a Forests offer and the release’s REDIP money have not been reconciled, so this page says “the Province” paid.^17, 12

05 What the crossings have cost

Three figures appear in the public record of this one road. They do not measure the same work, so each bar below says what it paid for and where it comes from.

Read the chart fairly. The $5,000 was a grant toward a volunteer repair of the bridge deck, not its full cost. It did not touch the middle pier that failed two years later. The almost $400,000 installs one crossing, using a bridge the club bought at a reduced price. The $1 million is an early estimate for all five crossings. So the chart cannot show that a cheap fix would have saved the road. What it does show is the distance between what volunteers were carrying in 2021 and what the Province paid once the crossing was gone.

06 The case study, and what it cannot show

The only attempt to put a dollar figure on McBride’s loss is the report prepared for the Chamber of Commerce. It has not been published. Its findings are public only through the account in The Rocky Mountain Goat on 13 December 2024, and that account sets out every input:²⁵

The limits of that number. The chamber’s chair said the report was written for a local business to use in a grant application, and that the board administering the grant rejected it as inadequate or inaccurate data for showing a loss caused by the Renshaw closure. The spending figure and the share who stayed away come from conversations with visitors and businesses, not from receipts or a survey. The 9,000 baseline does not match the club’s own average of more than 12,000. The first closed winter was also short of snow. Read it as a projection, not a measured loss.²⁵

What survives those limits is narrower, and it is still plain. The club’s pass sales fell from an average of more than 12,000 riders a season to 3,500 in the first winter without the Renshaw.²⁵ That winter was also short of snow, so not all of that fall is the bridge. The village counted the Renshaw as close to half of all its riders in the weeks before it closed.⁰⁴ Six Robson Valley recreation groups wrote to the Ministry of Forests that the closures had significantly lowered the number of visitors and cut residents off from the backcountry.¹⁶

07 The same pattern in Kootenay Central and Kootenay-Monashee

Two members hold the titles that cover what happened in McBride. Neither represents it. Both represent ridings where forest roads are closing the same way.

Inside Kootenay Central, the Selkirk district has closed, posted for removal or retired all or part of fourteen forest service roads since 2020. Eight of them were closed or posted after the start of 2025, and three are posted for deactivation now, Sitkum Creek among them. Our record of her riding sets out each road, and what she has said about them in the Legislature and elsewhere. Read the Kootenay Central record.²⁶

The Province puts his name on its rural development announcements, and the fund he speaks for is the one that paid for the McBride bridge. Inside Kootenay-Monashee, thirty-three forest service roads have stood closed or had sections retired since 2020. Two closures on the Sugar Lake road north of Cherryville are still listed today, and 32.5 kilometres of retirements came after his appointment, although most of the total came before he held the seat. On 6 July 2026 the BC Snowmobile Federation recorded lobbying him and four other members on road deactivation. Read the Kootenay-Monashee record.²⁷

08 On the ballot in Prince George-Valemount

McBride votes in Prince George-Valemount on 24 October. Four candidates are on the ballot there this time. Each is asked the same thing here: what they have said in public about the Renshaw or McBride’s forest roads, and what they say their own campaign is mainly about.^28, 29

09 Opinion: the Province has to decide who keeps the way in

This section is the Backcountry Coalition’s opinion. It draws on the facts set out above.

McBride shows what lost access costs. A town that had already lost its mills built a winter economy on the roads the mills left behind. When one bridge failed, its riders went elsewhere, its businesses felt it, and two years later the Province paid almost $400,000 to put one crossing back. That is not a failure of the people who rebuilt it. The club, the village and six recreation groups did everything a community can do.

It is the price of a road that two ministries share and neither fully owns. On the record, this looks less like a decision than like nobody being in charge. The Forests minister and the Environment minister each pointed the Legislature at the other. The Premier pointed the village at a grant. The money that finally came was the jobs ministry’s: almost $400,000 toward one bridge out of five, close to eighty times the $5,000 grant that helped reopen the crossing in 2021, although the two sums do not buy the same work. On the record we found, no one in that chain answered for the road as a whole.

How the money arrived matters too. It came as one line in the launch release for a provincial recreation strategy, under a jobs minister’s quote that did not mention McBride. That is the shape of an announcement, not of a plan for the road. The election was a snap call four months later, and we found no minister or candidate pointing to the McBride grant since.^{12, 31, 32}

The same thing is under way in Kootenay Central and Kootenay-Monashee, one road at a time. Many of the closures follow a washout or a failed bridge, and each one can strand something a town was counting on.^26, 27 The two members whose titles are rural communities and rural development are the obvious people to say so out loud and on the record. One asked to meet a council that then put forest roads first on the agenda. The other was quoted, on another subject, in the release that funded the McBride bridge. On the public record we searched, neither has addressed the roads now closing in their own ridings.

Buying access back after it is gone cost McBride two winters and cost the Province a new bridge. The better way is a plan for which roads stay, written before the bridge comes out, and one minister whose job it is to hold that plan. That is the question to put to every candidate before 24 October.

A town should not have to lose its way in before the Province pays to put it back.