Ravi Parmar — A Legacy of Failed Leadership at the Ministry of Forests

Ask who Ravi Parmar is and the honest answer is this: a thirty-one-year-old who has spent his entire working life in politics, whose only previous contact with forestry was sixteen months as a political aide in the minister’s office, and who asked Premier David Eby to put him in charge of the industry anyway. He got it on 18 November 2024. He said he wanted to restore confidence in the sector.

Two years is not long enough to fix British Columbia’s forest industry. It is long enough to find out whether a minister can do the job. Here is what the Province’s own documents say happened on his watch.

Forest revenue to the treasury fell to about forty per cent of its 2020/21 level, with no recovery anywhere in his government’s own forecast. Twenty-one mills closed. More than fifteen thousand people lost their jobs, two thousand of them in his first full year. His ministry missed three of the seven targets it set for itself, including forest landscape plans, where the target was two and the number delivered was zero — in a report he signed personally. The Auditor General’s 2020 finding that this ministry does not maintain its own roads — an issue its internal auditors had already raised in 2008 — was still only five recommendations of nine complete at the last follow-up. And the Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel wrote to tell him its deferrals are failing.

Not one of the measures that decides whether this industry survives has improved under Ravi Parmar — not revenue, not harvest, not mills, not jobs. That is the whole of his legacy at the Ministry of Forests, and it took two years to build.

01He had never worked in a forest

Start with the thing nobody in Victoria will say out loud.

Parmar’s early record is real and it is impressive. In 2011, aged sixteen, he decided Belmont Secondary in Langford was not fit to be in — a leaking roof, asbestos in the walls, mould in the lockers, floors taped together. He wrote a petition, carried it to more than 1,700 signatures, and walked his classmates out in dust masks. His MLA, John Horgan, took it into the legislature. That Halloween the Minister of Education came to Belmont and announced two new schools. Both were built.⁰¹ He was a trustee at twenty, the youngest in Canada, and chaired the board at twenty-two, the youngest in the province.⁰²

A sixteen-year-old who forces a government to build two schools is a serious person. But a school board is not a forest industry, and at some point somebody should have asked what the rest of the résumé actually qualified him to run.

That is the whole curriculum vitae of the man running British Columbia’s forests. Seven months of work outside politics in a lifetime. Sixteen months within a hundred metres of the file he now owns. No forestry credential — the Forest Professionals BC register returns nothing under his name, and it keeps former registrants on the books for a decade, so the absence is real. And his statutory conflict-of-interest filings, four years running, list every source of income he has ever had: an MLA salary, a Ministry of Jobs salary, school district remuneration, and rent from two properties. No forestry company, no directorship, no forestry income, no union.³⁷³⁸

Every road document the Ministry of Forests issues carries the seal of a Registered Professional Forester or a professional engineer, because British Columbia requires qualified people to make those judgements. The only person in the chain who needed no qualification at all was the man placed above all of them. And his one stint inside the building ended in December 2020, the month after the Auditor General reported that the ministry was not maintaining its roads to its own policies.

He does not dispute any of this. Asked by BCBusiness in December 2024 how he answered constituents worried about electing someone with no experience outside politics: “I’ve been in politics my entire adult life… While I may not have that direct experience that others may expect for the minister of forests, I think I have the lived experiences.”³⁶ Fifteen months later, defending his own ministry’s estimates in Committee of Supply, he put it more briefly.

He is right. That is the problem.

02He learned the Ministry of Forests in its worst decade

Before he was elected to anything provincial, Parmar worked inside this same ministry as a senior advisor to Minister Doug Donaldson, who held the portfolio from July 2017 to November 2020.⁰²

In Donaldson’s final month the Auditor General of British Columbia published Management of Forest Service Roads, and found the ministry was not maintaining its roads to its own policies. The numbers underneath that sentence are the ones that matter. For 2019/20 the districts asked for $40.2 million to keep the network up and were given $5.5 million. Requests had climbed forty-one per cent in three years while the allocation never moved. Nearly nine million dollars of work the districts themselves ranked high-priority simply went unfunded. Seven of the eight districts the auditor sampled could not produce an inspection record. And an internal audit had said all of this already — in 2008.⁰³

Six years later, under his own signature, the Ministry of Forests reported what it had actually done about that. In 2024/25 it reported capital improvements to 29 kilometres of forest service road, on seven roads, with 23 major structures repaired or replaced. Against a 58,000-kilometre network that is five one-hundredths of one per cent in a year — a renewal cycle of roughly two thousand years. It is the only province-wide kilometre figure the ministry has published, and it has not published one since.²¹

There is a reason nothing improves. Across his current three-year plan, the 2026/27–2028/29 Service Plan, the phrases forest service road, road maintenance, deactivation, bridge and culvert appear zero times. The ministry has never created a published performance measure for the 58,000-kilometre network at all.²³ Nothing is measured, so nothing can be missed.

When somebody does go and look, this is what they find. In 2024 the Forest Practices Board audited BC Timber Sales — the government’s own logging agency, inside this ministry — in the Boundary and found it had inspected none of the 124 kilometres of road it had itself rated high or very high risk. The following year the Board audited BCTS on Haida Gwaii and found no road inspections since 2018, and a bridge over a fish stream that had failed.²⁴

This is the room Ravi Parmar learned the job in. Not a ministry that builds things: a ministry that had quietly decided it could not afford what it already owned, and had been told so twice. He did not walk into that culture as a stranger in 2024. He was raised in it. Twenty-two months at the top of it have not changed the arithmetic.

He will point to one number, and he is entitled to. In the same estimates debate where he said he was not a forester, Parmar told the committee he had raised the provincial road maintenance budget from $6.1 million in 2022/23 to $16.5 million in 2025/26.³⁵ Take it at face value. It is still less than half what the districts alone asked for in the single year the Auditor General examined, spread across a network his own ministry puts at 60,000 kilometres, and his current three-year plan sets no target for any of it. Tripling a number that was never close to adequate does not make it adequate.

03He promised to restore confidence

His official biography states that he “specifically requested the forestry portfolio from Premier David Eby, with a clear focus on restoring confidence in the sector.”⁰² Nobody drafted him. He wanted it.

At least he still has his. Fifteen thousand forestry workers do not.

Set what he said against what arrived.

04The money left, and it is not coming back

Forestry used to pay for things in British Columbia. In 2020/21 it returned more than $1.3 billion to the provincial treasury. The budget now forecasts $521 million for 2026/27. By 2028/29 the Province expects to take almost three times as much from natural gas as from its forests.⁰⁵

Read that last sentence again, because it is the quiet end of an era and it is happening on his watch. The resource this province was built on is being overtaken, in the government’s own accounts, by a pipeline.

His mandate letter of 16 January 2025 gave him one hard, measurable number: work toward a land base able to sustain a harvest of 45 million cubic metres a year.⁰⁴

His own ministry’s annual report puts the 2024 harvest at 38.9 million cubic metres across private and Crown land, unchanged from 2023.²¹ The Province’s own fiscal plan is blunter still: Budget 2026 assumes a Crown harvest of 29.0 million cubic metres, and holds it flat every year through 2028/29.²²

Take whichever basis you like. On the ministry’s own all-lands number he is short. On the government’s own Crown number he is short by more than a third. And the fiscal plan does not contain a single year that trends toward forty-five — his own government has quietly stopped believing his mandate, while the mandate still says forty-five.

05Twenty-one mills, fifteen thousand people

Numbers on a budget line are abstract. Mills are not. In 2025 alone the Crofton pulp mill, a West Fraser sawmill at 100 Mile House and a Drax pellet mill at Williams Lake all shut. Crofton put roughly 350 people out of work in jobs paying around $100,000 a year. In 2026 Canfor announced the closure of Northwood Pulp in Prince George, taking another 300. Quesnel River Pulp curtailed. Howe Sound Pulp and Paper curtailed indefinitely.⁰⁶⁰⁷⁰⁸

The industry’s own council counts twenty-one mills closed permanently or indefinitely since 2023, and more than fifteen thousand forestry jobs gone since 2022.⁰⁷ Statistics Canada, looking only at Parmar’s first full year in office, counted at least 1,200 jobs lost in forestry and at least 800 in sawmills between December 2024 and December 2025.⁰⁹

Every one of those is a household in a town that has few other employers, and most of those towns are exactly the places the rest of this government keeps telling to build a recreation economy instead.

06He is also the minister responsible for the fires

The Ministry of Forests owns the BC Wildfire Service. Wildfire is not weather that happens to this Minister — it is the largest operational responsibility he holds, and the largest cost he carries.

British Columbia has spent the past five years learning what happens when that responsibility is not met. On 30 June 2021 the village of Lytton burned almost completely to the ground, the day after it recorded the highest temperature ever measured in Canada. Two people died. Residents were still not home years later.²⁰ In 2023 fire tore through the Shuswap and West Kelowna and the province recorded its most destructive season on record — 2.84 million hectares, on the Province’s own published summary.¹⁰

Those fires were not Ravi Parmar’s. Lytton burned three years before he took the portfolio, and the Shuswap a year before that. They are the inheritance against which his own record has to be read — because the question for a minister who arrives after a disaster is a simple one. Did anything change?

The cost says no. British Columbia spent $621 million fighting fire in 2024 and more than a billion in 2023; 2025 came in at $510 million as of 1 November. Across 2016–2025 the province averaged $525 million a year on suppression; across the preceding decade it averaged $252 million. The cost of fighting fire here has doubled in ten years. The annual figure has come down since 2023, but not because anything was fixed: 2025 burned 886,348 hectares — above the ten-year average of 791,278 — and still cost half a billion dollars.¹⁰

Then came his own season, and it deserves setting out properly. British Columbia recorded 1,389 fires and roughly 475,000 hectares burned in 2026 — about sixty per cent of the ten-year average. By area, it was a quiet year.³²

It did not feel quiet. On 8 August 2026 the Province declared a state of emergency. More than twenty thousand people were driven from their homes. The Bald Range fire above Summerland ran to some 25,000 hectares, the community of Faulder was described by the district’s own chief administrative officer as nearly erased, and an eighty-year-old woman died in Meadow Valley trying to leave her house.³³ Against a budget of $236 million, the year is forecast to cost $850 million.

Hold those two facts together, because the combination is the indictment. A below-average fire year still emptied twenty thousand homes, killed someone, and ran nearly four times over budget. That is not what a bad year looks like. That is what an average year now costs a province that has spent two decades not doing the prevention work, and whose current Minister of Forests responded by halving the treatment target.

And the emergency itself reached far beyond the fires. A state of emergency is declared province-wide, and it is declared by Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, not by the Minister of Forests. But its effect lands everywhere at once: travel advisories, cancellations and closures in valleys hundreds of kilometres from any flame, in a province where a single smoke-free week in August is the difference between a profitable season and a lost one for a backcountry lodge. Revelstoke had almost no smoke in 2026 and still wore the declaration. Nothing published sets out the threshold — how many hectares, how many crews committed, how many communities at risk — at which a fire emergency stops being regional and becomes province-wide. A blanket declaration is the cheapest instrument available and the most expensive one to the recreation economy, and nobody has to show their working before reaching for it. The recreation economy absorbs the cost of a fire season it did not cause and cannot prevent — and it is the same economy this Minister’s ministry is dismantling one forest service road at a time.¹⁴

That is the week in which the Minister of Forests was asked whether he should keep his job. It is worth being exact about how he answered.

07His own ministry’s scorecard, signed by him

Every figure so far has come from somebody else’s document. This one comes from his.

The Ministry of Forests publishes an Annual Service Plan Report grading itself against its own targets. The 2025/26 edition — Parmar’s first full fiscal year — was published in August 2026 and is signed by him personally, on 28 July 2026.²¹ It records that the ministry missed three of its seven published performance measures.

The worst of them is not close. Forest landscape plans are the legal regime created to deliver the Old Growth Strategic Review — the ministry’s own plan calls them integral to it. The target for the year was two. The number initiated was zero.²¹

That last figure belongs with the fire numbers above. After the worst fire decade in the province’s history, the ministry cut its own target for area treated to reduce wildfire risk from 10,150 hectares to 5,000 — a 51 per cent reduction, and 58 per cent below what it had actually achieved the year before. Its own footnote names the reason: available funding.²³

He halved the province’s own community fire-protection target in the decade its own record says was the worst on file.

And the agency he runs directly is shrinking. BC Timber Sales’ annual volume fell from 11.7 million cubic metres in 2020/21 to 4.5 million in 2024/25, a 62 per cent decline — a figure that appears in the task force report Parmar himself commissioned and which is addressed to him by name.²⁶

08The fires are expensive because nobody prevented them

There is a reason British Columbia keeps paying half a billion dollars a year to put fires out, and it is not bad luck.

The Forest Practices Board reported in June 2023 that 39 million hectares — forty-five per cent of all public land in British Columbia — sits at high or extreme wildfire threat. Against that, roughly 26,000 hectares had been treated since 2018 to reduce the risk: “just over one percent of the [wildland-urban interface].” The Board’s own verdict on the pace was that such efforts “do not come close to achieving the scale required to restore landscape resilience.”²⁵

That last figure is the one that belongs to this ministry specifically. In June 2025 the Board found that between 2014 and 2023 approximately 175,700 hectares were logged in the interface, against just 16,200 hectares treated specifically to reduce wildfire risk — eleven to one. Over a million British Columbians live in communities rated high or extreme risk.²⁷ The same ministry authorises both. The Board is careful to say logging is not designed to reduce fire risk and that some practices can reduce it — its finding is that the two are not being coordinated. That is the charge: not that his ministry set out to make the interface more dangerous, but that it runs the biggest lever it has over that landscape without aligning it to the risk at all.

This is not a new discovery, and that is the damning part. The review the Province itself commissioned after the 2017 fires put the arithmetic in an appendix, using the BC Wildfire Service’s own data: across 2003–2017 British Columbia spent $3.099 billion suppressing fires and $73.8 million preventing them. Prevention was 2.3 per cent of what was spent.²⁸ The Auditor General reached the same conclusion in February 2018 under a heading that needs no summary: “Wildfire prevention activities are not sufficient.”²⁹

So what has this Minister done with that inheritance? He cut the treatment target by half and named available funding as the reason. And his ministry underspent its own fire preparedness budget in 2025/26 by $4.5 million, in a year it overspent suppression by $407 million.³⁰

Which points at the deeper fiction. Over nine fiscal years British Columbia has voted $1.37 billion for fire management and actually spent $5.39 billion — nearly four times the vote — and the recorded variance is zero in every single year, because the money is authorised after the fact to match whatever was burned through. The budget is not a constraint. It is a placeholder.³⁰

The current year makes the point in his own numbers. For 2026/27 the ministry budgeted $236 million for fire management. By September the forecast was $850 million. The same $236 million is budgeted again for each of the next two years.³¹

One last thing about the mandate letter. It runs to four pages and eight priorities for the Minister of Forests, the minister who owns the BC Wildfire Service. The words wildfire, fire, prevention, evacuation and emergency appear in it zero times. Tariff appears five times.⁰⁴ That is the Premier’s document, not Parmar’s, and the failure of imagination in it belongs to David Eby. But Ravi Parmar asked for this portfolio, and a minister who wanted to prevent fires was never going to be stopped by a letter that forgot to mention them.

09Everyone is telling him. From every direction.

Criticism from the opposition can be dismissed as politics. Criticism from the opposition, the scientists the Province appointed, conservation groups, and the public, all at once, cannot.

Note what is missing from every one of those answers: a result. Asked about his old-growth policy in March, he replied with what his government had done since 2017. Asked about caribou, he criticised the animals. Asked whether he should go, he told the people asking to fill their boots. A minister with something to show reaches for the something. This one reaches for a line.

10The industry stopped asking him, and started explaining the basics

On 4 September 2026 fifteen organisations representing essentially the whole of British Columbia’s forest sector signed a letter about the crisis in their industry.³⁴

They did not send it to the Minister of Forests.

They sent it to Premier David Eby, and what they asked him for was a “Forestry Crisis Action Group, led by the Premier’s Office” — a phrase the letter uses twice. Ravi Parmar does not appear in the body of the document at all. He appears on page five, as the first of eight ministers copied on it. The single reference to him is oblique and is addressed to the Premier: a reminder that “your Minister of Forests” made a commitment in the Legislature on 9 April 2025 that has not been delivered.³⁴

Then it does something more damning than complain. It starts explaining the job to him. The letter’s own section headings are “The First Priority: Do No Further Harm”, “The Second Priority: Get the Wood Moving” and “Retain Workers—Do Not Wait to Retrain Them”. Underneath them is a six-point list any competent ministry would have written for itself: freeze new provincial fees and charges while the trade crisis lasts; stand up a cross-ministry permitting and fibre triage team; and — the line that should sting most — “within 30 days, release a public Forest Sector Crisis Action Plan identifying specific measures, responsible ministers and firm implementation timelines.”³⁴

On wildfire the letter is blunter than the Minister has ever been: “invest in silviculture and forest management activities to prevent catastrophic fires in the first place. Prevention is much cheaper than response.”³⁴ An industry coalition had to write that down for the minister responsible for the BC Wildfire Service.

And it hands over the harvest arithmetic too. The letter notes the Province’s fiscal plan assumes about 29 million cubic metres, says the industry believes BC can move toward 45 million, and reminds the Premier that “on April 9, 2025, your Minister of Forests confirmed in the Legislature that this objective was being advanced” — a commitment the signatories say has not been delivered.³⁴ Fifteen organisations independently arrived at the same two numbers set out above, and had to remind the Premier that his own minister promised to close the gap between them.

Their language is not diplomatic. “BC’s forest sector is at a breaking point. Immediate action is required.” The mandate they want is “get economically viable wood moving, reduce costs, remove regulatory barriers, stabilize fibre supply, protect operating businesses, and retain—not retrain—British Columbia’s skilled forestry workforce.” And on page four, the line that should end any argument about whether this Minister still has the confidence of the sector he governs: “Long-term transformation of the forest sector remains important. But the time for relying primarily on incremental measures, studies and long-term transformation plans has passed.”³⁴

They also remind the Premier that the federal Forest Sector Transformation Task Force “confirmed what industry has been saying for some time: many of the most serious challenges confronting Canadian forestry are ‘homegrown.’” Not tariffs. Not markets. Homegrown. And they tell him plainly: “The Province has both the authority and the responsibility to act.”³⁴

Parmar’s public answer came five days later, at a media conference: “Clearly we are in arguably the most challenging period in forestry’s history.”³⁴

When the entire industry you are responsible for writes past you to your boss and asks him to run it instead, the question of whether you still hold the job has already been answered by everyone except you.

11A board of directors, governing for shareholders, would have fired him already

Take the word minister off the file and put it in front of people whose own money is in the business.

The chief executive asked for this division. Since he took it, revenue has fallen to about forty per cent of its 2020/21 level and the finance department's four-year forecast leaves it there. Production is short of plan on every basis the company itself publishes, and the finance department’s own forecast holds it there. Twenty-one plants have closed. More than fifteen thousand people have left the workforce. The biggest operational cost line has doubled over a decade. Four of the external auditor’s nine recommendations from the last review are still outstanding, five years on, on a problem the internal audit first raised eighteen years ago. The expert panel the company itself appointed has put in writing that the flagship programme does not work. He has no qualification in the industry, has never run an operating business, and can point to no measurable improvement anywhere in the file.

In business the executive usually goes before he is pushed, because the numbers have already made the argument and staying is the more humiliating option. In government he gives an interview about how he asked for the job — and then proceeds to fake it until he makes it, on an industry that employs tens of thousands of people and a forest estate the size of a country. That is not leadership. It is an internship with a ministry attached.

12The optics matter more to him than the outcome

Ravi Parmar’s career has been one unbroken ascent since he was sixteen. Youngest trustee in Canada. Youngest board chair in the province. Ministerial advisor, then chief of staff, then the seat a premier vacated, then cabinet at thirty. Nothing in that record has ever required him to stand in front of a room and say a thing had gone wrong on his watch. He has never had to.

Then he asked for the Ministry of Forests — and that request is the hinge of this whole story. Nobody handed him a failing portfolio. He went and got it, which means every number in it is personally his in a way it would not have been had he simply been assigned.

And every honest thing he could now do would require him to say, out loud, that the industry is smaller than it was and is not coming back. Funding a road for recreation instead of hauling means admitting the hauling is finished. Handing a road to a community rather than demolishing it means admitting his ministry will never afford it again. Building the recreation and tourism economy the rest of his government has already started building means standing in a mill town and telling people the mill is gone. Every one of those is the right call for the province. Every one of them also puts the words managed decline next to the name of a man whose entire brand is that he makes things happen.

So he does not say it. Watch what he reaches for instead, because it is the same move every time and it is always a move to protect the story rather than fix the file. Asked about his own panel’s finding that his old-growth policy is failing, he answered with what his government had done since 2017 — a record that predates him. Asked about a caribou population in collapse, he criticised the intelligence of the caribou. Asked whether he should resign with twenty thousand people out of their homes, he told his critics to fill their boots. Asked, in writing, to pause the destruction of the Rady Creek forest service road above Trout Lake, he did not reply; his ministry commissioned a fresh report written to a conclusion already fixed, re-tendered the work, and budgeted security guards to stand over it.

None of those is the behaviour of a man solving a problem. They are the behaviours of a man managing how the problem looks. A minister who cared more about the outcome than the optics would have taken the industry’s September letter as the emergency it plainly is; instead the letter went past him to the Premier and he told a media conference it was “arguably the most challenging period in forestry’s history” — a sentence that describes the weather and commits him to nothing.

So nothing is conceded, and the province gets the worst of every road. The target is missed and remains the only plan he knows. The forest service roads are neither maintained nor transferred — they are demolished, the one option that costs nothing next year and forecloses everything after it. The recreation economy grows in a room he is not in.

He is protecting a career. The people in Trout Lake, and in the other rural communities his forestry industry has abandoned, are paying for it. Fifty residents, three industries, one road, and a minister who will not risk the admission that would save it.

All he had to do was support his own government’s mandate to transition to a new recreation economy. Instead he clings to optics handed down to him by the men he understudied.

13His own government has moved on without him

On 21 May 2026 the Province launched Look West: B.C.’s Outdoor Recreation Strategy — seventeen targets, built on the finding that outdoor recreation contributes $4.8 billion a year and supports more than 1,400 businesses. It came from the Ministry of Environment and Parks under Tamara Davidson and the Ministry of Jobs and Economic Growth under Ravi Kahlon, the minister Parmar once served as a senior ministerial advisor. Kahlon’s case for it: outdoor recreation helps communities “diversify their economies and build long-term prosperity.”¹⁶

The Ministry of Forests is not on that announcement. The ministry that owns the 58,000 kilometres of road almost all of that recreation is reached by was not a partner in its own government’s recreation strategy.

14What it looks like when it reaches the ground

Rady Creek forest service road 0321.02 climbs out of Trout Lake, a village of about fifty full-time residents whose remaining economy is tourism, mineral exploration and recreation. All three go up that road. His ministry has tendered 4,395 metres of it for permanent deactivation, with bids closing at 1:00 PM on 24 September 2026.¹⁷

On 6 July 2026 a provincial recreation federation put the file on the Minister’s desk and asked for an administrative pause.¹⁸ On 8 September the Selkirk Natural Resource District took delivery of a new forty-two page deactivation prescription it had commissioned. On 9 September the tender went back out. The instruction handed to the consultant before any engineering was done was that the road “is intended to be deactivated to a permanent standard, and that post-deactivation vehicular access is not required.” The tender budgets for round-the-clock on-site security, because the ministry’s own paperwork describes the job as “contentious” and “well known to the public.”¹⁷

There is one more document in this file, and it is the one that should settle the argument about consultation. In October 2021 the Ministry postponed this same deactivation and circulated its reason, in writing, to everyone who had written in to object: the delay would “allow for further consultation and discussions to be conducted if needed with interested stakeholders.” That undertaking was given by the Ministry of Forests. No consultation for Rady Creek appears anywhere on the record in the five years since — the last twenty-two months of them his.³⁹

Fourteen cents on the dollar in 2019/20 is why the district cannot maintain this road. A mandate written to keep costs low is why the cheapest disposal wins. A recreation strategy his ministry was not invited to is why nobody ever costed the alternative. He was asked in July to stop it and did not. A minister will say, correctly, that he does not personally sign a road prescription — that these files are settled by an assistant deputy minister and a district office, well below his desk. That is true, and it is the whole point. Officials decide what the minister’s priorities allow them to decide. A ministry told to keep costs low, given no road target to hit and no recreation mandate to serve, will produce exactly this decision in exactly this district, over and over, until somebody at the top changes what it is for. That is the job he asked for. Rady Creek is Ravi Parmar’s record arriving in one valley, with security guards hired to stand over it.

And the Selkirk Natural Resource District is not an outlier in his ministry. It is his ministry working exactly as configured: an office that found the money for round-the-clock security but has not found an afternoon for a meeting in five years, that commissioned an engineering report after the conclusion was already written into the brief, and that let a written undertaking to consult sit unhonoured since 2021. No district behaves like that for five years unless the building above it is content.

15Let’s all say it out loud together: Ravi, you should just resign

Forestry was in trouble before him and will be in trouble after him. Softwood duties, a beetle-killed fibre supply and a warming climate are not his invention, and no minister should be run out of office over weather. That is not the case against Ravi Parmar.

The case against him is that he asked for a job he was not qualified to hold, promised to restore confidence in a sector, and delivered nothing measurable in two years. Every published metric is worse. His own target has been missed on every basis his government publishes, and its fiscal plan contains no year that trends toward it. His own experts say his own policy is failing. His ministry has been working through the same road-maintenance findings since 2008. And on every occasion he has been asked about it, he has answered with 2017, with the stupidity of caribou, or with an invitation to fill our boots.

Good leaders stand down when they cannot do the job. They do not wait to be voted out or shamed out. They look at a record like this one, accept that somebody else would do it better, and go — because the towns carrying the consequences are real places with real people in them, and because at some point staying is no longer service. It is just vanity.

So let us all say it out loud together, Minister. Ravi, you should just resign. Not because forestry is hard, but because you asked for this, you promised to restore confidence in it, and on every number your own government publishes you have made it worse. Go, and let whoever comes next begin with the two things you would not do: pause the Rady Creek deactivation, and publish a mechanism for transferring public roads into the recreation economy instead of demolishing them.

At this point, that kind of humility is the only thing that could save your legacy from the same destruction you are using to harm rural communities — communities that depend on transitioning away from your failed forestry business model and towards a recreation economy.