Steve Morissette has been his government’s voice for rural development. On the forest roads lost in his own riding, we could find no record of him saying a word.

01 The job his title describes, and the letter that gave it to him

On 18 November 2024 the Premier appointed Steve Morissette Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development in the Ministry of Finance.⁰¹ He had been elected the member for Kootenay-Monashee a month earlier, with 10,202 votes and 52 per cent of the count.⁰² When he rose in the debate on the Speech from the Throne, he introduced himself by that title in his first words:

I stand here proud to be a resident of Fruitvale, representing the riding of Kootenay-Monashee, and as Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development.

The letter that appointed him runs to two pages, and its body is 542 words. It congratulates him, sets out the four priorities that open every letter of that round, and tells him that ministers’ mandate letters “will also provide additional direction regarding your role.” It gives him no priority of his own. “Rural” appears twice, both times as part of his title. “Road”, “recreation”, “trail”, “forest” and “tourism” do not appear anywhere in the letter.⁰¹

The additional direction came a year later, in the mandate letter of the Minister of Jobs and Economic Growth, whose ministry runs the Rural Economic Diversification and Infrastructure Program. The Province reprints that letter in the ministry’s own service plan. This is the whole of what it says about him:⁰⁴

“In partnership with the Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development, ensure government initiatives consider and deliver economic growth and benefits for rural and urban communities.”

That is one sentence, with “rural and urban” side by side. It names no program, no region and no deliverable, and nothing in it mentions the forest service roads that most of rural British Columbia reaches its jobs and its backcountry on. The job is real, and so is the gap in it. Nobody wrote the roads into his assignment. The rest of this page is about whether he took the roads up anyway.

02 The riding, in his own words

Kootenay-Monashee runs from Cherryville in the north to Trail, Rossland and Fruitvale in the south, and takes in Castlegar, Montrose, Warfield, Edgewood, Needles and the Slocan valley as far as Winlaw.⁰⁵ In that same speech he described its economy himself, naming one employer after another:⁰³

Teck describes its Trail Operations as “one of the world’s largest fully integrated zinc and lead smelting and refining complexes.”⁰⁶ ATCO’s veneer plant in Fruitvale employs about seventy people directly and fifty full-time contractors.⁰⁷ Red Mountain Resort in Rossland says it employs more than six hundred staff.⁰⁸ He summed up the riding’s ambition as being “to add value and jobs to every cubic metre of fibre that is cut out of our forests”, and he closed the speech with a line he said would shape his time in office:

I love the resilient can-do spirit of rural people. I will close with a quote I heard last summer from former MLA Corky Evans… Corky said: “It is important that our MLA is one of us.”

Every one of those employers depends on wood or ore coming out of the hills, and so does the riding’s backcountry economy of sledders, hunters, skiers and riders. The Province’s own outdoor recreation strategy says plainly how most of it gets there: “Recreation access in B.C. depends heavily on resource roads, which provide the primary routes into much of the province’s backcountry.”⁰⁹

03 He speaks for the rural money

The Rural Economic Diversification and Infrastructure Program is how the Province pays for rural projects when an economy needs to change. On 21 May 2025 it announced as much as $43 million from its third intake, for more than 130 projects, and quoted the parliamentary secretary for rural development.¹⁰ The same day, he and Brittny Anderson announced the Kootenay share, more than $4 million for nine Kootenay projects, and he gave a longer version of the same quote:¹¹

Investing in local priorities is making communities stronger, more resilient, and better prepared for the future. REDIP is ensuring people in every corner of the province have the tools needed for success, including right here in the Kootenays.

The largest line in his riding was $937,153 for an expansion of trailhead facilities at the Black Jack Cross Country Ski Club in Rossland. The Rossland Museum and Discovery Centre received $1,000,000.¹² A trailhead is the place where people leave the road and go into the hills on foot or on skis. It is recreation money, and it is spent at the end of a road.

The program kept coming back to the riding, and so did he. Between June and July 2026 he was quoted on the program’s money for small-business technology, a local food system and the critical-metals cluster in Trail. In April he was quoted on a new forestry licence for Nakusp, where he said that “rural communities across British Columbia depend on forestry as a major economic driver.”¹³

On 21 May 2026 the Province launched its outdoor recreation strategy, Look West, with almost $1.5 million of the same program’s money for three recreation projects. He was quoted again, this time as parliamentary secretary for rural economic development:¹⁴

Outdoor recreation is such a draw for people, both here in the Kootenays and in rural communities across the province.

Every one of those statements is warm about rural communities, and the one at the Look West launch is about recreation. None of them mentions a road into the backcountry. One of the three projects in that second release was almost $400,000 to put a bridge back into a snowmobile area near McBride, after the old one was closed and pulled out. Section 08 sets out what losing it cost a town.

04 The roads lost in his own riding

Two natural resource districts look after the forest service roads in Kootenay-Monashee. The Selkirk district, run from Nelson, covers Castlegar, Trail, Rossland, the Slocan valley and the Arrow Lakes. The Okanagan Shuswap district, run from Vernon, covers Cherryville, Sugar Lake and the Monashee Pass. We read every version of both districts’ road-notice pages that the Internet Archive holds from 2019 on, and the live pages updated on 9 October 2026. Then we tested every forest service road in the Province’s tenure register, section by section, against the gazetted boundary of his riding.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

Since the 2020 election, thirty-three forest service roads inside Kootenay-Monashee have stood closed or had sections retired. Four were listed as closed with no date to reopen, and two of them, both on the Sugar Lake road north of Cherryville, are still closed today. The register records 88 sections of 31 roads retired, 143 kilometres in all, and the Sugar Lake road is among them. Goose Creek and South Fork–Yeoward were closed but not retired, which makes thirty-three. Of the retired length, 32.5 kilometres on 14 roads was retired after he became parliamentary secretary in November 2024. In July 2020 the Province cancelled the recreation designation of the Columbia & Western Rail Trail, and 41 kilometres of that corridor run through his riding.

Most closures follow a washout or a failed structure, and nobody should drive a bridge that an engineer has found unsafe. The issue is what follows. On every closure below, the district gave no date to reopen. A retirement takes a section off the Province’s books as a forest service road, and its date is when the register changed, which is not always when work was done on the ground.

How each road was placed. Every road above was tested point by point against the gazetted Kootenay-Monashee boundary of 2023, and against the 2015 boundaries for the years before it. Before the October 2024 election, the Arrow Lakes, Slocan, Castlegar and Rossland roads were in Kootenay West, and the Cherryville and Sugar Lake roads were in Vernon-Monashee. Of the 143 kilometres retired, 110.7 were retired before he took the seat. Under the boundaries then in force, about 65.6 of those lay in Kootenay West, 41.4 in Vernon-Monashee, 3.4 in Columbia River-Revelstoke and 0.3 in Boundary-Similkameen. The two Sugar Lake closures have stood through his term, the Province’s letter on the rail trail was copied to him by name in December 2025, and 32.5 kilometres of retirements came after his appointment. The register shows sections of 21 other forest service roads retired in the riding over the same years, each under five kilometres; they are counted in the totals, not listed. Short closures for logging or bridge work are left out, and so are the Burrell Creek roads near Christina Lake, which lie in Boundary-Similkameen.^15161718

05 A full parliament of Hansard, tested against his own riding

We read every House transcript of the 43rd Parliament, both sessions, from 18 February 2025 to the last sitting on 28 May 2026, and assigned each speaking turn to the member who took it. Steve Morissette took 72 turns. We searched every one for the name of each road in the ledger above, for the rail trail, and for the riding’s backcountry places, from Sugar Lake and the Monashee Pass to Paulson, Bulldog and the Arrow Lakes. None of his 72 turns names any of those roads. None uses any of eleven general terms for road access either: forest service road, resource road, deactivation, decommission, Crown land, backcountry, public land, road access, access road, motorized recreation or logging road.²¹

Committee hearings are published separately from the House record. At one, on 17 June 2025, he spoke about recreation access roads in general; section 10 sets out what he said. He named no road there either.²⁰

He did name Cherryville, in four turns: for its community forest and the wildfire truck it helped buy, its food and resource centre, its library and Cherryville Days. None of those turns mentions a road.²¹

Read that table fairly. Questioning a minister during estimates is largely an opposition job, so opposition members will always ask more about roads than a government backbencher. He is not alone on his own side, either. Of the 47 BC NDP members who took a turn in the House, 28 never used one of the eleven terms, and he is one of them. So is Brittny Anderson, who represents Kootenay Central next door. The finding is not that he spoke less than the opposition, or less than his caucus. It is that the member whose title is rural development never named one of the thirty-three roads closed or retired in his own riding, in a full parliament of turns.²¹

What he did speak to was housing, health care, child care, colleges, critical minerals, mining and forestry jobs, ICBC licensing and community events. On 25 February 2026 he celebrated the B.C. Winter Games in Trail and Rossland and their “meaningful rural economic impact”.²² When he spoke about access in rural communities, on 4 March 2026, he meant renewing a driver’s licence online:

Bill 6 is practical, responsible legislation. It saves people time. It reduces unnecessary travel. It improves access in rural and remote communities.

That is a reasonable thing to say about a licensing bill. It is also the closest he came in the House, in a full parliament, to the access question his rural riding lives on.

06 The question was put in front of him

British Columbia’s lobbyists registry is public. A registered organisation that lobbies a member of the Legislature files a report naming who it contacted and what it was about. A report filed by the British Columbia Snowmobile Federation, lobbying activity report 572-54398, records a lobbying communication on 6 July 2026 with five members. They are Tamara Davidson, Anne Kang, Scott McInnis, Ravi Parmar and Steve Morissette, MLA for Kootenay-Monashee. The topic, exactly as the registry records it:²⁴

Public recreation access and resource roads — maintaining motorized recreation access to Crown land, including Forest Service Roads/resource roads, road deactivation, maintenance, and access to established recreation areas.

The report names no specific road, and it records that no meeting was arranged. A registry entry shows that the subject was raised with him; it cannot show what, if anything, he said back. The registry names him in nearly two hundred lobbying reports. This is the only one we found on resource roads or road deactivation.²⁴

Two days after that communication, on 8 July, more than seventy people spent the day at Trout Lake and on the roads above it, from the snowmobile, four-wheel-drive, wildlife and mineral exploration associations and the villages of Nakusp and Salmo. Provincial ministers were invited and declined. The only elected provincial official named as attending in the published accounts is the local member, Scott McInnis. The release does not say which other members were invited.²⁵

07 The road next door

The Trout Lake–Rady Creek Forest Service Road and the Incomappleux road are not in his riding. Both sit in Columbia River-Revelstoke, which we checked against the Province’s gazetted boundaries. Columbia River-Revelstoke shares a long boundary with Kootenay-Monashee.⁰⁵ Rady Creek is the road next door to his riding, in a seat held by the other party.

Where these come from: the district’s own published FAQ,²⁶ the Hansard record of the petition,²⁷ and the ministry’s statement as CBC News reported it.²⁸

He cannot sign a road closed. That power sits with the Minister of Forests and with the district manager who signs the prescription. But nobody needs a signing power to say in public that a road matters, and his title is not member for one riding. It is rural development, and it covers the whole province.

08 What it costs to buy access back

McBride is in the Robson Valley, in Prince George-Valemount, a long way from Kootenay-Monashee, and we found no part for Steve Morissette in what happened there. It belongs on this page because it is a clear public record of what the rural development program ends up paying for once backcountry access is lost. This is the sequence, as the public record sets it out:

Those are two figures on the public record for the same crossing. In 2021 a $5,000 grant and a club work party kept it open. In 2026, after the bridge had been closed and pulled out, the rural fund granted almost $400,000 toward putting it back, for what the club president called one of the largest projects in the history of Recreation Sites and Trails BC. The bridge going in is a 140-foot span that the club had bought from Trans Mountain at what its president called a significantly reduced price. The agency’s own early estimate for replacing all five crossings on the trail was over $1 million, before any maintenance costs.^30143531

What the two figures do not show. They are not a like-for-like repair. The 2021 work replaced a deck on a foundation the club said was still good, and the 2024 closure was for a structural problem in the middle pier, so $5,000 would not have fixed what failed in 2024. No published figure prices a repair of that pier. Nor is the grant the whole price of the new bridge: in the House in March 2026, the member for Boundary-Similkameen said the community and the club had raised over $1 million themselves for it.³⁶ The bridge came out because it was failing, not because anyone decided to close the area, so this is evidence of price and not of intent. What the record does show is the order of events. The access was lost, the town reported its riders gone, and then the Province’s rural development money paid to put one crossing back.

What the chamber’s projection says, and what it leaves out

The only attempt we found to price McBride’s loss is the report prepared for the chamber of commerce. It projected a $3.15 million loss for one winter, from 9,000 riders a season spending $500 each, with 65 to 70 per cent of them staying away. The board that administers the grant it was written for rejected it as inadequate or inaccurate data, so it is a projection and not a measured loss. The snowmobile club’s own count of daily trail passes is firmer. It averaged slightly more than 12,000 riders a season before the closure, and 3,500 in the winter the bridge closed. That winter also had a low snowpack. The chamber said riders would still have found snow in the Renshaw, but the weather makes the drop harder to pin on the bridge alone.³⁴

Opinion. In our view, the cheaper place to spend is upkeep. No public figure prices a repair of the pier that failed, so the record cannot say what saving the old bridge would have cost. It does show what losing it cost: a trail closed for more than two years, a town that reported most of its riders gone, and almost $400,000 of rural development money toward replacing one crossing. Keeping crossings inspected and in service, with the clubs that ride them, is how a bill like that is avoided.

The same kind of loss is under way in Kootenay-Monashee, where thirty-three forest service roads have been closed or had sections retired since 2020, as section 04 sets out. The full McBride record, with the chamber’s numbers and their limits, is in our piece on what lost access costs.³⁷

Steve Morissette was quoted in the release that announced the Renshaw money. His quote was about the Kootenays and the KORE program at the College of the Rockies, not about McBride. Beyond that one quote, we found nothing else that ties him to the grant.¹⁴

09 Opinion: rural development has to include the way in

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

One part of this government pays for trailheads, ski-club facilities and replacement bridges, and calls it rural economic diversification. Another part removes the forest service roads that the same visitors drive in on, and says the decision is final. The Rural Economic Diversification and Infrastructure Program and the Ministry of Forests do not answer to each other, and no document we have read requires them to.

The person whose title is rural development is the obvious one to join them up. He has the title, a riding whose economy he describes as fibre, ore and the outdoors, thirty-three forest roads in that riding closed or retired since 2020, and a road next door that is slated for deactivation. In July the snowmobile federation recorded lobbying him on road deactivation. We can find no record that he named one of his own riding’s roads in public, or took a position on deactivation: not in the House, not in a release and not in the local press.

McBride shows what lost access costs. A town loses its snowmobile trail, its riders leave, and two years later the rural development fund pays almost $400,000 toward putting back one crossing, where a club had once kept the old bridge in service with a $5,000 re-deck. Money spent keeping roads and bridges in service with the clubs that use them need not be spent buying them back. Diversification money spent at the end of roads that are being removed is not a plan for rural British Columbia. It is a bill that arrives later.

His appointment letter gave him nothing in writing to do about it, and that is a reason the gap exists. It is not a reason to leave it open. A parliamentary secretary does not need a mandate letter to stand up in a rural riding and say, out loud, that the roads into the backcountry are part of the rural economy.

10 What he has done

The record is not empty, and it should be read whole. In July 2025 he welcomed a new bridge and more campsites in Monashee Park, inside his riding:³⁸

Replacing the bridge at Little Peters Lake and adding more campsites at Big Peters Lake means more people, whether visitors or locals, can enjoy the beautiful Monashee Mountains.

In his own words, a bridge is what lets more people enjoy the mountains. He has also named the problem with backcountry roads, though not in the House. At a finance committee hearing in Victoria on 17 June 2025, the Federation of Mountain Clubs of B.C. asked the committee to fund the repair and maintenance of access roads for recreation, and he answered:²⁰

You mentioned upkeeping access roads for recreation. That’s a significant problem, because it’s very expensive and typically those roads are old logging roads. Logging companies aren’t going to maintain them, and parks aren’t going to maintain them. What do you propose? You just want money towards that?

That is a fair description of the gap this page is about, and it came from him. It names no road, and we found nothing to show he took it further. Two days later, at the same committee, he spoke about the Columbia & Western Rail Trail, which runs through his riding:²⁰

Several portions of it have slid away without maintenance, and there are tunnels and trestles that need maintenance that are not cheap. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain. The impact is huge, because we get people coming through there.

On 5 August 2026 he toured the trail with the Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, local government representatives and ministry staff. In his caucus release he said the tour was a chance to “learn the challenges and explore solutions to maintaining the much loved trail.”³⁹ That is access work, on a trail many of his constituents use, and we found no solution announced since. He has also told the House that he spends all the time he can outdoors, swimming and camping at Champion Lakes in summer and skiing there in winter.⁴⁰ His Legislature record shows real attention to the riding’s mills, its smelter, its colleges and its hospital. He has not been asked about Rady Creek or the roads in the ledger in any published interview we found, and a candidate who has not been asked has not refused.

None of that reaches the roads in his own riding. Rural development, in a riding of mills and backcountry, includes the forest service roads. On the thirty-three in his own riding, the record we could find across two years in office, and a full parliament of debate, is empty.

11 Everyone on the ballot in Kootenay-Monashee

Four people are on the ballot for 24 October: Stephen Hill for OneBC, Connie Larochelle for the BC Green Party, Warren Mirko for the Conservative Party and Steve Morissette for the BC NDP.⁴¹

Kootenay-Monashee, on backcountry road access

Question	Steve MorissetteIncumbent	Stephen Hill	Connie Larochelle	Warren Mirko
Public office held	MLA since 2024 and Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development; before that, mayor of Fruitvale	None found; ran federally in 2011	None found; retired provincial public servant	None provincially; acclaimed to Warfield council
On the floor of the Legislature	72 speaking turns; not one of them names a road in his own riding	No seat to raise it from	No seat to raise it from	No seat to raise it from
Lobbied on road deactivation	Yes, 6 July 2026, as a sitting member	Not a member	Not a member	Not a member
On Rady Creek and the Incomappleux	No public statement found	No public statement found	No public statement found	A stop-work demand, a provincial letter published, and both petitions backed
Does the 2026 campaign name access?	No: jobs, health care and costs	No: debt, rehabilitation and resources to market	No: housing, health care and farmland	Yes: “Everyone relies on access to public land”

Candidates are listed with the incumbent first, then in ballot order. Morissette’s portrait is the Legislative Assembly’s; the others come from each party’s own pages, except Stephen Hill’s, which is from My Kootenay Now. Party logos are from each party’s website.⁴²

Hill and Larochelle have never held a seat to raise anything from, and a candidate who has not been asked about these roads has not refused to answer. Mirko has made road access the centre of his campaign, and his record has an editorial of its own. Morissette is the only one of the four who has held the seat, the title and the lobbying contact, and so he is the only one with a record on it to be judged.

12 Ask what happens to a road when forestry leaves it

The question is the same in every riding. When industry no longer needs a resource road but the public still uses it, who decides whether it stays, and how? A candidate who says “I support rural communities” has committed to nothing. A candidate who answers that question can be held to the answer.

The letter is already written. It goes to the candidates of the party you choose, it sends from your own address, and nothing is stored on this site.