Asked who keeps the roads into B.C.’s parks open, Tamara Davidson pointed at Ravi Parmar. Thirteen months later she signed the strategy that calls those roads essential. Then said nothing as Ravi tore them out.

01 Two ministers, two days, and the road into Rady Creek

Two people in this government already answer for the Trout Lake–Rady Creek forest service road. Ravi Parmar’s Ministry of Forests has put its deactivation out to contract. Brittny Anderson is Minister of State for Local Governments and Rural Communities — a post that sits in the Office of the Premier rather than under a line ministry — and no public statement by her on this road has surfaced. This piece is about the six who are left, and about the Premier who tells all of them what their job is.

It begins eighteen months ago, in an estimates debate on Tamara Davidson’s own ministry budget, with a question nobody has answered since.

8 April 2025. The Ministry of Environment and Parks estimates had spent the afternoon on liquefied natural gas proponents and on a bridge into Cathedral Park that a fire destroyed in 2023, and Donegal Wilson, the member for Boundary-Similkameen, had just got the minister to confirm that the Province would pay for its replacement. Then she changed the subject to the roads, and she did not put it in general terms. She put the terms of the deal on the record: recreation clubs being asked to become the road maintenance agreement holder, to put down a $10,000 deposit, to invest $50,000 in a bridge in partnership with the Province, and then to carry the liability of that road long term — on agreements that take five to seven years to put in place.⁸

“I do want to switch again and talk about roads. I know that road access to our B.C. parks, recreation sites and trails continues to be a challenge in this province… We make investments in the infrastructure and the trails, yet we’re continuing to lose the roads to them, and they need to be included in the budgets, going forward. Is there going to be funding in the budget for access trails to parks, rec sites and trails?”

The minister’s answer carried no budget line. It carried the name of the Ministry of Forests.

“The Ministry of Forests is the one that has the responsibility for the roads. Most of the time, the roads have been constructed for a specific purpose, which is for forestry. We do work closely with the Ministry of Forests to balance and to make recommendations to prioritize and identify roads that are leading into rec sites and trails…”

Wilson pressed, and named the places: the Kakwa Park access, limited for years; the McBride bridge; the road into Allan Creek at Valemount. “My inbox is full of businesses in McBride that are struggling from losing access to McBride.” If the Province intended to hand these roads to volunteers, would it extend its own insurance to them, or were the clubs to find liability cover for road maintenance themselves? Five minutes later, at 4:35 p.m., the minister answered again, and closed the door with an invitation.⁸

“To answer the question, the Ministry of Forests has the statutory responsibility for the road maintenance, and they also include the securities and the financial arrangements. All of those are under the purview of the Ministry of Forests, and I would welcome the members to canvass the Minister of Forests.”

That was the end of it. Trevor Halford thanked his colleague for canvassing the issue and took the committee back to liquefied natural gas. The roads had held the Ministry of Environment and Parks’ estimates for five minutes.⁸

The next day, Wilson did exactly as she had been invited to do.

“Staying on the same theme around recreation and road access, while we do appreciate that Rec Sites and Trails is no longer within your ministry, just about every access to a park or recreation site in the province does involve a forestry road to get there. What specific budget has the province allocated in this fiscal year for the maintenance and repair of forestry roads to provide access to recreation sites, trails and B.C. parks?”

“In our capital budget, the integrated resource operations division has $20.3 million set aside and B.C. Timber Sales has $47.83 million set aside for roads. Again, I just want to reiterate that these are dollars not for rec sites or for recreation.”

Wilson then said out loud what the previous twenty-four hours had been: “I asked this of the Ministry of Environment yesterday and was brought here to the Ministry of Forests. I was told this bridge is yours.” The bridge was above McBride, the Ministry of Forests’ own engineers had removed it on safety grounds, and the McBride Big Country Snowmobile Association needed it back. Parmar replied that he was “not going to send the member back to the Ministry of Environment and Parks” — and then explained that the trails she meant “live within the Ministry of Environment and Parks” and that “Rec Sites and Trails doesn’t exist in the Ministry of Forests.”⁹

The money for a McBride bridge arrived thirteen months later, and out of neither of those two budgets. On 21 May 2026 the Province gave the McBride Big Country Snowmobile Association almost $400,000 for a new bridge re-establishing access to the Renshaw snowmobile area — from the Rural Economic Diversification Infrastructure Plan, which belongs to a third ministry again, Jobs and Economic Growth. It was announced in the news release that launched the Outdoor Recreation Strategy.¹⁷

02 Thirteen months later she signed a strategy saying the same thing

On 21 May 2026 the Province published Look West: B.C.’s Outdoor Recreation Strategy — 36 pages, seventeen numbered targets, and a name borrowed from the Premier’s Stronger BC, Look West economic strategy. The Minister’s Message at page 4 is signed Honourable Tamara Davidson, Minister of Environment and Parks.¹

One of the seventeen targets is about the roads. Target 8, at page 21, is “a modernized framework for high-value recreation access and resource roads.” Read its reasoning next to the question Wilson had asked thirteen months earlier. The strategy asks the same question, and this time a minister has signed the page the question is printed on.

Recreation access in B.C. depends heavily on resource roads, which provide the primary routes into much of the province’s backcountry. These roads were built and maintained largely to support forestry and other resource industries, but they now serve a much broader public role, providing access to rural communities and high-value recreation sites across Crown land. As shifts in the forest sector accelerate and the industrial base that has historically funded road maintenance continues to shrink, new solutions need to be explored.

The Province had been told this in its own Legislature. Its answer, more than a year on, was that new solutions need to be explored.

Thirteen pages earlier, the strategy is blunter about why nothing moves. Target 1 puts the question, and then answers itself.¹

Outdoor recreation spans multiple agencies, but no single office coordinates these shared priorities. With responsibilities spread across multiple ministries and no unified governance structure, fragmentation affects recreation access, investment and prevents alignment with broader objectives and shared interests.

Its remedy, in the same box, is to “explore the establishment of a coordinating Office of Outdoor Recreation.” The thing already in place is listed as “a recently formed cross-ministry Outdoor Recreation Committee” — a body the strategy neither names, staffs nor dates.

Fifteen of the seventeen targets carry three boxes: what’s next, what’s in place, and why this matters. Target 8 has only two. Nothing is in place, and Target 8 names no lead ministry, no budget line and no delivery date.¹

One more absence runs through the whole document. The strategy names the Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport, and it names Davidson’s own Ministry of Environment and Parks. It never once names the Ministry of Forests. Where it says “forest” it means the forest industry, the forest sector, or a private landowner — Mosaic Forest Management, the Cumberland Community Forest. The ministry that holds all 60,000 kilometres of forest service road, the ministry Davidson herself had pointed to in Hansard thirteen months earlier, does not appear in the strategy written to coordinate them.¹

Nor does it appear in the launch. The news release of that morning, datelined Kamloops, carries quotes from Davidson, from the then Minister of Jobs and Economic Growth, Ravi Kahlon, who put outdoor recreation at $4.8 billion a year and more than 1,400 businesses, and from the Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development, Steve Morissette. Not one of them mentions a road.¹⁷

03 Ninety days later, Recreation Sites and Trails BC refused the Rady Creek road

The Trout Lake Recreational Club was not asking the Province for money. It was asking to be allowed to keep the road. It applied to Recreation Sites and Trails BC for a formal partnership agreement over the Trout Lake–Rady Creek corridor, offering to assume the liability itself and to stand up a sustainable insurance structure for the corridor.¹³

Recreation Sites and Trails BC is an agency of Tamara Davidson’s Ministry of Environment and Parks, and three of the Province’s own documents say so. The strategy’s Target 7 records that in 2023 BC Parks and Recreation Sites and Trails BC “were aligned under the same ministry.” Davidson’s service plan opens by saying her ministry “administers the province’s parks and protected areas, and recreation sites and trails.” And her ministry’s own news release of 26 May 2026 describes the Off-Road Vehicle Trail Fund as “a user-funded program administered by Recreation Sites and Trails BC.”¹²¹¹

The refusal is the strategy’s own diagnosis arriving as a decision. Target 8 of Look West said the framework governing recreation access and resource roads had to be modernised. Ninety days later Recreation Sites and Trails BC — the agency that would have used that framework — turned down the Trout Lake–Rady Creek forest service road, because no such framework exists. Tamara Davidson signed the page Target 8 is printed on, and her own agency then refused a road for want of the very thing that page said was missing.

Read the alternative twice. The club may take the corridor on after the road has been destroyed and re-sloped, not instead of. The pathway guarantees the loss it is offered as a remedy for.¹⁴

That the application went to Environment and Parks rather than to Forests is not an accident of filing. It is the split Davidson described in Hansard: the trail is hers, the Rady Creek road is Ravi Parmar’s, and what the Trout Lake Recreational Club applied for is a trail laid along that road.

04 What the Premier actually asked her to do

A mandate letter is the Premier’s written instruction to a minister: the list that minister will be held to. Every ministry reprints its own as an appendix to its service plan, so what follows is the document rather than a summary of it.

Tamara Davidson’s is dated 16 January 2025 — twelve weeks before the Hansard exchange above — and gives her five priorities.²

Three of the five are about speeding up industrial permitting or cutting her ministry’s costs. One exempts whole classes of project from environmental assessment. Her single instruction on access is about parks, and it is qualified by price — increase access for families to British Columbia’s parks in a cost-efficient manner. A forest service road is not a park.

Now put the fourth priority beside the target she signed sixteen months later. One of the two has a clock on it.

The letter predates the strategy, so it could not have named Target 8. That is the point rather than the excuse. In the twenty months since it was written, nothing has been issued that puts Target 8 into anybody’s job, and the strategy that created the target named nobody to carry it.

Her ministry’s own plan is where the gap is sharpest. Its Goal 2 is “sound management of protected areas system, recreation site and trail networks” — the goal that covers everything at the end of the road. It is the only one of the ministry’s three goals with no performance measure at all. The plan says so plainly: “the ministry is finalizing a new performance measure this year for Goal 2… the first survey with this updated methodology is expected to be conducted in mid-2026.” There is no baseline and no target.²

And the division that runs it is being cut. The Conservation and Recreation Division falls from $98.936 million to $93.018 million, a reduction of $5.918 million, and is then held flat for three years.²

“Outdoor recreation is increasingly recognized as essential to our well-being, community connection and regional economic development.”

That release is the only place in her ministry’s 2026 output where a forest service road appears. It awards $25,000 to the Valemount and Area Recreation Development Association “to contribute to a much larger bridge repair, led by the Ministry of Forests, in the Clemina Creek area,” and says the money “helps keep a forest service road connection open to a managed trail system.” The same release records what the fund is: “a user-funded program… supported by ICBC off-road vehicle registration fees,” administered by Recreation Sites and Trails BC.¹¹

So the whole of this ministry’s money on a forest service road connection in 2026 was riders’ own registration fees, topping up a bridge repair Ravi Parmar’s Ministry of Forests was already leading. Set against the Conservation and Recreation Division’s $93 million, the entire ORV Trail Fund — $500,000 across 24 projects — is about half of one per cent, and it is not the ministry’s money.²¹¹

05 The rest of the table, and what each one was given

Four more ministers hold a piece of this road, and the Premier writes all of their instructions. Randene Neill holds the Crown land it crosses and the Land Act licence the Ministry of Forests offers as a consolation. Anne Kang markets the backcountry those roads lead into. Brenda Bailey runs the fund that pays for trails. Christine Boyle is the minister to whom the regional districts at either end of the road answer. What follows is not what any of them failed to say. It is what each of them was told to do, in the Premier’s own words, taken from the mandate letters their ministries reprint in their own service plans.

Nothing reaches the road from the Forests side either. Ravi Parmar’s eight mandate priorities are the sector crisis, a review of BC Timber Sales, forest landscape planning tables, value-added products, permits for industry, “a sustainable land base to enable harvest of 45,000,000 cubic meters per year,” community forests and softwood lumber. The minister who told the Legislature his road budget is “not for rec sites or for recreation” was himself given no instruction about a road.⁷

06 The parliamentary secretary for rural development was never given a job

There is a seventh person, and his case is the clearest of all, because the documents are short enough to read in full.

Steve Morissette is the Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development and the MLA for Kootenay-Monashee — the Kootenays, the same corner of the province this road is in. On 21 May 2026 the Province gave him a quote in the news release that launched the Outdoor Recreation Strategy, alongside Tamara Davidson and the then Minister of Jobs and Economic Growth, Ravi Kahlon. It begins exactly where you would hope, and then goes somewhere else.¹⁷

“Outdoor recreation is such a draw for people, both here in the Kootenays and in rural communities across the province. The College of the Rockies, and especially the KORE program, are helping lead innovation in sustainability and skills when it comes to creating, repairing and upcycling outdoor gear.”

On the day the Province published a strategy saying the road network that carries the public into the backcountry is collapsing, the contribution of the Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Development was about repairing gear.

That is less his failing than the job’s. He has never been given one. His letter from the Premier is dated 18 November 2024, runs to 593 words, and contains no priorities at all — not a rural priority, not any priority. It is not even a mandate letter: on the Province’s own cabinet page every minister’s link reads “mandate letter” and his reads “Premier’s appointment letter.”¹⁸

The direction was deferred to a letter that never came. Rural development sits in the Ministry of Finance, and the only instruction Morissette has ever been given is one clause in a letter written to somebody else — Ravi Kahlon’s mandate letter as Minister of Jobs and Economic Growth, dated 25 November 2025. Set that clause against the other parliamentary secretary assigned four lines further down the same page.⁵

The asymmetry is not an accident of drafting, because the office itself carries nothing. The Constitution Act gives parliamentary secretaries one section, and this is the whole of it.¹⁹

12  The Lieutenant Governor in Council may appoint members of the Legislative Assembly to be parliamentary secretaries to members of the Executive Council.

One sentence. It grants a power of appointment to the Lieutenant Governor in Council and no power whatever to the person appointed — no duties, no functions, no budget, no delegated authority. The sections on either side of it do confer real powers: section 13 lets government establish and disestablish ministries and transfer duties between them. A parliamentary secretary sits outside all of that.¹⁹

07 What six ministers signed up to deliver, and the duty none of them took

A service plan is a ministry’s own statement, signed by its minister under the Budget Transparency and Accountability Act, of what it will deliver and how it will be measured. The signature is not a formality. Each plan opens with the minister’s own sentence — “I am accountable for the basis on which the plan has been prepared” — and each one then names goals, objectives and numbered targets for the three years to 2028/29. Six plans cover every ministry this road touches. What follows is what each minister put his or her name to, in the plan’s own words, beside the number that plan will be judged against.

All six plans were read in full from bcbudget.gov.bc.ca, extracted with pdftotext; 22,991 words between them. The Forests plan comes out at 3,728 words and the Tourism plan at 3,603, which are the figures an earlier independent read of those two produced, so the text is whole rather than silently truncated.

The Environment and Parks plan does not name the Outdoor Recreation Strategy anywhere, which the dates explain: the plan was signed on 2 February 2026 and the strategy was published on 21 May. What the dates do not explain is the three years the plan runs. It sets targets through 2028/29, and the road is in none of them.²

08 A full parliament, and the two subjects that disappeared from it

The Legislative Assembly keeps an index of what its members actually raise. It is compiled from the transcript, session by session, and it is a fair record of what a parliament spent its time on.¹⁰

Indexed Hansard entries, 43rd Parliament	Entries
Brenda Bailey 264 in the 2025 session, 116 in 2026	380
Christine Boyle 48 in the 2025 session, 223 in 2026	271
David Eby 67 in the 2025 session, 56 in 2026	123
Steve Morissette 12 in the 2025 session, 47 in 2026	59
All four, both sessions	833
Of those, on recreation access, resource roads, forest service roads, backcountry or Crown land the only near-hit is a reference to the 2026 B.C. Winter Games in the city of Trail	0

Read from the official Members and Subject indexes for both sessions of the 43rd Parliament, reached through the Legislative Assembly’s own document service. The full-text search at search.leg.bc.ca cannot be used — it fails on a certificate name mismatch — so the indexes are the route. They are compiled by the Assembly itself.

Two subject headings vanished between the two sessions. The 2025 index carries a heading for Back-country recreation and a heading for Snowmobiles. The 2026 index carries neither. A subject index is built from what members raise, so a heading that disappears means the subject stopped being raised.¹⁰

Two ministers did speak to the subject, and what each of them said is worth having in full.

On 8 May 2025, in oral questions, under the agenda heading Back-Country Land Use in Columbia Valley and Kootenays, Scott McInnis — the member for Columbia River-Revelstoke, the riding this road is actually in — asked the Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship to explain to “prospectors, hunters and everyday back-country users why their access is being cut off at an alarming rate.”¹⁰

“Back-country use is not being turned off at an alarming rate — in fact, not at all.”

“Our job as government is to get people to fall in love with nature… The very last thing we’re going to do is turn the back country off from folks who love to use it.”

Fifteen months later the Province put a contract out to destroy a road into the backcountry of the riding the question came from.

On 13 April 2026, in her own estimates, Anne Kang was asked the most direct question any minister has been asked about this. Jeremy Valeriote put the numbers on the table — mountain biking worth $26 million a year to Squamish, visiting climbers another $21 million, and the trails they come for built and maintained by volunteer non-profits — and asked whether her ministry would fund the people doing the work it advertises.¹⁰

“Our ministry does work very closely with the Ministry of Environment and Parks. Within that ministry, there is a branch called the recreation sites and trails branch, which works very closely with communities on such issues the member across has described… So we will continue to work with my colleague in Environment and Parks. With that, I move that the committee rise, report progress and ask leave to sit again.”

That is the answer in full. The question was whether she would fund them; the answer named another minister’s branch and moved adjournment. It is also her only substantive statement on trails or recreation access in the whole parliament. The only oral question the Minister of Tourism answered in the entire 2026 session was about who received FIFA World Cup tickets.¹⁰

Each of them answered inside their own half of the problem. Randene Neill, asked about back-country access being cut off, answered about getting people to fall in love with nature. Ravi Parmar, asked about recreation access, answered with a capital budget that is “not for rec sites or for recreation.” Anne Kang, asked to fund the volunteers, named a branch inside Tamara Davidson’s ministry.¹⁰ Getting both halves of the answer took Donegal Wilson two estimates debates on two consecutive days, and the two halves still do not meet.⁸⁹

And this road is in Hansard exactly once. Not from a minister, and not in the index. On 12 March 2026, in the Ministry of Forests estimates, about 3:40 in the afternoon, Donegal Wilson asked why a road that could carry a “use at your own risk” sign has to be destroyed instead, and then named one.¹⁰

“The one that does come to mind for me is Rady Creek out of Trout Lake. I think that is one where we’re looking at a complete re-slope, replant. The hazard, I believe, is some unstable slope. It is a mining road that has been there 120 years. Recreation has been using it for all of that time… It is an important recreation infrastructure for the community of Trout Lake.”

Ravi Parmar’s answer, a moment earlier, was the sentence the whole of this turns on: “Liability continues to exist as long as that road is activated.”¹⁰ Section 3.1 of the Occupiers Liability Act has said otherwise since 25 June 2012, when it deemed every user of a resource road to have assumed all the risks.²¹

Outside that one exchange, the Province has never said the words in public. A search of the government news index for “Rady Creek” returns nothing, against working controls — “Incomappleux” returns four and “Trout Lake” twenty-four.²³ Six weeks before the Parliament rose, Scott McInnis tabled a petition from 1,500 people opposed to deactivating the neighbouring Incomappleux forest service road.¹⁰

09 A legislature committee already recommended protecting these roads — in her ministry’s own chapter of the Budget 2027 report

The Legislature has already written the recommendation. On 11 August 2026 the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services transmitted its report on the Budget 2027 consultation — 122 pages, and 81 recommendations drawn from what the public and the recreation sector put to the Committee. Two of the 81 are about exactly this, and the Committee printed them in the Environment and Parks chapter, at page 33, and again in the summary at page 107. They are numbered 16 and 17.¹⁶

16. Review and strengthen British Columbia’s parks and recreation funding model to provide predictable, dedicated funding that supports sector organizations and infrastructure, aligned with tourism priorities.

17. Provide dedicated funding to assess and protect high-value recreation access roads prior to deactivation where recreation, tourism, emergency access, or community value remains.

Rady Creek is not named anywhere in that report. Recommendation 17 is general policy written from sector submissions, and it is stronger for that: the Committee was describing a pattern, and this road is one instance of the pattern.¹⁶ The dates are what give the recommendation its force.

10 Two documents from one government that cannot both be true

Put the two sides of the same government in one place. On the left, what Tamara Davidson signed on 21 May 2026 and what her own agency decided ninety days later. On the right, what Ravi Parmar’s ministry has put in writing about this kind of road: a district FAQ in April 2025, Charlene Strelaeff’s letter of 15 September 2026, and a statement to CBC a week after that letter.

Both columns are the Province. One says recreation access is essential infrastructure that depends on resource roads. The other says resource roads are not for public access and this one is coming out. Neither Davidson nor Parmar has been made to answer for the other, because no document requires either of them to.

11 What a government that meant the strategy would do

None of this needs a new idea. The Province has already written the diagnosis, the remedy and the funding recommendation. What has never been written is the line that makes one person answer for it.

The writ was issued on 22 September 2026 and the vote is on 24 October. Every minister on this page is in caretaker, and two of them — Brenda Bailey and Ravi Kahlon — are leaving politics.²⁰ So the ask is not about a personnel decision. It is about the first set of mandate letters the next Premier signs, whoever that turns out to be, because that is the document in which this either becomes somebody’s job or stays nobody’s.

Eighteen months ago Donegal Wilson asked Tamara Davidson whether there would be money in the budget for the roads into the parks, the recreation sites and the trails. Davidson answered that the roads are the Ministry of Forests’ responsibility. The next day Ravi Parmar gave the figures, $20.3  million and $47.83 million, and said they are “not for rec sites or for recreation.” Nothing has been written down since that would make either answer different today.

12 Ask them who owns the roads into the backcountry