Province defers logging on 2,100 hectares in the Nass Valley
The deferral covers three cutblocks approved in 2019, and lands the question of long-term protection with a joint planning table that has not met since March.
The province quietly deferred logging Tuesday on 2,100 hectares of old growth in the Nass Valley, pausing three cutblocks that were approved in 2019 and have sat at the centre of the region's longest-running forestry argument since.
The deferral is two years, renewable once. The ministry's letter — released to licence holders Monday and to everyone else by way of a licence holder — describes it as "an interim measure while long-term planning proceeds." The long-term planning in question belongs to a joint table of provincial staff and area nations that, by its own published schedule, has not met since March.
The stands at issue are the kind the deferral system was invented for: western redcedar in the valley bottoms, some of it modelled at over five hundred years, on terrain gentle enough to log profitably — which is precisely why it is still standing nowhere else. The licensee holds approved permits and has twice postponed road-building on its own initiative, a patience the company's regional forester described last year as "not indefinite."
What happens next depends on a meeting nobody has scheduled. The deferral buys the table two years; the table has so far used zero of the twenty-nine months it has already had. "A deferral is not a decision," said one negotiator familiar with the file, who asked not to be named because the file is the reason they have a job. "It is a decision not to decide, with a calendar attached."
