What Can The Public Actually See? Port Renfrew Forestry, Old Forest, Fish, Fire, And Missing Records

Date prepared: 2026-06-02

Plain-Language Executive Summary

Official government data already shows a large recorded logging footprint around Port Renfrew, San Juan, Gordon, Fairy, Walbran, and Harris. It shows where old forest still stands, where roads cross water, and where fish-passage records exist. That is enough to ask serious questions.

What the public still cannot see is the record behind each decision: the site plan, the stream and riparian rules, the road and culvert records, the fuel hazard work, the sale economics, and the reason a given old stand was kept or cut. Without those records, the public cannot tell whether harvest near water, fish, recreation, and old forest creates net public value.

This report does not claim anyone broke the law, and it does not claim logging caused any specific fish decline or fire. It makes one point: the public data shows enough to ask, but not enough to judge. That gap is the accountability problem.

Why This Matters

Before old-growth or high-risk forest is logged near water, fish, recreation, and remaining high-age forest, the public is being asked to accept a decision it cannot check. Timber revenue is visible. The costs and liabilities the public may inherit are not: roads, culverts, sediment, fish habitat, fuel treatment, wildfire exposure, recreation loss, carbon, restoration, monitoring, and enforcement.

Full-cost accounting means showing the revenue beside those costs before approval or sale. Right now the public can see the harvest but not the ledger. That is why the missing records matter, and why they are the right thing to ask for first.

The Public Can See / The Public Cannot See

The public can see:

• Recorded harvest history as consolidated cutblock polygons, with year and area.
• VRI forest-age screening, including where young/regrowth and 250+ high-age stands are.
• Official old-growth priority mapping (TAP old forests, big trees, ancient forest, priority deferrals) and legal OGMAs.
• Official named watershed boundaries.
• Forest road tenure lines and stream lines, enough for GIS crossing estimates.
• PSCIS fish-passage assessment points and fish-obstacle records in several watersheds.
• BCTS sales schedules, including rows labelled Old Growth.

The public cannot see:

• The site plan for a specific block such as SJsj5P8.
• Official stream classification and riparian prescriptions for a block.
• Road and culvert maintenance or deactivation records.
• Fuel hazard assessments and slash abatement records for local blocks.
• Sale economics and appraisal assumptions behind a sale.
• The retention rationale for keeping or cutting a given old/high-age stand.
• Sale package assumptions and purchaser/sale result for reviewed old-growth-labelled rows.
• Property-specific inspection and complaint records on private managed forest land.
• Official watershed-scale cumulative-effects accounting.

(Source: data/public-data-audit/can-public-tell.csv and public-data-scorecard.csv.)

Strongest Findings So Far

1. Official data alone shows about 32,800 ha of recorded consolidated-cutblock area across the broad study area (2,312 cutblock polygons). The full footprint may be larger because the layer can miss private-land and older harvest.
2. Recorded harvest is recent and ongoing. The 2010s are the largest recorded decade with about 10,905 ha; the 2020s already show about 5,958 ha while the decade is incomplete.
3. Old forest and harvest sit close together. In San Juan River alone, screening shows about 5,697.4 ha of TAP old forest and 3,320.0 ha of legal OGMA, beside about 11,421.8 ha of recorded cutblock overlap.
4. Road-stream crossing pressure is high. GIS estimates give about 622 road-stream intersections in San Juan River and 459 in Gordon River. These are estimates, not field-confirmed culvert counts.
5. The MOF bridges/major-culverts public layer returned 0 features in the study area. That is a public-data visibility gap, not evidence that no culverts exist. It strengthens the question of where the local crossing records are held.
6. BCTS old-growth-labelled sales are visible as schedule rows (about 420.8 ha and 317,335 m3 in 9 reviewed Strait of Georgia rows), but the rationale, full-cost accounting, and site-level risk records behind them are not.
7. Recorded harvest overlaps the province's own old-growth priority-deferral areas by about 138 ha. About 30 ha of that was harvested after the Old Growth Technical Advisory Panel recommended those areas for deferral on November 2, 2021, across nine RESULTS openings, several in areas the province flagged as ancient old growth older than 400 years (concentrated around Walbran Creek, Caycuse River, and the Loss landscape unit). Deferral is a recommendation, not a law. Public RESULTS data shows most of these openings are held by First Nations tenure-holders; this is a question about the province's deferral process and records, not about First Nations choices, since the province recommended deferral, required First Nations consensus, and has not funded the alternative. The missing piece is any public record of why each block was approved. This is the local, named detail behind a March 2026 letter to the Premier from all five members of the province's own Technical Advisory Panel, which warned that deferral areas are being logged and that BC Timber Sales is becoming the primary harvester in deferral zones. (Source: data/public-data-audit/harvest-in-deferral-blocks.csv; Victoria News, 2026-03-20.)

What This Does Not Prove

• It does not prove anyone broke the law. No illegality is claimed.
• It does not prove logging caused salmon decline. Escapement is shaped by ocean survival, fishing, climate, hatcheries, survey effort, and other land uses.
• It does not prove logging caused any specific wildfire or made a specific block unsafe.
• It does not prove any specific old-growth polygon was logged.
• The road and stream counts are GIS intersections, not field-confirmed culvert or bridge counts.
• The recorded harvest footprint is a floor, not a ceiling. The real footprint may be larger.

The honest claim is narrower and still strong: the public can see enough to ask for records, and cannot see enough to judge net public value.

Where This Could Be Wrong

This package is built from official data and screening analysis. A forester or ecologist may catch things a desk review cannot, so the weak points are worth stating plainly:

• Deferral recommendation is not a legal deferral. Areas in the Technical Advisory Panel layer were recommended for deferral; many were never formally deferred, and formal deferral required First Nations agreement. Harvest in those areas after November 2021 is harvest after a recommendation, not a breach.
• Some of the named deferral-overlap blocks may have had First Nations agreement, or been approved before November 2021, in ways the public layers do not show.
• Our nine-watershed area is not identical to ESSA's study area, which is the portion of the Arrowsmith-South Island TSA within 35 km of Port Renfrew. The ESSA dollar figures describe that study area, not our exact area.
• The carbon, volume, and stumpage figures are screening estimates with wide ranges. They show order of magnitude, not measured local accounts. The 40-65% carbon release fraction is a published figure for old-growth conversion (Harmon et al. 1990, Science), applied here to local hectares; the residual uncertainty is in the per-stand values, not the fraction.
• Private managed forest land runs under a different regime than Crown land and BCTS, so the disclosure argument is strongest for public timber.
• We can confirm the data is accurate. We cannot confirm from a desk that our interpretation matches how forestry works on the ground. That is why expert review should come before public use.

Full method and caveats: notes/port-renfrew-public-data-audit-methods.md.

What Public Data Shows

The current historical-change package found:

• 2,312 consolidated cutblock polygons.
• 1,074 RESULTS opening records.
• 13,636 VRI forest-vegetation polygons.
• No capped tiles in the consolidated cutblock, RESULTS, or VRI pulls after tiled reruns.
• About 32,800 ha of recorded consolidated-cutblock area in the broad Port Renfrew / San Juan / Gordon / Fairy / Walbran / Harris AOI.

The largest recorded harvest decade in the current pull is the 2010s, with 830 cutblock polygons and about 10,905 ha. The 2020s already show 527 polygons and about 5,958 ha, even though the decade is incomplete.

This is not all logging. Consolidated Cutblocks can miss private land, older harvest, recent activity, or records held elsewhere. The careful claim is stronger anyway: official data alone shows a major recorded harvest footprint, and the full footprint may be larger.

Where The Public Can See Forest-Age Signals

VRI screening shows large young/regrowth areas in several working zones:

These are screening classes based on VRI PROJ_AGE_1, not legal old-growth determinations. They use the earlier rectangular working-zone boxes. The Official Watershed Results section below redoes this on Freshwater Atlas watershed polygons, so its per-area numbers differ from and supersede this table; for example, San Juan young/regrowth is about 10,475 ha by working zone and about 13,261 ha by official watershed because the boundaries are drawn differently.

Roads, Water, And Fish

The current road/water/fish signal is strong enough for targeted records questions, not strong enough for causal claims.

These counts use the uncapped tiled road and stream layers. They are still GIS intersections, not field-confirmed culvert counts. They justify specific records requests: road crossings, culverts, sediment control, bridge records, maintenance records, deactivation records, and fish-passage planning records.

Fire And Fuel

Public guidance confirms fuel hazard assessment and abatement are real forestry obligations. Forest Practices Board findings also show this has been a systemic weak point in B.C. forestry practice.

The public should be able to see block-level fuel hazard assessments, slash-treatment records, abatement records, burn/chip records, and inspection records for harvest near recreation corridors, old forest, water, and communities.

Right now, those local records are not visible in the public package.

BCTS Old-Growth Sales

The public BCTS schedule scan found:

• 9 reviewed Strait of Georgia rows marked Old Growth.
• About 420.8 ha and 317,335 m3 in those reviewed rows.
• 13 automated old-growth text contexts across scanned BCTS business-area schedules, pending manual row review.

The schedule label is public. The decision rationale is not. The public schedule does not show full-cost accounting, site-level risk records, old-growth retention rationale, fuel treatment records, sale package assumptions, or the public-value test used before offering the timber.

The Economic Stakes

The records gap is also an economics gap. A 2021 economic valuation by ESSA Technologies found that protecting the old growth in its Port Renfrew study area produced about $97 million in net public benefit over 100 years, against about $56.4 million under business as usual, an improvement of about $40 million once carbon, recreation, and tourism were counted. That study deliberately left out wildfire suppression, slash and fuel hazard, road and culvert liabilities, drinking water, and most fish values, so the gap it found is conservative.

Two screening estimates put scale on what is missing from the public ledger. The carbon released from the old growth cut since 2010 is worth roughly $30 to $274 million at the federal carbon price, while the public's direct stumpage take from that same timber was on the order of $3 to $6 million. Separately, B.C. spent about $1.1 billion on wildfire management in 2023, a public cost that never appears beside a timber sale. None of these are precise local accounts. They show that when public costs are counted, the public case for protecting old growth is strong, and that the full ledger is exactly what the public cannot see before a block is approved or sold. Detail and sources are in full-cost-accounting-model.md and forest-succession-and-recovery.md.

Who Profits, And What The Government Has Known

The records gap sits on top of a structural conflict, stated as a question rather than an accusation. The public owns the timber but captures a small cash share (average stumpage about $6.55/m3), while BC Timber Sales, a government agency, earns revenue from selling Crown old growth that it also regulates and was advised by its own panel to defer; the largest private timberlands are owned by public-sector pension funds. A long-running U.S. trade finding argues B.C. undercharges for its Crown timber, which B.C. disputes.

And the government has known for a long time. Its own 2020 Old Growth Strategic Review made 14 recommendations it promised to enact within three years, and independent reviews report none are fully implemented five years on. In March 2026 its own expert panel told the Premier that deferral areas are being logged. This is not a claim of corruption; it is a documented conflict of interest and accountability failure, and a further reason the full ledger and the site records should be open. Detail is in forestry-economics-and-corporate-accountability.md and what-the-government-has-known.md.

For why this reaches ordinary residents, through wildfire risk and water security, see why-this-matters-to-you.md.

Private Managed Forest Gap

Managed Forest Council reporting shows private managed forest land is a major timber source, especially on the coast. The report also gives program-level inspection and compliance numbers.

Mapping the province's own Generalized Forest Cover Ownership layer (F_OWN) shows about 117,500 hectares of private forest land in the study area, a large share of the land base around Port Renfrew, much of it held through Mosaic (TimberWest and Island Timberlands). On that private land the public Crown harvest record (RESULTS) does not apply, so logging there is largely invisible in the public data. The interactive map shows these areas as "Private land (logging data goes dark)."

That does not answer the local question. It does not show Mosaic/TimberWest property-specific inspections, complaints, road records, watershed impacts, or local harvest decisions around Port Renfrew.

This is a transparency gap.

The Public-Data Scorecard

The audit package now includes:

• data/public-data-audit/source-register.csv (provenance for the GIS audit layers)
• data/source-register-analysis.csv (provenance for the economic, carbon, fire, species, and financial claims)
• notes/canonical-figures.md (one source of truth for every load-bearing number)
• data/public-data-audit/public-data-scorecard.csv
• data/public-data-audit/can-public-tell.csv
• data/public-data-audit/harvest-in-deferral-blocks.csv (named blocks harvested inside priority-deferral areas)
• data/public-data-audit/records-gap-register.csv (every recent high-risk block, with flags and missing records) and records-gap-foi-pack.md (a ready-to-file FOI request per Tier 1 block)
• data/public-data-audit/old-growth-overlap-by-watershed.csv
• data/public-data-audit/watershed-harvest-stand-age-summary.csv
• data/public-data-audit/road-stream-crossing-density-official-watersheds.csv
• data/public-data-audit/bcts-sale-record-visibility.csv
• notes/port-renfrew-public-data-audit-methods.md
• maps/port-renfrew-public-data-audit-map.html

The scorecard separates what is known from what is missing. This matters because the next argument should not be "trust me, logging is bad." It should be:

The public cannot evaluate net public value unless these records are disclosed before approval or sale.

Public Layer Completion

The next public-data pass downloaded the missing audit layers with tiled queries. No downloaded layer in this pass was capped:

The zero bridge/major-culvert result should not be read as "no culverts exist." It means that public layer did not return records in this AOI. That strengthens the record-request question: where are the local culvert, bridge, inspection, and maintenance records held?

Official Watershed Results

The audit now uses Freshwater Atlas named watershed polygons instead of only the earlier working-zone boxes. The selected watersheds are Caycuse River, Fairy Creek, Gordon River, Harris Creek, Lens Creek, Renfrew Creek, San Juan River, Sombrio River, and Walbran Creek.

Selected old-growth/protection overlaps:

Selected harvest and stand-age signals:

Selected road/water signals:

These road-stream counts are GIS estimates, not field-confirmed culvert counts. They are strong enough to justify specific records requests for road crossings, sediment control, deactivation, inspection, and fish-passage planning.

Best Next Actions

The audit layers are now built. The next steps are about turning the gaps into disclosure, not gathering more screening data.

1. File narrow FOI requests from the per-block records-gap register. data/public-data-audit/records-gap-register.csv screens every recent cutblock (harvest 2015 or later) against old growth, deferrals, OGMAs, streams, recreation, and fish records, and records-gap-foi-pack.md contains a ready-to-file request for each of the 143 Tier 1 blocks (the ones overlapping old growth, a deferral, or an OGMA, or close to a fish or recreation record). The category-level FOI targets in can-public-tell.csv (rows CPT-001 through CPT-006: the SJsj5P8 site plan, riparian prescriptions, road/culvert records, and fuel hazard records) remain the cleanest first send.
2. Review BCTS sale results and BC Bid package availability for the reviewed old-growth-labelled TSL rows. The schedule label is public; the rationale and ledger are not. This is the CPT-008 gap.
3. Publish the map, scorecard, and one-page explainer together so a journalist, MLA staffer, or resident can see the same point in one read: public data shows enough to ask, not enough to judge.
4. Do a visual QA pass of the map around Port Renfrew, San Juan River Rec Site, Pacific Marine Road, Fairy Creek, Gordon River, and Walbran before wider sharing.
5. Treat each FOI response, fee estimate, delay, redaction, no-records answer, or disclosure as the next public accountability artifact. A refusal or a "no records" answer is itself a finding.

Core Ask

Before public old-growth or high-risk harvest proceeds near water, fish, recreation, and high-age forest, the Province should disclose full-cost accounting and site-level risk records.

That means timber revenue should be shown beside the costs and liabilities the public may inherit: roads, culverts, sediment, fish habitat, fuel treatment, wildfire exposure, recreation displacement, carbon, restoration, monitoring, and enforcement.