The Government of British Columbia is providing a $2 million grant to FPInnovations to support the development of regional economic hubs aimed at strengthening the competitiveness and resilience of the province’s forest sector.
Part of the Make More in B.C. initiative, the project is intended to encourage greater local wood processing, support employment in forest-dependent communities and generate more value from British Columbia’s fibre resources.
According to the provincial government, the economic hubs are designed to foster regional collaboration among manufacturers, contractors and Indigenous partners while helping improve fibre access and support new investment opportunities for wood products, including pulp and paper grades.
“On the ground in forest-dependent communities, we’ve heard it loud and clear: forestry needs predictable access to fibre, more local logs going to local mills, to create more jobs,” said Ravi Parmar, Minister of Forests for British Columbia.
The province said the initiative is also intended to reduce the sector’s exposure to tariffs, duties and global trade uncertainty while supporting more domestic value-added processing.
The funding will allow FPInnovations to apply its expertise in industrial infrastructure, fibre supply, techno-economics and transportation networks to identify regional development opportunities across British Columbia.
One early example of the collaborative model is already underway in the Merritt region, where a working group led by Gorman Group is exploring opportunities tied to higher-value wood products and the forest bioeconomy.
British Columbia said the initiative also aligns with its Look West strategy, which includes a goal of tripling the use of B.C. wood in construction by 2030.
FPInnovations is a private, non-profit Canadian research and development organization focused on supporting competitiveness, industrial transformation and innovation across the wood products, pulp and paper, and forest bioeconomy sectors.
