EDITOR’S NOTE

This month’s Stanley Park Notebook is appearing in collaboration with another online Vancouver news source, Vancity Lookout. Our regular contributor Nate Lewis has joined the Lookout team and along with their editor and founder Geoff Sharpe and other contributors is providing an important local news source. The West End Journal believes that such collaboration between independent community media outlets is increasingly important as media outlets controlled by large corporations continue to shut down. Last month three Metro Vancouver publications announced that they would shortly cease publication in print and online. You can find the Vancity Lookout website here, and subscribe to their daily newsletter here.

ANOTHER LEGAL CHALLENGE TO STANLEY PARK TREE REMOVALS
This latest effort won't stop logging work in the short-term

by Nate Lewis
(click images to enlarge)

A petition to the B.C. Supreme Court to stop tree removals in Stanley Park won’t halt the current “urgent” work underway in the park, but could, if successful, limit the number of trees being removed over the next two years.

**SIGNS HAVE BEEN POPPING UP AROUND THE CITY INVITING PEOPLE TO JOIN THE MOVEMENT TO “STOP THE LOGGING” IN STANLEY PARK.** *(KDM PHOTO)*

The park board says the trees being cut down, mostly hemlocks, are a risk to public safety, as they are dead or dying due to an outbreak of hemlock looper moths in Stanley Park, which began in 2020.

On February 10 the Stanley Park Preservation Society (SPPS) filed its second legal attempt to stop the logging. Their petition for judicial review asks the court to quash the Park Board’s decisions in October and December of 2024 to allow and expedite the tree removal work, as well as quashing the city’s 2023 and 2024 contracts with forestry consultant B.A. Blackwell and Associates (Blackwell).

SPPS is also seeking an injunction to “prohibit logging in Stanley Park, with the exception of trees designated, after individual inspection, as posing an immediate danger to the public,” according to court documents.

In a statement to Vancity Lookout, the Park Board said they cannot comment at this time as the matter is before the courts.

Michael Caditz, a founding director of the Stanley Park Preservation Society and a plaintiff in the case, said SPPS was founded in June 2024 in reaction to “the beginning of what turned out to be a large scale logging operation in Stanley Park… to remove, at the time they were saying 160,000 trees, which would amount to about a third of the trees in Stanley Park.”

The 160,000 figure comes from a November 2023 news release from the city, and similar numbers were included in a city-commissioned assessment from Blackwell submitted in January 2024.

While 160,000 has remained a prominent number in public discourse about tree cutting in Stanley Park, the park board has moved far away from these estimates both in terms of messaging and their operational reporting.

Over the past year, the park board has repeatedly stated that “only a fraction of these impacted trees will need to be removed due to their risks to public safety.”

**A tree being removed by helicopter from the cliffs near Prospect Point during Phase 2 work in November, 2024.** *(Nate Lewis Photo)*

According to the park board, 1,329 trees were cut down during operations in fall of 2024. In total, 8,530 trees have been removed or treated over two phases of work between October 2023 and December 2024, with 41 percent of Stanley Park’s forest areas being treated over that time, they said.

Park board staff had already begun removing dead and dying trees impacted by hemlock looper starting in June 2023, according to a park board memo, but those removals aren’t accounted for in the data above.

The third phase of tree removals and replanting was planned to start in late 2025. However, the park board approved a staff recommendation to change plans and complete a quarter of the phase three work between January and March of 2025. The urgency was due to a “significant increase” of tree failures during storms in October and November of 2024, indicating the hazardous situation was escalating more quickly than expected, according to the park board.

”Tree failures were reported across the park during these events, but overall, the quantity and complexity are greatly reduced in areas that have already been treated,” staff said of the late 2024 storms.

The Stanley Park Preservation Society has been organizing against the tree removals in Stanley Park since formally establishing themselves in June 2024 and took the city and park board to court in the fall of 2024.

In October of 2024, a judge denied an injunction request by SPPS in the civil claim, in which they alleged the city, park board, and associate urban forestry director Joe McLeod had acted negligently in ordering the tree removal work. While the injunction in that case was denied, Justice Maegan Giltrow did say SPPS raised “legitimate concerns about the apparent lack of deliberative decision making by the Park Board,” in an October 1 decision.

In the previous case, Caditz and SPPS provided sworn testimony from several experts that the tree removals were “neither necessary nor safe,” while the city submitted expert evidence of their own that generally supported the approach outlined in the Blackwell report.

**An area near a trail where trees were topped and cut down during Phase 1 work.** *(Nate Lewis Photo)*

A year ago, Colin Spratt, an advocate and tour operator focusing on old growth trees and ecosystems in Stanley Park, said the removal work should proceed carefully in those areas. However, he was of the opinion that the park board’s approach made sense from a forestry management perspective.

STRATEGY AND DETAILS

Regardless of the outcome, the latest petition won’t halt the current “urgent” work underway in the park. That’s because the current phase of removal work will end sometime in March while the petition for judicial review won’t be heard until May at the earliest, according to the park board and a lawyer for the city.

With over 8,000 trees already cut down, SPPS’s petition is a strategic attempt to stop future phases of work, Caditz said. The halfway completed project is planned to continue intermittently until early 2027.

If the judge rules in their favour, then, “if the city and or the park board wants to resume logging, they'll have to do it correctly,” Caditz argued.

**Michael Caditz, one of Stanley Park Preservation Society’s founding directors** *(Michael Caditz submitted)*

“We, the Stanley Park Preservation Society, are quite confident that if the city and the park board had to do things correctly, they would not be chopping down all these trees. If they were inspecting trees, and if they were following the correct protocols, and they were getting bona fide, independent assessments to review or corroborate what Blackwell says, if they would actually read them and find out what they said, there would be very little reason for them to continue logging,” Caditz alleged.

One thing SPPS is alleging in their current petition for judicial review is that Blackwell and other park board contractors were not using the correct methodology for the circumstances and should have been conducting individual tree assessments, rather than visual inspections, to assess how hazardous a given tree is.

Under these same premises, SPPS is also alleging that two independent third-party assessments obtained by the park board in December of 2024 did not support the park board’s claims that trees were degrading faster than anticipated or that it was necessary to accelerate phase 3 work.

Further, they say a third assessment by Chartwell Assessments was not independent because Chartwell was a subcontractor for Blackwell on their original report for the city.

“For street trees, it is totally appropriate to do individual tree assessments [but] when you're managing stands of trees it’s totally impractical,” according to Ken Byrne, who is a registered professional forester, and a lecturer in the Department of Forest Resource Management at UBC’s Faculty of Forestry.

Byrne added that, based on the Blackwell assessment, there would be hundreds of trees per hectare in Stanley Park that have been impacted by the looper moth.

The Stanley Park Causeway is more visible from surrounding trails in this February, 2024 photo, after trees were cut down to mitigate the risk of them falling on the highway or on trail users during Phase 1 work *(Nate Lewis Photo)*

In the previous case, the city advised the judge that the tree assessment criteria being used by Blackwell, which SPPS argues is incorrect in the current petition, is the same criteria used by the park board’s Urban Forestry team. The difference is that “significantly more” trees are now being captured under that assessment because of the looper moth’s impact, according to court documents.

SPPS is also alleging park board commissioners were misled or not given full and accurate information by staff with regard to the work being undertaken, and weren’t provided the opportunity authorize the work by vote until October of 2024.

On its face, it does seem that while park board commissioners were briefed on the situation, they didn’t explicitly vote to authorize the work until October of 2024 (they did approve a motion for staff to create a plan, including future tree removals, in July of 2023). However, whether that was an appropriate governance approach and the pertinence and particulars of the information provided by staff to commissioners will be something for the judge to evaluate.

NATURAL DISTURBANCES AND FOREST MANAGEMENT

Ken Byrne, the professional forester and UBC faculty member, was involved in consulting on the Stanley Park Forest Management Plan, as a UBC grad student, which was published in 2009 following the 2006 windstorm that blew down over 10,000 trees in Stanley Park.

“The windstorm was actually a wonderful opportunity to do some active management and make the forest more resilient into the future,” Byrne said, pointing to the trees surrounding the Prospect Point picnic area as an example of a zone that was heavily impacted by the windstorm and is doing well after replanting was done about 15 years ago.

Like wind, hemlock looper is a natural disturbance, Byrne said. “It's just a demonstration that if we try and keep the park static, if we try and keep it the same, Mother Nature is going to make changes anyway, and often those changes will be rapid and in a scale that we will not want,” Byrne said.

“People look at trees like they'll always be there, but they [won’t]. It's healthy for there to be turnover and change. Trees die and trees need to be removed sometimes,” Byrne said. However, he did add that if the outbreak occurred somewhere more remote, it could be left alone for nature to take its course, but because it happened in a busy park the risk of fire or harm from falling trees is heightened.

“Nobody wants Stanley Park to burn up. Nobody wants, you know, trees to start falling down on cars and people. So those are the values that we're managing for,” Byrne said

Speaking to some of the other factors exacerbating poor tree health in the park, Byrne noted the effect of the heat dome in summer 2021 was huge for the trees in Stanley Park, “because the trees had just been impacted by the looper, and then a year or two later, they got hit with that heat dome. I think that really played a major role in the trees not having the resilience to recover,” Byrne explained.

As part of the project, the park board said they have planted over 25,000 seedlings in spring of 2024 and plan to plant more this spring.

“Each tree removed in impacted areas will be restored through dedicated tree planting and replaced with a more diverse mix of species to support a stronger forest that is more resilient to future insect outbreaks and climate change impacts,” according to the park board.

COUNCIL HOPEFULS ENTER THE DISCUSSION

TEAM for a Livable Vancouver, running Colleen Hardwick and Theodore Abbott as council candidates in the April 5 by-election, has made the tree removals a campaign issue for the party.

**TEAm city council candidates colleen hardwick and thomas abbott.**

Their platform includes an action item to “protect Stanley Park by halting the current logging operation until a full scientific review and independent risk assessments are conducted, including documented tree inspections with consideration for ecological, wildlife, and recreational values.” This aligns with some of the key concerns SPPS outlined in their recent petition.

However, it’s unclear how TEAM candidates would, if elected, take action on this policy as councillors at city hall. The party explicitly supports an elected and independent park board, which has authority over the work being done in Stanley Park.

“City council, realistically, wouldn't really have a dog in the race, as this is a park board matter,” TEAM candidate Theodore Abbott told Vancity Lookout.

“We could advocate, work with groups who are opposing this logging… [and] make a lot of noise on it,” Abbott said.

However, TEAM would stop short of using council’s control over park board funding to try and stop the tree removals.

“Going against the park board's decision on this one specific issue is not reflective of any kinds of decisions we would make that would go against them getting funding for anything… we think parks need more funding, not less,” Abbott said.

WHAT’S HAPPENING TO THE WOOD?

The park board said the project derives a small amount of revenue from the sale of low value hemlock wood for pulp. This revenue offsets the projects costs, particularly hauling costs and delivery of timber to the local First Nations for cultural use.

Approximately 10,600 cubic metres of hemlock wood was sold for $112,446.45, while hauling the wood to a scaling yard in Squamish cost the park board $83,885.68. The total net revenue generated from the first two phases of work was $28,560.77 after hauling costs, according to the park board.

123 cubic metres of Fir and Cedar wood were set aside to be distributed to interested First Nations. Delivery is still being coordinated and associated costs will be paid out of the net revenue, the park board said.

The total cost of the tree removals, treatment, and planting is expected to be just under $18 million, according to a park board report.