Canada has lost billions of trees, but we can still build the forests of the future | Canada Voices

On top of a Quebec mountain, a scraggly tree rises out of stone.

Neither the mountain nor the tree seems to be in its proper place. The rock rises like a camel hump out of flat farmland at the edge of the St. Lawrence River; the tree usually flourishes farther north, in the sandy soil of the boreal forest.

But nature defies expectations. At the 200-metre summit, the shady, mixed forest abruptly gives way to a Tolkienesque stand of jack pine, growing helter skelter across the rock face.

On a May morning made ghostly by rainclouds, they’re sentries in the mist. Twisting trunks brace for an absent wind. Branches, grey and dead, or quilled with cones, crookedly claw the air.

There are easier places for the jack pine to grow. And yet, here it endures. An act of defiance that suggests hope for the forest, if humans tread carefully enough.

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Trees are remarkably resilient when left to their innate wisdom. Canada’s boreal forest, a sweep of green from coast to coast, evolved to flourish through adversity. To withstand winter and wind, defy infestations and emerge stronger from fires. Between 70 and 85 per cent of the most charred, broken land will regenerate, with time and patience.

But today, Canada is losing trees far faster than nature can grow them or humans can plant them. We chop them down to make way for parking lots, bulldoze for development, clear-cut for timber and paper. Large ribbons of forest – its natural defences weakened by human intervention – have been consumed by the mountain pine beetle, a tree killer supercharged by warming temperatures.

Between 2023 and 2025, fires ripped through nearly 31.5 million hectares of thick, dry forest, nearly a tenth of our national total. Canada lost 7.35 billion trees that will never grow back, according to a recent analysis by the Canadian Tree Nursery Association.

Those losses will only multiply. The country is heading into a summer forecasted to be one of the hottest on record, and the forests are already burning. The temperature is rising faster than trees can adapt. Scientists now worry that even the tough, drought-hardy, sun-loving jack pine, which grows back first after a fire, will suffer.

We’re not planting enough seedlings to make the slightest dent in our tree deficit. We barely replace the trees we cut down. To stop losing trees, to have any chance of bringing back those lost to fire and to foster a sustainable ecosystem that can survive the future, Canadians will have to be more ambitious.

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Canada already stewards 9 per cent of the world’s forests. According to a study published last year in the journal One Earth, Canadians could become the caretakers of much more.

The research found 19.1 million hectares of former forest land that could potentially be returned to its original state. Much of the property is private, but The Globe worked with lead author Ronnie Drever, a senior conservation scientist at the non-profit Nature United, to break it down further. The analysis suggests that up to 1.25 billion seedlings could be planted on federal land.

In March, Ottawa announced a new conservation strategy that promised to designate 2.9 million new hectares of federally protected land by 2031. The plan includes funding for restoration, but without specific tree-planting goals. Last fall, the federal government cancelled the 10-year 2 Billion Trees Program announced with much fanfare in 2021; as of June, 2025, only 228 million trees had been planted, with outstanding contracts for about 700 million more.

Given current global tensions, governments are prioritizing infrastructure projects such as mines, nuclear power and pipelines. But what larger, more valuable national infrastructure does Canada possess than its forests? They fuel industry and innovation, sink carbon, preserve wildlife, clean the air and water, cool our cities and comfort our restless souls.

A forest is much more than the sum of its tree trunks. Sustaining our existing forests and creating climate-resistant new ones, scientists say, requires thinking carefully about how and what and where we chop and plant, and for what purpose – guided by the Indigenous experts who were Canada’s first forest guardians.

“This isn’t just a couple of unusual years,” says Rob Keen, the founder and past executive director of the national tree nursery association. “Unless we start recognizing the forest as Canada’s greatest natural resource, and managing it properly, they’re going to continue to burn.”

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Guillaume de Lafontaine was 20 years old, and studying to be a biologist, when he discovered the curious collection of the jack pines on the mountain the locals call Raku.

He was camping with his parents in the summer of 2002, when they hiked the eight-kilometre Cabouron Trail near the small community of Saint‑Germain‑de‑Kamouraska, 175 kilometres east of Quebec City.

Cabouron is the colloquial name for the collection of isolated mountains that rise abruptly out of the flat land; scientists officially call formations like these monadnocks. The mountain’s name comes from the French word “recul,” or retreat in English, says Dr. de Lafontaine. In local context, he says, it refers to a sheltered valley, nested at the foot of the mountain.

Walking among the pines at the summit, Dr. de Lafontaine wondered how they came to be there. In 2019, now a professor at the University of Quebec in Rimouski and the Canada Research Chair in integrative biology of northern flora, he returned to learn their story. And, perhaps, find a secret that could help protect the country’s forests through the hot, fire-filled seasons to come.

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In a country of beautiful trees, the scruffy jack pine should be a wallflower. It failed, unsurprisingly, to sustain a Christmas career, and was once considered a weed – a slur never attached to its elegant forest roommate, the spruce.

But looks aren’t everything, and what the jack pine lacks in style, it makes up for in persistence and dependability. It survives where other trees cannot, with shallow, clever roots that can siphon minerals from the smallest cracks on a rocky mountain. It grows in forests from Nova Scotia to eastern Alberta and into the Northwest Territories. It’s most heavily logged in the East, primarily for pulp and paper, and industrial lumber.

The jack pine is what foresters call a fire-embracer. It dies in a fire, and then rises from the ashes, after the heat melts the hard resin encasing its cones and opens them up to release the seeds inside.

Those seeds germinate in the mineral-rich soil exposed after the organic top layer of the forest floor burns away. Earning its designation as a pioneer tree, the jack pine claims its spot within the first year after a fire and grows quickly.

This is why jack pine stands are typically all the same age. And why, Dr. de Lafontaine warns, you should never build your house nearby – eventually a fire will come along. Without those flames, the jack pines typically die of old age, seeds unspent.

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Except fire has rarely touched the mountaintop jack pines, and they’ve reproduced, generation after generation, for more than 6,000 years. The last fire was 185 years ago, says Dr. de Lafontaine, which according to his research predates the average age of the oldest trees by nearly a century. That’s what makes these particular trees so interesting.

As with other jack pines found outside fire areas, they have a special insurance policy. They still grow the usual cone coated in resin that is ready to open in case of fire. But Dr. de LaFontaine found that they also produce, in higher numbers than their northern brethren, a second open cone that releases seeds when they mature.

This hedge-betting results in a mixed-age stand with a backup plan for outlier conditions. Some day, that might be useful. Scientists are already studying how planting heat-adapted southern trees might add resilience to a future northern forest.

The jack pine perched above the St. Lawrence illustrates how important it is to find and preserve useful difference within a single species, says Dr. de Lafontaine. “If we lose this genetic richness, we lose something forever.”

Trees like this are a collective insurance policy, he says, “for what’s in front of us.”

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This May, in a clear-cut forest in northeastern Ontario, Hazel Sutherland, 25, and Lexey Burns, 24, are planting spruce and pine seedlings for their fifth year in a row.

Now university graduates, they keep coming back for much the same reason: good pay, fun people, the simpler life in nature. “We wake and go to bed with the day,” Ms. Sutherland says, in a phone call from camp, cheerfully describing buggy, stooped-over days and nights sleeping in a tent. “When you create a relationship with a space in nature, it reminds [us] that the way we interact with it can be positive.”

Last year, Ms. Burns checked on the jack pines she planted her first summer with Brinkman, Canada’s largest silviculture company; they were 6 feet high, as tall as she is. “Cut blocks aren’t the prettiest thing in the world, and sometimes you do feel overwhelmed that this used to be a thriving ecosystem,” she says. “But if I hadn’t been there, we’d be farther in the hole for trees.”

Across the country, every summer, about 10,000 tree planters put 600 million seedlings in the ground. But these aren’t new trees. They’re the ones that companies are obligated to plant after clear-cuts.

In 2023, Canada’s forestry industry contributed $27-billion to the GDP, employed 200,000 people and harvested 670,000 hectares of land.

Although requirements vary by province, companies must submit a management plan to reforest with the same species they cut, and monitor the seedlings until they can grow on their own, replacing them if they die. Provinces monitor the progress with satellite and GPS, and companies risk fines and harvest license suspensions for infractions – more often illegal cutting than poor planting.

By the time governments started restricting the overconsumption of nature, hundreds of years of human intervention contributed to making the boreal forest a tinderbox.

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The harm was greater because Indigenous expertise was cast aside, says Amy Cardinal Christianson, the senior fire adviser with the Indigenous Leadership Initiative.

For thousands of years, Indigenous communities have used culture burning to promote the growth of trees and berries, creating meadows, cleaning out deadfall, encouraging diversity – benefits they first observed after lightning fires, says Dr. Cardinal Christianson.

They burned small parts of forest at a time, mostly keeping the flames out of the canopy. “These were fires that you could walk beside,” says Dr. Cardinal Christianson. “They moved gently with the land.”

But European settlers, as early as the 17th century in Newfoundland, saw the practice as wasting timber, Dr. Cardinal Christianson says, “and pretty soon, we weren’t burning anything.” Skip ahead to the 1930s: still ignoring expertise of First Nations, Canadian firefighters began aggressively dousing fires in the forest.

Logging operations removed the older, stronger trees and tree planters crowded in single-species seedlings. The fire-resistant hardwood trees were weeded out to make clear-cutting easier. The forest began to thicken, entire stands became the same age and the organic ground cover piled up like kindling.

In the 1970s, mainstream scientists acknowledged that fires were actually helpful, and Parks Canada began prescribed burning – “basically a bunch of white dudes,” Dr. Cardinal Christianson says, “running around with drip torches lighting everything on fire.”

They still didn’t turn to the communities that had originated the practice, recalls Dr. Cardinal Christianson, a former research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. In 2022, while working with Parks Canada, she watched helicopters with suspended torches light up huge areas of forest, and thought of the small, careful, smoking fires that her ancestors had set.

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The return to this long undervalued wisdom is supported by a growing body of science. Earlier this year, a large study by forestry researchers at the University of British Columbia found that Indigenous peoples around the world, including in Canada, consistently protect forests, biodiversity and carbon stores on their lands as well as or better than governments manage designated protected areas.

“We’ve created a monster problem,” by weakening our ecosystems with decades of misguided management, Dr. Cardinal Christianson says.

Any solution, she says, must recognize that our forests and watersheds and communities are linked; we benefit and suffer together. She shares the story of an elder who used cultural burning to save his house in the fire that burned the town of Lytton, B.C., in 2021. Five months later, Dr. Cardinal Christianson says, he watched his home wash away in a flood made worse by wildfire damaged land upstream.

Fire travels farther and burns hotter in our unnaturally uniform coniferous forests, with no gaps to stop its path. Even jack pine can be pushed to its limits. In 2023, some fires burned so hot that flames consumed entire cones, torching all the seeds inside.

If fire returns too soon, young trees may die before they even have cones. Fire that arrives too early in the spring – a rising trend – may burn the trees but not the still-damp forest cover, preventing the jack pine seeds from germinating in the mineral soil underneath.

In some places, fire now scorches the ground so severely that the forest becomes a desert where nothing grows.

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About 40 kilometres outside Happy Valley-Goose Bay in central Labrador, another out-of-place stand of jack pine grows, this one planted by a government official many decades ago.

“He said, ‘Look, it will grow fast and be good for us,’” says Valérie Courtois, recounting the tale she heard from elders while working as director of environment for the Innu Nation in Labrador.

But the southern seedlings grew poorly. The local porcupines took to snacking on the bark. Soon, Ms. Courtois says, elders were saying that the trees had ruined the taste of the porcupine meat.

“I didn’t witness it myself,” Ms. Courtois says, “but I heard there were even some rogue women elders who would go into the forest and pull up the jack pine from the ground.”

Add the Goose Bay jack pine to the long, global list of well-meaning but poorly executed tree planting projects. In South Asia, record-setting efforts to plant mangroves on coastlines produced only a small percentage of surviving trees, according to follow-up studies. In Mexico, financial incentives offered in a forestation program prompted farmers to cut trees down so they could plant new ones. In Pakistan, a billion-tree project reduced access to grazing land.

Over and over again, projects have failed to plant the right tree in the right place at the right time.

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In Canada, short-term profits have often been prioritized over long-term stewardship, says Ms. Courtois, a member of Quebec’s Pekuakamiulnuatsh First Nation, who now serves as the executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative. Messy, diverse forests were replaced by homogenous, evenly spaced forests that were cheaper to harvest.

You can see the results, she says, along the side of the Trans-Canada Highway in New Brunswick – row upon row of doppelganger trees, in even formation like soldiers.

In most cases, Ms. Courtois says, we should allow the forest to return as naturally as possible. But there are times, she says, when the forest needs our help. When the land is so badly scorched it would take years for the forest to re-establish itself. When invasive plants crowd the empty spaces, squeezing out seedlings. And, most especially, she says, when bringing back a forest from scratch.

Fencing off land will not be enough; our forests – and wetlands and oceans – need care and stewardship to survive. To help the land regenerate, foresters suggest leaving more mature trees standing. When forests are thinned to lower fire risk, mills could expand their current capacity to handle smaller trees and branches – as companies have been doing in Alberta.

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Instead of growing species in separate patches, Yves Bergeron, professor emeritus at the University of Quebec in Montreal and a former Canadian Research Chair in Forest Ecology and Management, suggests mixing more jack pine into spruce harvest areas, even though the latter species is more economically valuable. “Planting more jack pine would be a way to plan for the future,” he says.

Logging has been happening more conservatively in some places, tree planters now try to avoid planting in straight lines and almost all of the projects in the 2 Billion Trees Program included two or more species for biodiversity.

But scientists say we have to not only correct the problem we created, but more consistently follow the lessons we now know.

Some foresters propose a “triad approach” where one part of the forest is intensively harvested, a second portion is protected and a third sees a combination of conservation and lighter harvesting. Ideally, says Dr. Bergeron, heavy logging would shift south, closer to communities, so companies can save on transportation and become more productive on smaller plots. That’s an interesting theory in principle, Ms. Courtois says, but which community gets the ugly tree farm on its doorstep?

Other researchers propose adapting approaches to the needs of a particular forest and community. Harvesting can also be a tool for conservation, as a managed stand of jack pines in Michigan demonstrates. The trees were planted decades ago to provide a habitat for the endangered Kirtland’s warbler, which only nests under young jack pines. A portion of the land is logged and replanted every year, providing marketable timber while keeping the rare songbird happy. In 2019, the warbler was removed from the endangered species list.

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Ms. Courtois prefers the term “land relationship plans” to describe land use plans. She suggests foresters should stand in a forest and ask, “What needs to stay?” – instead of, “What can I take?”

That perspective is already gaining ground as input from Indigenous experts guides forestry management. This year, B.C. revised its forestry management plans, requiring logging companies to work with First Nations. The federal government’s new nature strategy recently increased funding for Indigenous forest guardians who organize fire mitigation and responses and guide restoration.

“Reconciliation should not just be a goal between peoples,” says Ms. Courtois. “It also means reconciling with our environments.”

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Ms. Courtois acknowledges that it helps to make an economic case for forest restoration.

“If I put on my Innu hat, this idea of monetizing nature can feel like a lack of respect,” says Ms. Courtois. On the other hand, “I do feel we need to get there,” she says. “The value of the boreal forest should be recognized.”

She makes the elevator pitch for saving Canada’s boreal forest: It’s the largest intact forest on the planet; it stores more carbon in its soil than any other terrestrial ecosystem; it holds back floods; it cools the world down.

In its March nature announcement, the federal government repeated a finding from a 2011 study that estimated that the boreal forest contributes $703-billion per year in ecosystem services, the positive benefits that stem from its existence. On the other hand, there is the cost of failing to create a more fire-resistant forest. An untold fortune is lost to the economic, psychological and health consequences of forest fires. The 2024 fire in Jasper, Alta., alone was estimated to cost $1.23-billion.

The complication is that “people naturally expect it to be free,” Ms. Courtois says. “If you’re in Germany, do you want to pay for your ability to breathe, thanks to a forest halfway around the world?”

But someone – or all of us – will have to pay, so economists are currently studying how to make that work. In Canada, ecologists talk about a restoration economy – a figurative forest of tree planters, scientists, foresters, fire guardians, nurseries and tech companies – creating goods and services to protect and bring back essential ecosystems.

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“We have an opportunity to show the world how it’s done,” says Ronnie Drever, who led the forest land study. And growing back forests where they once existed, he says, “is probably the single biggest thing that we could be doing to use nature as an ally in our fight against climate change.”

Suzanne Simard, a University of British Columbia ecologist and the author of the new book When the Forest Breathes, puts it pointedly: “Trees in the future might not be the most valuable as two-by-fours. They might be the most valuable standing up and cycling carbon and nutrients.”

This spring, the federal government officially joined the conversation by creating an expert panel to study how to factor nature’s true value into decision-making and generate more private investment in conservation.

For Canadians, Dr. Simard says, “it’s a matter of priorities.” And inheritance: How we care for the forest now will sow joy or despair for the next generation.

“The forest is telling us, ‘You’ve done too much. You’ve taken too much,’” says Dr. Simard. “It can’t heal from this. What we need to do is give these ecosystems a little bit of help. We can’t walk away.”

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John Betts, the executive director of the Western Forestry Contractors’ Association, is expecting flames at his doorstep any day now.

The forest around him by Kootenay Lake, B.C., has not seen fire for decades, yet another example of land made more dangerous by past fire suppression policies, says Mr. Betts, a former logger and tree planter. In the wrong wind, a forest fire could burn through the valley, endangering the city of Nelson.

In 2019, Mr. Betts hired a crew to limb trees and burn away crowded undergrowth in the nearby forest to prevent a fire from leaping up into the canopy. Each fall, he clears out what has grown back. He has also invested in sprinklers, hoses, two 2,000-gallon water storage tanks and a backyard swimming pool that can hold another 3,000 gallons – all in an effort to prepare, he says, for the inevitable.

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A fully funded program-level approach to restoration might not change the inevitable, Mr. Betts says, but it would improve the odds of avoiding ruin for humans and the forest. We once failed to see the forest as a dynamic, interdependent ecosystem of diverse parts. Now that we know better, he says, we can’t dither for decades more to embrace that science.

In the past 50 years, Mr. Betts estimates that Canadians planted up to 20 billion trees – because the forestry industry was ordered to do so. Now we need to plant more, faster and smarter.

“So yes, it is a massive infrastructure project,” Mr. Betts says. “Saving the planet is a pretty massive infrastructure project.”

More than 100 years ago, Canadian painter Tom Thomson famously sketched a lonely, spider-limbed tree by a lake in Ontario’s Algonquin Park, and created one of his most famous paintings.

A new generation of forest guardians might find their own inspiration in the jack pine, in the thick of the northern forest or on a lonely mountaintop in Quebec.

A gloriously scrappy tree that stands proud and defies the odds to survive adversity – much like the country it populates.

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