Canada lost 7.35 billion trees between 2023 and 2025! Not to logging. To wildfire. Trees that won't grow back, in forests already weakened by decades of fire suppression, monoculture planting, and the long dismissal of Indigenous land knowledge that would have kept them healthier. We're not planting nearly enough to close that gap. The problems are layered, and they have built up over generations.
Last week, the Globe and Mail published a sweeping, beautifully reported piece titled The Final Stand, written by Erin Anderssen, on exactly this crisis. It featured two of our planters, Hazel Sutherland and Lexey Burns, both in their fifth season with Brinkman, and images from one of our planting sites in northeastern Ontario. We think it's worth your time.
What Hazel and Lexey said in the piece stays with us. Lexey went back to check on the jack pines she planted her first season. They were six feet tall. "If I hadn't been there," she said, "we'd be farther in the hole for trees."
That's it, really. That's the work.
It doesn't fix everything. A clear-cut is still a wound on the land. Replanting the same species in tidy rows is not the same as a living forest. We've learned that over a long time, and we've changed how we work because of it. We support the shift away from tree farming toward sustainably managed forestry, guided meaningfully by Indigenous expertise. In practice, that means seeking guidance before we plant, not after. It means asking what needs to stay, not just what we can put back.
Here's something the Globe piece points to that doesn't get said enough. In burned and damaged terrain, human planters achieve survival rates that machines simply can't match. The difficult, uneven ground left behind by wildfire requires judgment, adaptability, and care that mechanized planting can't replicate. The seedlings make it because people put them there. That matters enormously right now, when Canada is also facing a significant seedling shortage. We don't have trees to waste. Every seedling that doesn't survive is a loss we can't easily recover.
Erin’s article, The Final Stand, describes what ecologists are calling a restoration economy: tree planters, scientists, foresters, fire guardians, nurseries, tech companies, all working together to protect and rebuild essential ecosystems. We'd say this: that economy already exists. It has existed for a long time. What it needs now is wide recognition, investment, and the political will to scale it.
At a moment when unemployment is rising, especially for young Canadians, tree planting offers more than a paycheque. It builds determination, self-regulation, and the particular kind of social intelligence that comes from living and working with people in a remote camp, far from the noise of everything else. And it reconnects people to the natural world in a way that is physical, personal, and lasting. Hazel and Lexey are back for their fifth season. So are thousands of others across the country, signing up for one of the most physically demanding jobs on the planet.
Canada has a real opportunity here. To restore its forests, invest in its young people, and demonstrate to the world what a restoration economy can actually look like on the ground. We know what works. We know what the land needs. The question was never whether this was possible. It's whether we're willing to treat it as the national priority that it actually is.
[Read the full Globe and Mail piece here.]
Photography by Eamon Mac Mahon, The Globe and Mail ("The Last Stand," May 16, 2026)
