Concern grows as 200+ year-old cedars cut down in Stanley Park

Editor’s note: This article was updated on April 11 with comments from the park board that were received after publication.

What happened: There’s growing concern about what sort of trees are being cut down in Stanley Park, as the park board’s multi-year project intended to mitigate the risk of falling trees and wildfires in the park continues. 

What we heard: Colin Spratt, an advocate and educator who focuses on old trees in Vancouver is going public with his critiques of the process. He says the cutting down of two multi-hundred-year-old cedar trees and Canada’s largest red alder has crossed a line. 

• Spratt is a member of the BC Big Tree Committee and founder of Ancient Trees of Vancouver, where he offers educational resources and tours of old and significant trees in Stanley Park. 

Regarding the red alder, the park board said their assessment found it was ~98 per cent dead, with major structural defects and decay. Its location near the seawall and a walking path meant it posed a significant safety risk, they said. 

• “The tree’s historic and ecological value is acknowledged, but its removal was undertaken as a necessary public safety measure,” the park board said in a statement to Vancity Lookout.

Flashpoint: “It's really the final stretch of risk mitigation that they're doing with the logging that has crossed a very, very obvious line,” Colin Spratt told Vancity Lookout, referring to the last six to eight months of tree removal work as “the most aggressive.” 

“I think [the park board and city would] rather just basically rid themselves of any chance of liability,” Spratt alleged.  

• Spratt recently put out a press release, including photo and video evidence, detailing the removal of significant trees – like a 200 and a 400-600 year-old cedar and Canada’s largest red alder – from the park.

“There's a beautiful western red cedar that's a few hundred years old, growing at an angle over a trail that's fully alive. Why did that tree get cut down? I completely understand why the dead hemlocks got cut down right beside it, but why did that cedar get cut down?” Spratt questioned. 

• The park board said the 200+ year-old cedar was removed after it failed due to structural defects. The tree wasn’t within any of the areas that have been treated so far as part of their response to the insect infestation, according to the park board.

The park board wasn’t able to provide information on their assessment of the 400-600 year-old cedar, or why it was removed. “Overall, very few cedars across the entire park have been treated, and every effort is made to retain and protect these trees, as we value their cultural and ecological significance,” the park board said.

Background: In 2020, Stanley Park experienced a hemlock looper moth outbreak, an insect infestation which causes severe damage to trees. While outbreaks typically last only one to three years, this infestation was on the longer end of that spectrum, resulting in significant numbers of dead trees, primarily hemlocks, in the park.  

Initially, 160,000 impacted trees – mostly small hemlocks – were identified for removal, due to the risk of trees falling on people or infrastructure, and a heightened risk of wildfire. That figure was first made public in a city news release in November 2023, with more detail provided in a city-commissioned assessment by forestry consultant B.A. Blackwell and Associates (Blackwell), submitted in January 2024. 

In the 15 months since, the park board has significantly altered those projections, saying “only a fraction of these impacted trees will need to be removed due to their risks to public safety.” 

• 8,350 trees were removed or treated between October 2023 and December 2024, according to the park board. At the beginning of 2025, the park board accelerated the timeline for removals, citing an increase in falling trees.  

Genuine fear: Spratt – who spends a significant amount of time in Stanley Park leading tour groups and mapping old-growth trees – said he’d been closely watching all the initial logging work around high-traffic areas like the causeway, the aquarium, and Prospect Point. 

“I understand this. These are thousands of dead Hemlock trees… that might fall on a car, might fall on someone. I think it'd be lovely if we could just leave it, but we have too many people in the park. I've seen hemlocks crashed down on the trails and stuff. The Hemlocks can be managed to a degree,” Spratt said. 

However, it was seeing that some older, living trees near trails were being removed as well that drove Spratt to speak out about his concerns, because he thinks the calculation of risk to public safety versus preserving trees should change depending on the tree’s significance and where you are in the park. 

• “It's not that anyone is doing this to completely destroy the ancient forest of Stanley Park [without justification], there's fear there. We don't want someone to get harmed. I think we can all agree that that's a good thing.”

“I think the fear is genuine that some of these Hemlock trees could pose a risk… [however] that does not give the excuse of chainsaw management for an ancient tree,” Spratt said. 

Ancient isn’t a technical forestry term but the word is often used for trees in the 400–800-year-old range, Spratt explained. “It’s more about giving people a sense of the tree’s history and ecological importance,” he added.  

• Dive deeper: The tree removals have been the subject of two lawsuits, one of which is pending, filed by the newly-formed Stanley Park Preservation Society in an effort to stop further tree cutting in the park.

Need for better balance: One forestry expert who Vancity Lookout asked to comment on Spratt’s findings said, while the park board is, overall, taking a rigorous and professional approach to managing wildfire and tree risk, he sympathizes with Spratt’s concerns. 

• “It appears that the efforts to mitigate wildfire and tree risk are not doing enough to balance the need to also steward and safeguard the full range of values held within the park,” Ira Sutherland told Vancity Lookout by email.  

Sutherland is a registered professional forester, who earned his PhD from UBC Forestry, and is also a member of the BC Big Tree Committee. 

Stanley Park “contains significant natural assets, such as those ancient trees that Colin is highlighting, which store huge amounts of carbon to mitigate global warming, filter air pollutants to improve urban air quality, and provide spiritually revitalizing places to recreate in. These natural assets and the ecosystem services they provide are very costly if not impossible (in the case of 1000 year old trees) to replace,” Sutherland said. 

ESSA, an environmental management company that Sutherland works for, just released a new report that found fully protecting old-growth forests in two parts of the B.C.’s Interior could yield about $43 billion in economic benefits over the next century, according to BIV.   

• “This is quite different than what I think might be needed in Stanley Park, but does emphasize the high value of old-growth,” Sutherland said.  

A mosaic of forest types: Spratt doesn’t take issue with the approach the park board and its contractors are taking in some younger parts of the forest, but he’s concerned they’re not altering their strategy based on the age and significance of different parts of the forest.  

“We are treating the park as one entity… Stanley Park is like a mosaic missing a bunch of tiles. You have areas that were logged, areas that were destroyed by wind, areas that were destroyed by previous bug outbreaks, these areas have younger trees,” Spratt said.  

“Certain sections of Stanley Park can be treated the way that they've been treated [during the current tree removal work], but all these [old-growth] areas in green need a completely different approach. I think – due to that not being efficient – they are [taking] a single approach to the whole park. That is where conservationists and myself are seeing negligence,” Spratt alleged.

Over the past several years, Spratt has marked the coordinates of thousands of ancient trees and created a map of the remaining old-growth areas.     

Old-growth inventory: The city and park board do officially recognize there are old-growth trees in Stanley Park, but often it’s only a passing mention without details. The city’s Urban Forestry Strategy says Stanley Park has “many old-growth Douglas-fir and western redcedar trees,” while the park board’s Stanley Park Forest Management Plan mentions “a small, remnant old growth forest stand” near Tunnel Trail and Pipeline Road. 

• The 2024 Blackwell Assessment, which has served as the basis for the removal work, makes no mention of old-growth trees, stands, or habitats.

The park board said they’re “aware that Stanley Park has a number of trees that may have exceeded the lifespan of a typical tree or are remarkably old for their species,” which they publicly refer to as “monument trees.” 

“The value of these trees is acknowledged and the Park Board works in collaboration with experts, local First Nations, and the public to preserve them whenever possible,” they said in a statement.  

• Old-growth trees in coastal B.C. are defined as trees that are 250 years and older, according to the province. 

Spratt said, historically, there’s no map that details all the old-growth trees in Stanley Park. Sutherland pointed to one UBC Forestry Master thesis in 2010 that did so, but he wasn’t sure if that data had been incorporated into government files.

“They seem to be omitting these trees constantly. They're sort of omitted from the discussion, and I can't help but feel that the omission is because with recognizing them comes responsibility and work,” Spratt alleged. 

“The small size of Stanley Park might mean that park staff 'know the forest' and so would not need to undertake expensive inventory in order to manage it carefully. However, in a situation like this it would have been helpful,” Sutherland said. 

• Sutherland added that the city should be reflecting on the situation and asking themselves if they have the right tools and data to manage Stanley Park in the best way possible, pointing to Gibsons as a leading example of how to integrate natural assets in municipal planning.  

“With climate-related stresses, these events [like the hemlock looper outbreak] are likely to occur with greater frequency in the future, and yet the ecosystem services such as summer heat buffering will be [in] even greater demand,” Sutherland said.

What it means: The tree cutting in Stanley Park is understandably emotional and polarizing for the public. Theories that have been floating around, like that the trees are being cut down removed to make way for condos, or cut down for massive profit, don’t currently have any basis in fact. However, there are legitimate concerns about the project’s unclear scope of work, which has shifted from 160,000 impacted trees being removed down to several thousand that pose a risk to public safety.  

• For a group like the Stanley Park Preservation Society, they want to see as few trees cut down as possible. For Spratt, there’s a big difference between removing dead Hemlocks in busy areas and cutting down significant old trees like the cedars and alder that were removed in the recent phases of work. 

Ultimately, it’s about striking the right balance between harm mitigation and preserving significant old trees that provide immense environmental, cultural, and social value. Whether that’s being done in this case will continue to be a matter of public and professional debate.