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Reforestation in Canada Facing a Skills Shortage

Canada plants roughly 600 million seedlings per year across its provincial reforestation programs, a figure that has been stable for over a decade. In that same period, the area requiring replanting has grown sharply.

Three consecutive wildfire seasons have burned more than 30 million hectares since 2023 alone, with 2023 accounting for 17.2 million hectares, 2024 for 5.37 million hectares, and 2025 for approximately 8.9 million hectares, according to Natural Resources Canada and Public Safety Canada data.

The scale of what needs replanting continues to grow, and the workforce available to do it has not kept pace.The constraint is labour. A skilled manual tree planter typically puts in around 2,500 seedlings per day on manageable ground, and productivity drops substantially on remote or difficult terrain.

The work is hard and the hours are long. The industry has struggled to recruit and retain enough planters to keep pace with demand. Average wages in the sector have not kept up with inflation for more than a decade, according to the Western Forestry Contractors' Association, and competing industries continue to draw workers away from seasonal planting contracts.The reforestation backlog grows faster than the workforce can address it, and the gap widens after every severe fire season.

For SFL holders with replanting obligations on post-fire or harvested blocks, the question is increasingly whether manual planting capacity will be available when and where it is needed.Flash Forest's automated systems address this constraint directly.

Drone based deployment can disperse 30 or more seed pods per second and plant over 50 hectares per drone per day, without relying on the availability of manual labour. Multiple drones can operate simultaneously, enabling access to remote or hazardous terrain that manual crews cannot safely reach or where operational conditions would significantly reduce productivity.

Sources: CIFFC (2024), CIFFC (2025), CWFIS / NRCan (2025), CBC News / WFCA (2018)

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