Ottawa spent nearly half a billion dollars on its now-cancelled Two Billion Trees Program, only to fall dramatically short of its own planting goal, according to federal records tabled in Parliament.Blacklock's Reporter says documents from the Department of Natural Resources show the program cost $487,891,090 before it was wound down on November 4, missing its target by 89%. The disclosure came through an inquiry of ministry response, which also revealed $44.6 million was spent on administration alone, with about 50 employees assigned to manage the initiative.The figures were released in response to a question from Bloc Québécois MP Mario Beaulieu (La Pointe-de-l’Île, Que.), who asked how many trees were actually planted before the program was cancelled. The department said a total of 173,853,472 trees were planted, including 8,559 trees at First World War memorial sites in France.Federal officials added that roughly 800 million additional trees are expected to be planted under existing agreements over the remaining years originally envisioned for the program, though the response did not explain how or where those trees would be planted..Funding for the initiative was cut in the November 4 federal budget. “The government will wind down the Two Billion Trees Program,” stated the budget document Canada Strong, adding that existing contribution agreements would be honoured and any uncommitted funds returned.The program was announced in 2019 by then-environment minister Catherine McKenna, who pitched mass tree planting as a climate and conservation measure. The Liberals promised to plant two billion trees within 10 years, a target that the Parliamentary Budget Officer later estimated would cost $5.94 billion to achieve.Concerns about the program’s management surfaced years before its cancellation. Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco told MPs in 2023 that the initiative had become focused on counting trees rather than planting them, alleging some trees were double-counted across programs to inflate results.“It has become a tree counting program, not a tree planting program,” DeMarco testified at the Commons environment committee..Critics also questioned the need for the program, noting Canada already has an estimated 318 billion trees across 895 million acres of forested land, with forestry companies planting an average of 600 million trees each year as part of logging requirements on Crown land.Bloc Québécois MP Christine Normandin previously said the ridicule directed at the program stemmed from the Liberals’ failure to deliver on their promise.“If everyone laughed at them for this program, it wasn’t because it was a bad program that had to be cut,” Normandin told the Commons. “It was because the Liberals were unable to plant the trees.”
