British Columbia is giving a troubled timber company a huge swath of forest on Vancouver Island, essentially allowing logging on public property in exchange for the economic benefit of helping keep the company in business.
Western Forest Products gets 69,000 acres -- roughly 75 times the size of Stanley Park -- that the company ceded to the government decades ago in exchange for access to other land. The move is expected to allow logging that will provide thousands of jobs along the province's coast, though the jobs aren't likely to outlast the trees.