Note: This article discusses sexual violence. Please read with care. If you have experienced sexual violence, resources are available at Ending Sexual Violence. Because of the sensitive nature of discussing assault, The Narwhal has used pseudonyms for sources who preferred to remain anonymous to readers.

When the ground thaws every spring, a rag-tag workforce assembles across the country. Armed with shovels and bug spray, tree-planters head out into the Canadian wilderness to put baby trees in the ground, replanting recently logged forests. 

Operating in the shadow of the commercial logging industry, tree-planting is physically and psychologically demanding and the workforce skews young. Typically paid per tree, planters work long hours, trudging through cutblocks weighed down with heavy gear and bags full of seedlings, chased by voracious clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies and the occasional bear. 

Most of these places are pretty far flung — with dozens of workers sometimes flown in by helicopter or driven to the end of a logging road, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town. When access is so challenging, companies often set up remote bush camps, rows of tents squished together inside a bear fence or shared accommodations in a trailer. 

The work starts early and finishes late — day after day, followed by a single night off where there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but blow off steam. Planters often can’t leave camp during their downtime because they’re at the mercy of company transportation, whether that’s a helicopter flight or a day-long, dusty drive to town. That’s one reason why, on those days off, some camps can get pretty wild: drop a big group of young people into the middle of the forest and many of them will bring drugs, alcohol and an appetite for sex. 

To some, it’s an appealing lifestyle and a lot of fun. For others, it’s an environment that allows bad judgement, or worse. 

“It’s the perfect storm of a situation,” Anna, a veteran planter with 13 years of experience, says on a call from a remote logging camp in B.C. (Anna is not her real name. The Narwhal agreed to use pseudonyms to protect the identities of sources who spoke about sexual assault in camps.) “In tree-planting, you get a bit of a mixed bag of weirdos. Some people are truly themselves when they’re out here and it’s really great to see them blossom. But the things that make this job beautiful are also the things someone can use as a gateway to be a piece of shit.”

She’s talking about sexual violence and harassment. Current and former workers, as well as worker advocates, say it permeates through the industry and takes on a unique ugliness in the context of remote work. Anna describes herself as a “bush mom” these days — looking out for rookies and calling out bad behaviour when she sees it. She works on contract wildfire crews as well as tree-planting and says that similar dynamics — remote locations, close quarters, stressful work, scarce labour and not much to do on days off — means that gendered violence is common there as well.

“The further you get into some of these places, the weirder it gets with this sort of sliding social acceptance,” Anna says. “Sometimes you get into camps and they’re like, ‘Who’s gonna fuck the hot rookie first?’ It becomes this weird game these dudes get competitive about — and it’s usually fuelled by alcohol.”

Karina Etzler has first hand experience. They were sexually assaulted in Ontario planting camps four times between 2018 and 2023, once as a planter and three times when they were a crew leader.

In one camp, most of the young men, including those who assaulted Karina and others, were “caught up in this sort of ‘boys club’ kind of culture,” they say in an interview. 

“They would just go around camp chanting and it was clear that to them it was fun and they thought it was lighthearted — but to everyone else it was an explicit and aggressive display of inconsiderate male power.”

“It felt like war to everyone else but they just didn’t see it.”

Tree-planting and the culture around it offers a lot of freedom to people who don’t easily conform to societal norms. It’s a seasonal job that gets workers away from desks and into the wilderness. The piecemeal pay means the harder you work, the more money you make. For some, heading out to camp for a couple of months each year is a means to living a more anarchic, free existence. But that freedom can come with a dark side — one that those in the industry are gradually accepting needs to be addressed.

Talking about sexual violence can carry stigma and like most survivors, the sources who came forward for this story didn’t file police reports about their assaults. Some have never told friends and family about what happened to them — there’s no record, other than their memories. While none of the sources named individuals or identified specific companies they worked for at the time, The Narwhal reached out to half a dozen silviculture companies across Canada to discuss this issue. None answered our questions. 

Every survivor said the culture of tree-planting can normalize sexual violence. That normalization was on display even in the brief few weeks of reporting this story. When The Narwhal put out a call for sources on a Facebook tree-planting forum called King Kong Reforestation, one of the first responses was from an anonymous member who wrote, “Fuck off, go find a problem that actually exists.” 

Airika Owen is co-ordinator of a multifaceted assault prevention program called Camp Assault Mitigation Project, or CAMP, which provides training and support for forestry, pipeline and other industries and remote workers year round. For the forestry sector, she says it’s especially important in the spring, as the planting season gets underway and a wave of newbies starts, and ideally it happens in person.

“We try to get out to as many as we can, but we’re a tiny non-profit in northern B.C. so we can’t do a ton in person,” Owen says on a call from her office in Smithers. “But we have flown to camps and we have driven probably thousands of kilometres on logging roads at this point.”

Owen says that while issues of gender-based violence are systemic across industries, jobs in remote locations such as tree-planting pose particular challenges.

“These workplaces are the most unique in Canada — they require kind of out of the box, impromptu solutions when problems like sexual violence arise,” she says. “I can’t just walk into a camp in the middle of nowhere in a tent at 7 o’clock at night with mosquitoes everywhere and press play on a video of a boss and a receptionist in an office building. It doesn’t speak to their experience at all.”

Owen says the sector has been responsive to calls for action but there’s no Band-Aid solution that will make the problem go away. Assaults still fall through the cracks — often leaving survivors to carry the weight of their trauma alone. 

When Chris was 20 years old, she signed up for a season of tree-planting in Ontario. She had never slept in a tent before. She says she got into the industry for innocent reasons, including a belief that it was a good thing for the environment. 

A few days into her new job, she was raped.

Chris blamed herself. First of all, she’d been drunk. But also, the world around her was steeped in misogyny and she had absorbed the idea that she wasn’t good enough. Tree-planting is inextricably intertwined with productivity and a hierarchy follows: those who plant the most trees have the highest value. The workforce is about 40 per cent female, according to a 2021 industry report, but Chris says even when she outperformed her male colleagues, her achievements were downplayed, including by her superiors and colleagues. It forced her to develop a tough exterior and choke her demons down. 

“I was very confused and I was focusing on my planting,” she says of the aftermath of her assault. “I just dedicated myself to that. I loved the whole experience of being out in nature — it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” 

When Chris started finding her groove and getting a lot of trees in the ground, her abuser apologized to her for his actions. Yet at the same time, “the guy who did this would talk about it to his friends, really proud of himself for doing it and bragging about it,” she says.

The stories floated around camp, adding to the endless onslaught of gendered slights and daily comments. It all got inside her head and Chris found herself spiralling mentally, even as she made herself tougher and harder physically.

Karina also found the impossibility of avoiding their assailant to be one of the hardest parts of being sexually violated in a remote camp. Everyone goes to work together the next morning, piling into a pickup truck or van to head out to the cutblock.

“The next day I would just go about totally normal and even talk to the people that did horrible things to me, because my brain was…” They trail off, leaving the thought unfinished. 

“You’re in this isolated work environment and you mostly don’t really think about the traumatic things that happen to you because you’re still living in it,” Karina continues. “You have to pretend that nothing wrong happened. You kind of exist in this weird bubble while you’re there and everything just, I don’t know, feels kind of normalized, skewed.”

After she left camp, Chris became hostile to the people she loved — and herself. Her university grades plummeted and she considered dropping out. 

“I started treating myself really, really badly,” she says. “I wouldn’t shower properly, I wouldn’t brush my hair, I wouldn’t get new clothes. I would wear things that were really ratty and really dirty all the time — this was for years.”

Chris says the incident itself, as bad as it was, was “a blip” compared to the relentless psychological erosion of her value as a human being. The sexual assault was like a stone thrown into water, the centre of a much bigger thing. The ripples around it were a culture in which she was consistently and repeatedly demoralized and devalued.

“At the end of the whole planting situation, I had internalized misogyny so badly that my entire personality, everything changed,” she says, her voice cracking. “I went back home and my mom was like, ‘When you left, you used to have light in your eyes and when you came back it was like there was nothing. It was like the stars were lost from your eyes.’ My mom actually said that.”

Chris eventually found her path, travelling the world, completing two masters degrees and becoming a university professor working overseas. But she has never shared her story until now and says, “I’m still dealing with trauma.” 

The tree-planting industry is a microcosm of broader society — sexual violence is everywhere. Because a vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported, estimates of the scale of the problem vary but hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, are sexually abused every year in Canada. In advocacy circles, an oft-quoted statistic is for every 1,000 cases of sexual violence, around 30 are reported to police and just three make it through the justice system to conviction.

“An existing culture that allows that kind of stuff gets amplified in remote working situations, but it doesn’t spontaneously occur there,” Karina says. “It’s a product of society that is just allowed to bloom a little more.”

Jordan Tesluk is a forestry safety advocate who has been involved in tree-planting since the early 1990s. He audits companies in B.C. and Alberta and considers the industry to be remarkably transparent about sexual violence — and says that transparency allows the sector to make progress in support and prevention. 

Tesluk points to a principles of conduct document drawn up by the Western Canada Forestry Association that holds the industry to standards for equitable hiring, providing a dignified workplace, preventing violence and responding when incidents do occur. 

He says other initiatives are in the works — “I’m personally working on a certification process for equality, diversity and inclusivity, which includes preventing violence and harassment” — while noting a policy-based approach only goes so far.

“Having some sort of a checklist, well, that’s not really helpful,” he says. “We don’t want a paperwork exercise. This calls for cultural and societal change — and that includes workers stepping up and taking responsibility for themselves and the way they relate to each other.”

For Tesluk, the biggest challenge is helping companies see this is part of a bigger problem and the only solution is talking about it. 

“How do I take away their fear that this is somehow going to reflect poorly on them and that it’s not going to single them out?” he says, explaining he tries to convince companies it’s not about calling them out so much as bringing them in “to be part of the solution.” 

Owen agrees that sexual violence is not “an industry-specific thing.” Even so, she says, companies should acknowledge they’re bringing workers into “an environment that has extra factors such as isolation and increased stress load and all of that.”

One persistent issue is very limited resources, including staff. Tree-planting — and work in remote areas more generally — faces a specific kind of labour scarcity, as companies need to ensure certain qualifications or certifications are covered in their crews.

“They’re really scrambling to try to duct tape responses together and come up with creative solutions that work in the middle of nowhere,” Owen says. “The first aid person might also be a peer support worker. They might also be a crew leader. You’re just trying to plug people and resources into square holes and trying to hammer them in and make them fit, because that’s all you have to work with 100 kilometres from the nearest town.”

August Nope, one of the founders of an advocacy organization called the Tree Workers Industrial Group, or TWIG, says staff shortages play into how management handles reports of assaults and harassment.

“Often there’s a bias,” he explains. “If it’s a rookie worker who had something happen to them and they’re making a complaint against a fifth-year crew lead who’s super helpful and that person is irreplaceable because he has his first aid ticket, then it’s going to be really difficult.”

Karina decided not to report an assault in part because of how unlikely it seemed that the perpetrator would be fired. “Even if they did an investigation and decided this actually happened, from what I’ve heard, they just move that person to a different camp,” they say. “If I know that’s going to happen, I’m just kind of pushing this predator off to hurt other people.”

That’s one reason why Karina decided to confront one of their assailants directly. They say they left that conversation feeling like their message — “Here’s why this is fucked up; here’s why you can’t do that” — was received and there was hope for changing the pattern of behaviour.

“I was under the impression that it got through to this particular person,” they say. 

But while the confrontation was the right decision for them personally, Karina says it had unintended consequences. Word travelled, and Karina heard that a director at another camp weaponized their courage against an acquaintance who tried to report a violent incident.

“She got sexually assaulted and went to tell him about it … and he basically was like, ‘Well, other people have just talked to their rapist about it — you should do that, that’s what Karina did.’ ”

Owen says there’s no one-size-fits-all approach but points out sexual violence isn’t treated the same as other safety issues.

“If there was bear attack after bear attack after bear attack in a season, or in a number of seasons, there would be massive overhaul and changes to any industry,” Owen says. Of course, a bear attack is hard to hide.

“But with sexual assault, so much of it the person just tries to keep their head down and get through the season,” she says. “Or they pack up and they leave and you never hear of it.”

Groups like TWIG are working to create community, advocate for survivors and open up spaces for people to share their experiences, good and bad. Nope says real change requires both a cultural shift and realistic policies and procedures at the company level. Often, camp managers or others in positions of leadership are young and unprepared to handle incidents. Instead, they’re left to improvise under high-pressure conditions. 

Zero-tolerance policies, for example, might seem good at face value, Nope says. But they don’t mean much if they aren’t backed up by procedures for how to deal with things when they come up — because they inevitably will.

“People are using substances, people are drinking, so you just have to be ready to deal with a situation and not fool yourself into thinking that nothing bad is ever going to happen,” Nope says. “That one line that says, ‘We are a zero-tolerance place for harassment and assault’ — what do you do with that when something happens? If you’re the manager of a camp and you have no HR or sexual assault prevention training, based on that policy if anyone ever does something you’re supposed to fire them. But that’s not what happens.”

When Nope first started tree-planting 11 years ago, he was 17 and presented as female. 

“I certainly have a lot of personal experience in this area, unfortunately,” he says. It was years spent at different companies and camps that led to the founding of TWIG, “to start building a safe community. We have this problem in society and specifically in tree-planting camps, which is that consent culture doesn’t really exist.”

One of TWIG’s early projects was developing a 2021 pamphlet on sexual assault prevention.

“We worked really hard to disseminate those zines,” he says, laughing as he explains the group’s tactics, including sneaking copies into other companies’ camps and hiding them amongst the seedlings. “If we’re in the bush and there’s another tree-planting company, we’ll drop them in people’s caches.”

TWIG also throws parties in the off-season, modelling good behaviour and decision-making in the hopes that planters will take those safe practices back to their camps the following season.

“Sometimes it’s really about showing people what it can be like so they can bring that standard with them into their workplaces.”

Nope says that moving beyond a simple, gender-focused conversation about violence prevention to fostering true consent culture requires an understanding of how colonialism shapes our worldview — including in the forestry industry. 

The first step, he explains, is “learning how our language and the way that we move through the world, without realizing it, is based on taking what we want.”

“I want to keep working towards a world where we’re not comfortable taking whatever we want from a person, where we understand how to ask,” he continues. “I think it’s about teaching people to slow down and how to care about each other. Ultimately, the people who learn that, their lives are going to be so much richer because they’re going to understand how to have relationships of reciprocity with each other.”

Karina is still planting but no longer living in camps, instead accepting small contracts within driving distance from their home base in Halifax. Their hope for the future is complicated and generous. They say they’d like to see education and harm reduction that doesn’t ostracize or dismiss perpetrators, because they believe greater change can occur by teaching people to understand their actions, the harm they caused and what consent means. 

“No one thinks that they’re the problem, because everyone has this idea of every act of sexual violence or assault or rape being something very grand and obvious,” they say. 

“I think it usually isn’t. It could be anyone, really, and it stems from people not understanding what consent really is and what assault really is.”