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Canadian taxpayers spent nearly half a billion dollars to plant 228 million trees under the now-cancelled Two Billion Trees Program, amounting to approximately $2.14 for every tree the federal government says was planted.

According to records obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter, the federal government spent $487,891,090 on the program, including $44.6 million in administration costs such as salaries and benefits for 50 employees assigned to oversee it.

The Department of Natural Resources claims 228 million trees were planted before cabinet cancelled the program last November.

That puts Ottawa's reported all-in expenditure at roughly $2.14 per tree.

Private-sector tree planters receive a fraction of that amount for putting seedlings in the ground.

Brinkman Reforestation, one of Canada's largest private reforestation contractors, lists its 2026 average planter rates at 17.5 cents per tree in Alberta, 22.5 cents in the B.C. Interior, 14 cents or more in Ontario and Manitoba, and 13 cents in New Brunswick.

Outland Reforestation reports similarly low piece rates. Its planters average 11 to 16 cents per tree in Alberta, 11 to 13 cents in Ontario, 12.5 to 13 cents in Manitoba and 11 cents in Saskatchewan. The company says it plants more than 30 million trees annually. 

Those figures represent the labour paid to individual planters and are not directly comparable to Ottawa's all-in program expenditure, which also includes seedlings, transportation, administration and other costs. But they provide a benchmark for what the private reforestation industry pays for the actual work of putting a tree in the ground.

A closer private-sector comparison comes from actual contractor bids. A 2025 Ontario conservation authority tree-planting tender received bids ranging from approximately 46 cents to $1.74 per tree, depending on the contractor and project. Unlike planter piece rates, those bids better reflect the cost charged by private contractors to carry out planting work. Even the highest bid of $1.74 per tree was about 40 cents less than the $2.14 average expenditure per tree under Ottawa’s Two Billion Trees Program, while the lowest was less than one-quarter of the federal figure.

Canada's forestry industry was already planting an estimated 600 million trees every year before Ottawa launched the program, largely because forestry companies are required to reforest Crown lands following logging.

The Liberal government announced the Two Billion Trees Program as a 2019 election pledge, promising to plant two billion additional trees within a decade.

The program repeatedly faced criticism over whether Ottawa was actually delivering additional trees.

Environment Commissioner Jerry DeMarco told MPs in 2023 that officials had been caught double-counting seedlings toward program targets.

“It has become a tree counting program, not a tree planting program,” DeMarco said.

Newly disclosed records also indicate that some trees included in government figures had merely been scheduled for planting and had not yet gone into the ground.

Federal plans included more than 2.6 million trees for at least 20 national parks, 12 national historic sites and one national urban park. Another 8,761 seedlings were planted on Department of National Defence property, including Canadian Forces residential housing sites.

Cabinet halted the program on November 4.

Canada already had an estimated 318 billion trees covering 895 million acres before the Liberal planting initiative was launched.