You Do Not Have to Cut the Tree Down to Break the Tree Bylaw

Three municipalities, three different answers

The North Shore reads as one place. It is three separate local governments, each with its own tree bylaw written at a different time for a different reason, and they do not line up on anything: not the size that triggers regulation, not the list of species singled out for protection, not the number of replacement trees you owe, and not even the arithmetic used to calculate a root zone.

That last one is a good measure of how far apart they are. The District of North Vancouver calculates the baseline root zone as ten times the trunk diameter. The City of North Vancouver uses six times. Same tree, same street a few blocks apart, two different protected areas around it.

So the useful first question on any North Shore project is not what the tree bylaw says. It is which municipality you are in, and in the City's case, what your lot is zoned. Everything else follows from those two answers.

The City of North Vancouver: 20 cm, with a large hole in it

The City's Tree Bylaw, 2022, No. 8888 does say, at section 2.B, that it only applies to trees having a DBH of 20 centimetres or more. That is the sentence the internet has been quoting for years, and taken alone it sounds like almost every mature tree in the City needs a permit.

Section 2.A is the sentence nobody quotes. In the version consolidated to December 8, 2025, it says the bylaw applies to trees on land throughout the City, but does not apply to a tree if the entire trunk of the tree is on a highway, or is on land zoned GO (Ground Oriented Zone), RS-1, RS-2, RS-4B, RT-1 or RT-2, or in a CD zone for which the permitted uses are based on any of those zones.

Read that list of zones again, because it is where most of the City's detached houses sit. If your lot is in one of them, the 20 cm rule does not apply to your trees at all. Which means a homeowner who spent a week arranging an arborist report for a 30 cm maple may have been solving a problem the bylaw had already removed.

The reverse is the part to be careful about. The exemption turns on zoning, and zoning is not something to guess at from the look of the street. A CD zone based on a different set of permitted uses is not exempt, and a corner lot rezoned years ago may not be what its neighbours are. Look your own property up in the City's zoning records before you conclude anything, and check the date on whatever version of the bylaw you are reading, because this scope change is recent.

• The 20 cm threshold is real, and it is the City's, not the District's
• It does not reach land zoned GO, RS-1, RS-2, RS-4B, RT-1 or RT-2, or CD zones based on those
• It does not reach a tree whose entire trunk sits on a highway
• The exemption is zoning-based, so confirm your own zone rather than assuming from the neighbourhood
• This scope wording is from the version consolidated to December 8, 2025, so older summaries online describe a wider bylaw

The District of North Vancouver: 75 cm, plus a long protected list

The District's Tree Protection Bylaw 7671 sets its general threshold at 75 cm. Its definition is precise about the rounding: a large-diameter tree is any tree having a DBH of 75 centimetres or more that is not also a protected tree, and all stem measurements are rounded up to the next nearest centimetre, so 74.3 cm becomes 75 cm and is captured.

Seventy-five centimetres is a big tree. It is roughly the trunk you cannot get your arms around. Plenty of healthy mature Douglas firs on District lots sit under it, and for those the large-diameter rule does not apply.

The category that catches people is the second one. Protected trees in the District are regulated at any size, and the list is long: trees on District land, trees within streamside protected areas, trees on a steep slope where the slope angle is greater than 20 degrees (36 percent), heritage trees, covenant trees, wildlife trees, old growth defined as 250 years old or older, and six named species, being Arbutus, Garry Oak, Oregon Ash, Pacific Yew, Western White Pine and Yellow-cedar.

Two of those matter constantly on North Shore work. The steep slope trigger applies across a great deal of the District, from Canyon Heights through Blueridge and up the Seymour side, and it does not care about trunk size. A 20 cm sapling on a 21 degree slope is a protected tree. The streamside trigger does the same thing along the creek corridors that run down through Lynn Valley and Deep Cove.

Section 7 of the bylaw is the operative one: a person must not cut, damage or remove, or permit or cause to be cut, damaged or removed, a protected tree or large-diameter tree without a tree permit, or contrary to a tree permit. Note the phrase permit or cause. A homeowner who hires an excavator and never touches a tree personally is still inside that sentence.

Damage does not mean cutting. It means concrete in the root zone.

This is the section to read if you read nothing else, because it is where ordinary renovation work collides with a bylaw people assume only applies to chainsaws.

The District defines damage as taking any action that may cause a tree to die or decline. The list that follows includes root severance, girdling, ringing, poisoning, burning, excessive crown lifting or reduction, topping, soil compaction, depositing or removing soil, placing concrete or any other hard surface within the root zone of a tree, and blasting within 5 metres of the root zone.

Placing concrete or any other hard surface within the root zone. A new patio. A widened driveway. A garage slab. A set of stairs down a slope. None of that is tree work in the ordinary sense, and all of it is capable of being damage under the bylaw if it lands in the wrong place.

The root zone is not measured by eye. The District uses a formula of ten times DBH for the baseline calculation. On a 75 cm tree that produces a 7.5 metre radius, which is a 15 metre circle. On a typical District lot that circle can cover the whole of one side yard and a good part of the rear. The City of North Vancouver runs the same idea at a different multiplier, defining the critical root zone as six times DBH.

What we see on North Shore lots is that this catches people at the worst possible moment, which is after the concrete is in. Nobody applies for a tree permit to pour a patio, because nothing in the job description mentions a tree. The tree is fine at the time. The decline shows up two or three years later when the root system that was buried under a slab finally gives out, and by then the connection between the two is obvious to an arborist and awkward for the owner.

Root zones also extend well beyond the drip line, which is why all three bylaws use a diameter multiplier instead of the visible canopy edge. The branches you can see are a poor guide to where the roots are, and on a windy exposed slope they are an especially poor guide.

• Soil compaction from parking or material storage is listed as damage
• Depositing soil is damage, so raising grade around a trunk counts
• Removing soil is damage, so cutting grade near a trunk counts
• Placing concrete or any hard surface inside the root zone is damage
• Blasting within 5 metres of the root zone is damage in the District
• Topping and excessive crown reduction are damage, so an aggressive prune counts

West Vancouver: seven categories instead of one number

West Vancouver's Tree Bylaw No. 4892 does not give you a single number to check. Section 4.3 defines a protected tree through a list of categories, and a tree only has to fall into one of them.

The categories are: any tree greater than 75 cm DBH, or with a combined stem DBH of 75 cm or more where it has multiple stems; any replacement tree; any retained tree; any heritage tree; any tree within a Watercourse Protection Area or Foreshore Protection Area; any tree of six named species over 20 cm DBH, being Arbutus, Garry Oak, Pacific yew, Pacific dogwood, Yellow cedar and Shore pine; and any tree containing an active bird nest, or the nest of an eagle, peregrine falcon, gyrfalcon, heron, osprey or burrowing owl whether that nest is active or not.

Three zones go further. In CD77, CD81 and CD82 the threshold drops all the way to 15.24 cm DBH and over 1.8 metres in height, which brings in trees most people would describe as young.

The multiple-stem rule deserves attention on older West Vancouver properties. A tree with three stems of 30 cm each has a combined stem DBH of 90 cm, so it is protected even though no single stem comes close to 75 cm. Multi-stem maples and cedars are common in Ambleside and Dundarave gardens.

West Vancouver also defines cutting more broadly than the word suggests. Section 4.1 includes the topping of trees, and the removal of any limb of a tree that requires ascending the tree to complete the removal. So a heavy prune that needs a climber is regulated cutting, and hiring someone to do it does not change that.

West Vancouver's fencing rule protects your neighbour's tree

Of the three bylaws, West Vancouver's construction site rules are the strongest, and section 5.2 is worth quoting because of how far it reaches.

It says no person shall carry out any tree cutting, or any site preparation, demolition, excavation, or construction work on a property unless a tree protection barrier in accordance with Schedule A has been installed. The barrier has to protect all protected trees outside the permitted building envelope, the portion of a neighbouring tree's critical root zone that falls on or within your building site, trees on any boulevard abutting the site, and trees on any part of a municipal park within 3 metres of the site.

So the fence is not only about the trees you own. If the neighbour's cedar has roots running under your side yard, the part of that root zone on your land has to be fenced before the excavator arrives. Same for the boulevard tree out front, which belongs to the municipality.

Schedule A specifies what the barrier is: 1.2 metres in height, built from 2x4s with cross-bracing and continuous snow fence. It also carries a distance table that scales with trunk size, running from 1.2 metres of clearance at 20 cm DBH up to 6.0 metres of clearance at 100 cm DBH.

On the projects we run, the fence goes in before demolition starts and stays up until the site is finished. The failure mode is not usually the fence being absent. It is the fence being treated as a suggestion once the site gets tight, with lumber stacked inside it, a bin parked on the roots, or a subtrade's truck using it as the only flat spot on a sloped lot. That is compaction, and compaction is on the damage list.

What happens when you get it wrong

The City of North Vancouver publishes its penalty structure inside the tree bylaw itself. Section 10.C sets a fee equal to 250 percent of the Ecological Compensation Fee for every tree, and requires the replacement trees that would have been owed plus at least two additional replacement trees on top.

The dollar amount behind that percentage lives in a separate fees and charges bylaw rather than in the tree bylaw, and it changes on its own schedule. We are not going to quote a number we cannot stand behind. Confirm the current Ecological Compensation Fee with the City directly before you rely on any figure you find online, including in older versions of the City's own material.

Replacement obligations are their own cost, separate from any penalty. The City requires three replacement trees for a tree that was not dead, dying or hazardous, with at least one of them a conifer and a minimum 5 cm caliper. The District requires three replacements for a large-diameter tree on a lot of 420 square metres or more where the lot will retain under 20 percent canopy cover after the work, and one on a lot under 420 square metres. West Vancouver replaces one for one, with a minimum of 5 cm caliper for deciduous or 3 metres in height for coniferous, and holds security of $1,000 per replacement tree to a maximum of $10,000.

One belief worth killing. There is no annual allowance to remove a set number of trees per year without a permit in either the City of North Vancouver or West Vancouver. Both bylaws were read in full looking for it. It is not there. If someone tells you that you get two or three a year, ask them which section says so.

Where trees belong in the project sequence

The tree question belongs at the design stage, before the drawings are finished, and this is the single piece of sequencing advice we would give any North Shore homeowner planning an addition or a new foundation.

The reason is simple. A protected tree can move a building envelope. If a Yellow-cedar in the side yard or a cedar on a 22 degree slope turns out to be regulated at any size, the setback the design assumed may not survive contact with the arborist report. Finding that out after the drawings are done means redrawing them, and redrawing is slower and more expensive than an early site visit.

So the order that works is: identify what is on the lot and what is protected, get the arborist report and the tree protection plan, and only then lock the footprint. The City's own application requirements point the same direction, since a construction-site tree application there needs an arborist report, a tree protection plan and a tree replacement plan together.

The City also limits which trees can come out on a construction site at all. Section 6.A restricts removal to trees within the permitted building envelope, trees whose retention would place unreasonable constraints on development, trees in the construction access area, dead or hazardous trees, and trees fouling utilities or drains. A tree that is simply inconvenient does not appear on that list.

One more piece of housekeeping. Because the three bylaws diverge so completely, a set of drawings prepared for a District lot carries assumptions that are wrong on a City lot, and both are wrong in West Vancouver. Check the municipality first, every time, and check the zoning second if you are in the City.