In the last decade, logging in British Columbia has suffered economic pains no one had ever imagined, from steep U.S. tariffs to a strong Canadian dollar. The wounds cut deep and cut often – and have so withered the once-powerful industry that some, inside and outside, now ask …
WENDY STUECK, Globe and Mail
CAMPBELL RIVER — More than a century ago, Don Bendickson’s grandfather started chopping trees on Vancouver Island, joining hundreds of others in a historic timber rush.
Today, like his grandfather and father before him, Mr. Bendickson makes his living from the woods, running two companies that work on Vancouver Island and the mainland’s central coast.
His son works with him, and Mr. Bendickson likes to think future generations of his family might also find their calling in the woods.
“I believe there is a future – but it’s obviously changing,” says Mr. Bendickson, whose Benwest and Stafford Lake logging companies harvest timber for customers that include publicly traded forestry firms and Indian bands.
Mr. Bendickson is one of a vanishing breed of those who make their living by cutting, hauling or processing trees on Vancouver Island. Up and down the island, mills, equipment suppliers and contractors are dropping like flies, felled by the worst market conditions in decades. Woes include a sickly U.S. housing market, export tariffs under the Softwood Lumber Agreement with the United States and the strong Canadian dollar.
In June, Mr. Bendickson took another blow when Duncan-based Western Forest Products Inc., which has already announced a string of cutbacks, announced more shutdowns that will hit 650 Western employees and 1,200 contractors – including 35 people in one of Mr. Bendickson’s crews.
Once that crew’s contract wraps up, Mr. Bendickson expects some workers may follow others who commute from British Columbia’s Comox Valley to jobs in Alberta’s oil patch.
The changes reflect more than a temporary lag in demand for two-by-fours. Demographic and real-estate trends on the island have resulted in forest companies assessing their properties to see if some can be put to “higher and best use.” Sites once considered valuable only for timber are being eyed for golf courses and condominiums, as well as airports, hospitals and industrial parks.
Take Campbell River, where Mr. Bendickson’s operations are based. The city wears its resource history on its sleeve, greeting visitors with the telltale billow of a smokestack in the sky and the smell of wood pulp in the breeze.
That history may be headed for the shelf. In May, Vancouver-based TimberWest Forest Corp. closed its Elk Falls sawmill in Campbell River, adding another 260 people to the roster of thousands in B.C. who have lost forestry jobs in recent years.
This month, Richmond-based Catalyst Paper Corp. announced it would close its Elk Falls pulp mill, throwing another 440 people out of work.
Meanwhile, new homes with ocean views are springing up on property formerly owned by TimberWest. The company is talking to city officials about other parcels that might prove suitable for development.
TimberWest says forestry will remain the primary use for up to 80 per cent of its holdings. Still, the company’s strategy speaks to a reshaping of island resources that may be as significant as the pell-mell harvesting of a hundred years ago.
“The strip of the island right from Campbell River to Victoria has become a bit of a haven for retirees from right across the country,” Mr. Bendickson says.
“People who are retired don’t really want to see the smokestacks. It’s ‘I’m retired now. I want the golf courses, I want the clean water to go fishing in.’ … All of a sudden you get a very different direction for the town.”
LAND RUSH
That direction appears to be moving away from a model that saw lumberjacks head into the woods and mills and towns spring up behind them.
Largely as a result of railway land grants dating back to the early 1900s, TimberWest holds big chunks of property on the Island – about 11 per cent by land mass.
Other forestry companies are also major landowners on the island, where about 20 per cent of the land base is in private hands, compared with about 5 per cent in the rest of the province.
Much of that land is in scenic areas close to metropolitan centres. Ninety-four per cent of the population on Vancouver Island – where real-estate prices have soared by 144 per cent since 2001 – lives within 20 minutes of TimberWest “development nodes,” says a June report by Dundee Securities Corp.
As would-be purchasers eye a piece of paradise, some neighbours are getting testy. On the western side of the island, there’s an uproar over Western Forest’s plans to sell chunks of land between Sooke and Jordan River to a developer. In response to public outcry, B.C. Auditor-General John Doyle investigated a 2007 provincial government decision that gave Western permission to remove the properties from provincially regulated Tree Farm Licences and put it up for sale.
His report earlier this week damned former forests minister Rich Coleman’s failure to consult with the public and local government, and described the minister’s analysis of the potential impacts as flimsy. “I would have expected to see the documentation that supported the decision to be beyond reproach,” Mr. Doyle said. “We found it inadequate.” Pat Bell, the new Forests Minister, rejected the findings and Mr. Doyle’s methodology. He said “there are no recommendations in here that we can take forward and take as constructive criticism.”
In a sign of the times, the Western Canada Wilderness Committee – which has campaigned to keep loggers out of old-growth forests in Clayoquot Sound, the Stein Valley and elsewhere in B.C. – in June teamed up with the United Steelworkers to call for a Forest Land Reserve that would protect forest lands from urban sprawl. (United Steelworkers represents about 7,000 B.C. coast forest workers.) “The environmentalists have now understood that maybe it’s better to have a working forest than to have a working subdivision,” says Dave Lewis, executive director of the Truck Loggers Association, which represents contract operators such as Mr. Bendickson and has seen many of its members fold this year.
“We used to say it was ‘cut and run,’ ” says Vicky Husband, a long-time environmental activist who is involved in the campaign to have the province block the Western Forest land sales. “Now we say it’s ‘log and flog.’ ” Ms. Husband and other activists have asked for meetings with Mr. Bell and Community Development Minister Blair Lekstrom, both appointed in a June cabinet shuffle, in the hopes of blocking the transaction.
Western Forest, for its part, has closed a conditional sale of the contentious properties, which were subdivided into 319 lots (averaging about five hectares each) before the Capital Regional District down-zoned the area to restrict small parcels. Western Forest contacted the CRD before putting the land up for sale, but the district expressed no interest in purchasing the sites, says Western Forest spokesman Duncan Kerr.
Such property won’t come cheap. Last year, TimberWest sold nearly 10,000 hectares of land comprising the Leech Watershed to the Capital Regional District. The land will bolster the Sea to Sea Green Blue Belt, a planned wilderness corridor running from Saanich Basin on the eastern Island to Sooke Basin in the southwest.
The price? Some $64.7-million.
FORESTS AT WORK
In Campbell River, union headquarters on a rainy Monday is deserted. Flyers tacked to bulletin boards advertise jobs in Alberta.
Duane Riddoch won’t be moving, but he is getting out of the business. Now 40, he started working at TimberWest’s Elk Falls sawmill in his 20s.
The number of employees at the mill dwindled over the years and, in May, TimberWest dropped the axe, announcing the mill’s permanent closing.
After 13 years during which he worked at nearly every production job at the mill and developed the back problems to prove it, Mr. Riddoch is studying to become an accountant. He doesn’t have much hope that jobs like his will return.
“The rationalization hasn’t ended,” says Mr. Riddoch, who was involved in an unsuccessful employee effort to buy the mill.
“And with none of the forest companies willing to sit down and work together, there is not a hope of sawmilling in B.C. in the short term to survive.”
In Campbell River, Don Bendickson hopes he can tough out a grim cycle. Demand could pick up once the U.S. housing market bottoms out and after a pine-beetle-fuelled harvesting boom in the B.C. Interior runs its course. A new marketing campaign is pitching wood as a climate-friendly building material.
Like Ms. Husband, he sees the island at a crossroads. Companies such as his are struggling, local governments are grappling with dwindling commercial tax bases and parts of the island are under unprecedented development pressure.
Royal commissions and other studies have long said the coast needed fewer, bigger manufacturing facilities and vastly reduced numbers of workers to survive, Mr. Bendickson says.
“That’s what’s going to happen,” he says, “but a lot of people aren’t prepared to accept the price of getting there.”
An industry in crisis
The B.C. forestry industry is suffering through what many believe are the worst financial times of its existence. Mills are closed, companies are bankrupt, workers are laid off and fleeing to other trades.
Net earnings for B.C. coastal forestry companies, in millions of dollars
1990 -9
1991 -869
1992 -262
1993 520
1994 1,360
1995 1,280
1996 -290
1997 -132
1998 -1.057
1999 923
2000 NA
2001 -90
2002 -44
2003* -95
2004 -47
2005 -125
2006 -164
*As of May, 2003
CARRIE COCKBURN/ THE GLOBE AND MAIL; SOURCE: COAST FOREST PRODUCTS ASSOCIATION
Filed under: BC, Canada, Jordan River/WFP, Vancouver Island
