Jack Knox, Times Colonist
So, what’s the difference between B.C.’s Liberals and Steven “Yeah, it’s cocaine” Page, the lead singer of the Barenaked Ladies?
Confronted with the evidence, police said, Page admitted the truth.
The Liberals, on the other hand, bleated and blustered with all the wounded indignation of a guilty man when faced with the auditor general’s report into the way they had messed up the Western Forest Products file.
In fact, making a mess of forestry on Vancouver Island is nothing new for the Liberals, whose record falls somewhere between helplessly feeble and downright scandalous.
They can argue, with justification, that government can do nothing about the global economy that drives the industry. But that doesn’t mean corporate interests should get priority over those of Vancouver Islanders, as happened with the Western Forest Products decision and others that resulted in raw logs and jobs racing each other to the U.S. and China.
It raises a question to which I don’t know the answer: How many jobs does Vancouver Island have to lose before it’s just not worth cutting down the forest anymore?
The justification for logging is that it provides employment, lots of it. It has been B.C.’s traditional trade-off: We lose our best forests but get food on the table, money in the till, plenty of taxes for roads and school and hospitals and all the other advantages of an industrial society that we take as our birthright.
Except now many of those jobs have disappeared, and we’re still chopping down trees like crazy, current doldrums notwithstanding. A report by forest researcher Ben Parfitt says the pace of private-land logging on southern Vancouver Island increased 22 per cent between 2003 and 2007.
The provincial government used to demand that timber be milled in the area in which it was logged, ensuring jobs went with the wood. It was the New Democrats who killed that policy when they allowed TimberWest to abandon its Youbou sawmill in 2001, which employed 225 people. Over time, integrated companies that used to cut down trees, mill them into lumber and make pulp and paper, were broken up.
The B.C. coast lost 40 per cent of its sawmilling jobs in the 1990s. Vancouver Island alone has lost several big operations since 2001. The Tahsis sawmill was finally declared dead that year. Doman’s Chemainus plant closed in 2002. The Field mill in Courtenay was dismantled a couple of years ago. Nanaimo’s Island Phoenix disappeared in 2006. TimberWest closed its Campbell River sawmill this May, with the loss of 257 jobs.
In fact, just seven decent-sized sawmills remain on all of Vancouver Island, most running at less than capacity.
Without the sawmills, there’s no sawdust and residual wood waste for the pulp and paper industry. The lack of sawdust doomed Catalyst’s Elk Falls pulp operation in Campbell River, which will close in November at a loss of 440 jobs; a similar number work on Elk Falls’ paper machines, though only two of three are running.
Another 82 jobs, close to 10 per cent of the workforce, were cut this year at Catalyst’s Crofton pulp and paper mill. The company’s Port Alberni operation, which way back in yellow-brick-road times employed 1,500, is down to 340 workers turning out the paper that goes into Rolling Stone magazine.
Nanaimo’s Harmac pulp mill shut down in May, taking 500 jobs with it. It’s been a decade since the Gold River pulp mill went under, at a loss of 380 positions. On the north Island, that leaves Neucel’s Port Alice back-from-the-dead cellulose mill, employing close to 400.
That’s all we have left: seven sawmills, a pulp and paper industry slowly dying of starvation and a land base being logged off at an unsustainable rate, with the timber destined for export and much of the land turned over for real-estate development — working forest lost forever.
It would be nice to listen to the Liberals explain how this is in the public interest, or at least in the interest of that portion of the public that does not hold shares in certain logging companies. Alas, all we’ve heard is self-serving political bluster.
Filed under: BC, Canada, Jordan River/WFP, Vancouver Island
