Industry and Trades

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Industry PG 18

TRADES

MINING SIMULATOR ExclusivE iNtErviEw

WOMEN IN MINING PG A COUPLE OF 07 PERSPECTIVES

WITh CANfOR PRESIdENT ANd CEO

PG DON KAYNE 16

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Table of COntents Page 4 Women in mining: A couple of perspectives….......................................................... Page 7 Chief Louie – Indian Business........................................................................................ Page 8 Canfor Pulp AGM…....................................................................................................... Page 12 RBC turns 100................................................................................................................. Page 14 Exclusive intreview with Canfor President and CEO Don Kayne…..................... Page 16 Canfor announces major local investment.............................................................. Page 17 Mining simulator…....................................................................................................... Page 18 Home brew....................................................................................................................Page 20 Winery plans…............................................................................................................. Page 25 Geoscience BC gets funding....................................................................................... Page 27 Trelle Morrow’s Big Smoke…..................................................................................... Page 30 Women in mining............................................................................................................

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Citizen photo by Frank PEEBLES

Part of the training youth receive in school districts across the province – in programs pioneered by Vanderhoof instructors – is hands-on operation of machinery, under the supervision of industry professionals.

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4 Citizen photo by Frank PEEBLES

Professional geologist Kim Foubister is living the positive realities of new equalities for women in the mining industry, but she and husband Robin, also a P.Geo. are nonetheless seeing the obstacles still placed by the industry on family aspirations.

WOMEN MINING IN

Frank Peebles Citizen Staff While miners are out exploring for minerals and metals, mining companies are out exploring for women to do more of that work. The old assumptions about women being too family orientated to be dependable field workers is being put in its place by two major factors underneath that patriarchal assumption: it turns out men, too, want to be attentive parents and not be dislocated from family for prolonged periods; and it turns out women bring several assets to the industrial workplace both on the ground and in the board room.

Since these are new data-sets for society and entire industrial sectors to come to terms with, the dialogue was hastened with a public panel discussion at the Minerals North Conference. Moderator Christine Ogryzlo (communications director for the Smithers Exploration Group) started the discussion with an emblematic paradox: in B.C., the composition of the overall labour force is 60 per cent female yet in the mining industry it is only 16 per cent female.

“There are a million different jobs and a million ways to take part in the mining industry. We’re not all geologists and mine engineers,” Ogryzlo said.

“I have broken rocks for a living but now I work at Geoscience BC where I consult with people who break rocks,” said Andrea Clifford, a profes-

sional geologist with field experience as widespread as Colombia and Greenland but is now involved in the provincial effort to gather baseline data for all land-use interests. “When I get into conversations about the field I do get nostalgic for it, and I have had to learn communication skills that were not automatically easy for me to pick up, but I can do that from a place of knowing exactly what it’s like to live in a tent for two months at a time, going into the lake for your only shower opportunity, contending with all the bugs, taking lots of till samples, and being involved in the strategic hunt for the values you’re looking for. That is irreplaceable background.”

Lori Seymore is also accruing that empirical knowledge, but she has no intentions of changing career paths. She loves driving the massive mining trucks on-site where the digging is happening.

She is looking forward to her next project, the Red Chris Mine.

“I know there is a big push to hire female heavy equipment operators,” she said. “Apparently we have better fine motor skills for doing the work, and we tend to look out for our fellow employees and take care of our equipment a lot better.

That saves lives and it saves the company a lot of money on the safety side and the equipment repair side.”

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6 Story continued from page 4 The one evolution of her job she doesn’t mind is being asked to teach new drivers and help set up the trucks for the worksite, just as long as she still gets to still take the wheel herself.

Danielle Smythe didn’t consider herself a part of the mining industry. She was focused on the education industry, but after a productive early career with UNBC she became a senior administrator with Northwest Community College, and her focus was NWCC’s School of Exploration and Mining. Voila.

She had become a member – and an important one – of the mining sector.

“What the school does is match community needs with industry’s labour needs including the skills that make them useful employees and progressive people,” she said. “What we deal with on a daily basis is sustainability: companies that make good profits, so employees and their families and their communities have a fulfilling existence, while we protect our environmental values for a longterm future for the companies and families and communities. I love being a part of that challenge and the changes we can effect in people’s lives and for companies.”

While mining’s B.C. future looks bright, for women in particular now that leaders and favourable data-sets are emerging, the past still has an

influence and it was not a welcome place in time for women. Sue Craig, a veteran B.C. geologist and part of AuRico Gold’s development team for the Kemess Underground project north of Prince George, said she stopped including the word “married” on her resume because she noticed it was an impediment to employment. And on job sites she would get comments about who was looking after her husband if she was out at the mine site.

Now, she is also part of the mining industry’s executive corpse, and she is no longer the only woman on any given job site. She has even seen an all-woman crew at one point in her recent career.

“We did not set out to hire females, but we had women at all roles in the company and it amounted to 50 per cent of the workforce and 60 per cent of the payroll,” Craig said. “All of those people got hired because they were qualified.”

Seymore said she has never seen, at least recently, any instances of payment or performance expectation prejudices between women and men doing the same job. But there is still a veil between women and the field-focused mining industry and it looks a lot like children and like being available as a parent.

“I’m not talking about employers discriminating against women over being a mom, I’m talking about moms who don’t even apply for jobs they are qualified for. They might not even look at trying for those jobs they are interested in because the

INDUSTRY AND TRADES situation doesn’t look like a good fit for the family side of their lives, and that could change, there are ways of helping that, if the industry wants those jobs filled,” Seymore said.

Clifford said she has seen babies right out in the bush on geology jobs, but when the kids are toddlers there are few provisions for them.

There are already examples, and not new ones, of companies in B.C. bending their worksites to the needs of families, said Peter Ogryzlo, husband to Christine and a senior geologist with a number of ventures over his career, most recently at Huckleberry Mine and once with the former Bell Copper Mine near Granisle. It was there, he said, that drastic measures had to be taken.

“Bell was one of the first to hire women but not because they were progressive – because they had such a labour crisis,” he said. “There was so much available employment in the region at that time that the monthly turnover was sometimes 100 per cent. People would sometimes work only a few days then leave for another job. We know that women are effective, and in some cases much better, on the mine site and I see labour shortages on the horizon again, so I think you’re going to have mining companies being innovative again about how they include women, parents, all kinds of people. They will have to.”

He said there are now people like Sue Craig in

senior mine management. There is a growing army of women in the general labour force, but where the impasse is still painful is middle management. Once women break into a significant number of those roles, all gender gaps will be more quickly filled, he predicted.

Smythe calls that hole in the industry “a fantastic opportunity” for the many in junior positions or in related fields to step across and take those management positions as they come open, as well as positions on mining companies’ boards of directors.

“There is a momentum around supporting women in mining that is growing in an exciting way,” she said. “For me, it is an exciting time in this industry. I feel a buzz out there.”

Seymore put the call out to women to think about some of the key benefits of working in a mine or exploration camp – things men have been party to for years. “You don’t have to shop for groceries, you don’t have to do any cooking, you don’t have to do the dishes, you can go to the gym, you have time to take a course online, it is like a break from your regular life.”

Most of these jobs also provide a slate of benefits – pensions, medical, dental, etc. – that many professions dominated by females do not provide.

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES

WOMEN IN MINING

A COUPLE oF

PERSPECTIVES

Robin and Kim Foubister are both professional miners. Each of them is a professional geologist working for New Gold Inc.’s Blackwater gold mine exploration effort south of Vanderhoof.

This husband-and-wife team loves the profession and relishes the combination of outdoor adventures and active science. They are part eco-detectives trying to read the landscape’s signs and part laboratory experimenters testing for signs of copper, gold, whatever resides under the surface.

“I never had a struggle getting into the industry. The struggle is to stay in the industry and have a lifetime career,” said Kim. “it is hard to be a shift worker and be away from a family, but I think that’s true of men or women, it’s just that men have traditionally been the ones expected to make those sacrifices of time with your spouse and children while women were expected to sacrifice the time in a great job. And I still see that struggle. The worries I have do not yet have solutions. Mining companies are making their rotations shorter, there is better connectivity through technology, but true solutions are not there yet.”

Robin is an anomaly, he said. He was gone from the industry and is now re-entering the field. “You have to get up to speed on changes in policies and technologies,” he said. “It isn’t common to leave and come back.”

Should he and Kim decide to start a family, he fears that would cause him and/or Kim to suffer from even subliminal discrimination in the Human Resources office of any given mining company.

“I really enjoy my career. I would hate for the industry to pass over our applications because

they see we have a family. I’d be worried that a company would think I wouldn’t be as dedicated or available if I had kids. And I don’t know anyone who has been through that to act as a mentor.”

“

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Frank Peebles Citizen Staff

I never had a struggle getting into the industry.

The struggle is to stay in the industry and have a lifetime career.

“Are companies even having that discussion, about how they are going to accommodate workers with families?,” wondered Kim. “What mechanisms are being built to allow for women to be hired for your jobsite, or for people to come back into the industry after time away no matter what the reason was? It is hard for us to even consider starting a family when you are faced with that kind of job uncertainty.”

It isn’t easy to qualify for a professional geologist’s certification, so when credentialed and experienced ones are ousted from the profession due to something as commonplace and primal as having a child. The Foubisters wondered out loud how successful companies would be with a young, high turnover force of field workers lacking the practical knowledge and experience, when plenty of skilled geologists were available, if a little innovation was applied to allow for family miners to fully participate in the hunt for pay-dirt.

Photo from Thinkstock

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Business-savvy aboriginal leader Chief Clarence Louie imparts lessons to northern industrialists learned from the successes of his Osoyoos Indian Band. Lesson one: partner with your First Nations or your proposed projects will likely have a rough ride.

Chief Louie

INDIAN BUSINESS

Frank Peebles Citizen Staff

Even before the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that First Nations had to give consent to land-use projects on their traditional territories, one of Canada’s most business savvy aboriginal leaders was warning that the old days were over of bypassing the historic residents.

Chief Clarence Louie and his Osoyoos Indian Band have grown wealthy and powerful by embracing the principles of economy and enterprise. He was named to the Order of BC and proclaimed by Maclean’s Magazine as “One of the Top 50 Canadians to Watch” in the process.

“I love creating jobs. That’s the No. 1 thing I like to do,” he said, explaining that any elected leader needed to think “if I’m collecting a paycheque on behalf of you, it is up to me to repay that by using my position to get other people working, collecting their own paycheques.”

To live out this philosophy he had to go against the fed-

eral departments that claimed jurisdiction over his band. He called out the Indian Act and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada as being institutionally mandated on behalf of mainstream Canadians to oppress First Nations.

“We are at the table,” said Louie to a crowd of mostly mining executives at the Minerals North Conference in Vanderhoof where he was a keynote speaker. “Wherever you go in Canada, you are on somebody’s traditional territory. Non-native people, even the Prime Minister, are starting to realize, your experiments didn’t work. Trying to kill the Indian inside the Indian didn’t work.

Colonization didn’t work. We are not wards of the government.”

Certainly the Osoyoos model isn’t reflective of the post-colonial stereotype. Louie’s nation owns a gas station, convenience store, spa, resort, vineyards, winery, RV park, conference centre, golf course, and many other ventures. Auto racing star Jacques Villeneuve just signed on to develop a country club for car racing enthusiasts.

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES “We are creating those jobs because white people are hording their opportunities,” Louie said. “Nobody can b.s. me that racism isn’t alive and well in today’s society. Have you seen the unemployment rates on reserves right beside towns? If it happened once you could maybe say there was something wrong with those people on the reserve, but it is absolutely everywhere. The town has it’s unemployment rate, and the reserve has its much worse rate. Those rates of unemployment on reserves exceed the Great Depression. The Carrier Sekani wish they had the unemployment rates of the Great Depression. That’s a sad wish. Whatever the unemployment rate is in Vanderhoof, that’s what the unemployment rate should be on Saik’uz Reserve [next door]. That’s the measure of the relationship.”

Louie stated flatly even before the landmark decision on June 26 that established First Nations veto rights to government or industrial activities over their traditional territories, he was already blocking any new developments from occurring that didn’t have Osoyoos Indian Band prior permission. He encouraged other First Nations to do the same.

“We aren’t stakeholders in our traditional territories,” he said. “We are the rights-holders to our territories. And the myth the white man keeps telling himself is, those rights were given to the federal government at some point along the way. No. At no time were aboriginal rights ceded to Canada, and now it is coming out in court that we were right about that. We always knew it, but now white people are finally telling each other through their courts that aboriginal title was actually never handed over.”

Louie pointed to his track record of economic development and business success. It radiates across the communities of Osoyoos and Oliver and beyond, not just confined to his people’s reserves. Be happy that aboriginal title is being recognized, he told the industrialists in the room, because it shows the way to his door or the doors of the First Nations on which you wish to work, and you can knock on those doors with your ideas.

“The fact is, if you include Indian people in the economy, you will find it stimulates more business. Or you can try to do it yourself, and

“

that’s a ticking time bomb,” he said. “We have the rights we always said we did.

So be our business partners. I had a mentor in business who told me, never do anything without a feasibility study. You see, we get asked to do some pretty wacky stuff, and we have done some pretty wacky stuff. But business is risk.

I don’t care if you’re Donald Trump or Jimmy Pattison, you’re going to have failures. You have to be diverse, you have to look at new ideas, you have to look to the youth, and the diverse interests of your people. Do a proper feasibility study on all ideas.”

A mine or logging operation, a pipeline or a highway that doesn’t include the factor of aboriginal partnership has not done a complete feasibility study, he said. And to other First Nations he said that holding your own heads under the federal government’s water was not passing the feasibility study criteria either.

“Until your own band itself generates its income, you can’t send your young people to school,” he said. “If you depend on the crumbs the government wants you to live on, you’ll never get what you need. Most university graduates are from middle- and upper-class households. We don’t see middle-class incomes on a lot of reserves at all. You have to create those yourself.”

Free enterprise is not the invention of the white man, he suggested. It is a natural condition of the world, especially in business. He said there were those within the Osoyoos Indian Band who felt they should coast now, and do no more development. Louie was adamant that this would hurt the band in the end.

“One thing about business: there is no finish line,” he said. “When we give out our annual per capita dividend, they all take their cheque. And they all take part in band programs. Someone had to pay for those, and it was through business. It’s how you develop as a community.”

The invitation was there, he said, to do business not specifically with the Osoyoos Indian Band, but to partner with those First Nations of your area with your local ideas. The price of not doing so could be quite expensive.

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You have to be diverse, you have to look at new ideas, you have to look to the youth, and the diverse interests of your people.

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES

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Canfor PulP AGM

It was a banner year for Canfor’s pulp operations. With strong prices and healthy market penetration helping the bottom line, one of Prince George’s most important industries got to smile at the end of 2013.

Canfor’s pulp division president Brett Robinson said their Prince George Pulp Mill location “broke production records” last year thanks to a new precipitator installed there and excellent staff performance at the plant. That investment also helped airshed residents breathe easier by “substantially reducing particulate emissions while increasing power production capacity.”

In addition to being a leading producer of Northern Bleached Softwood Kraft (NBSK) for the world market at Canfor’s trio of manufacturing plants in Prince George, the facilities also have power generation capabilities, making them, said Robinson, “North America’s largest bioenergy producer.”

He said more than $300 million had been spent by Canfor in the past 36

months on major new equipment within their pulp and paper operations items like two turbo-generators at their Northwood site.

“The equipment is performing better than we expected,” he said. A more energy-efficient and production-smooth pulp mill means a better product gets built and more of it gets made. That has been the case in Prince George.

Despite weather-related transportation problems (affecting rail cargo logistics) and the truckers’ strike at the Port of Vancouver, the company still had strong financial returns this year. Canfor’s CEO Don Kayne said the company’s pulp operations still managed to ship four per cent more in 2013 than in 2012, and the pulp group closed the year with net income of $42 million compared to a mere $13 million the year before.

“Global softwood pulp markets improved steadily through 2013 driven by improving demand from our traditional markets, specifically Europe and North America, while demand from China was relatively even year-over-year,” said Kayne.

Robinson said analysts have been predicting softer commodity prices in the next couple of years, but he thinks the Prince George pulp houses will be largely immune to that pain.

“We like to point out that the world’s NBSK sector is producing at capacity, there are not a lot of reserves being held anywhere, no one is building a new NBSK plant anytime soon, and market demand for that premium product continues to grow - and we produce it really well,” he said.

He also pointed to trends in the recycled paper market that stand to benefit Canfor’s pulp division in the long term.

Studies are showing that paper made from recycled fibre “is declining in strength as the molecular condition of the recycled product is weakening,” he said.

The overall pulp and paper industry will be looking to refresh the supply with younger products being fed into the manufacturing system of recycled paper.

“NBSK is the strongest fibre in the world.”

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CAREERS

RBC TURNS 100

Frank Peebles Citizen Staff

ABOVE LEFT: Photo courtesy of RBC (Prince George Main Branch)

The original building of RBC in Prince George as it was in 1934.

ABOVE RIGHT: Citizen photo by Brent BRAATEN

The RBC Tower where the Main Branch is located today.

A business can only survive if it has good people. So imagine the world-class people a business must have in order to last 100 years in Prince George. The Royal Bank of Canada - RBC - marks their local centennial this year. It was the industry and trades sector that boosted their profile here and literally changed the city’s skyline.

“I used to work for the Royal Bank in Toronto and Kamloops and I did a transfer to Prince George in 1968 when the big new branch opened [the office tower on Victoria Street],” said BettyJune “BJ” Gair. “There were already three branches there at the time, but this one would be bigger and more of a corporate focus to handle the new pulp mills.”

Another with long connections to RBC is Donna Currie. She’s been happy to come to work at her Prince George office for nearly 40 years.

Her first day of work was June 13, 1977. She had just been named the top stenographer student of the year at PGSS. “I didn’t think this was a long term career for me when I started, fresh out of high school,” she said. “In fact I had to ask for an afternoon off so I could go to my PGSS grad ceremonies. I joined into their stenographer typing pool. When you’d get to work in the morning you’d have a drawer full of folders. A personal loans officer might have a letter they’d dictated on dictaphone and I would transcribe it.”

After graduating from her entry level job at the 3rd Avenue and Quebec Street branch, she worked at the Victoria Street main branch directly for the company’s senior managers like John Goodwin, Bill Edmonds, Art Robin and Terry Kehler, and Assistant, Sheila Ireland. Then for 18 years it was Terry’s brother, Don Kehler she

worked for until his recent retirement. She then went to work for Sean Kehler, Terry’s son and Don’s nephew.

When Currie started her own family, accommodations were made by RBC management so she could work at the pace of her parenting.

“My father [an orchardist in Vernon] told all of us kids, if you want to be successful, you move north. And our family has all done well here. We love it here,” said Gair. She only left the banking sector when her brother’s business ventures [Northway Electric, Lakewood Electric, then Westcana Electric] needed her administrative leadership. She has been one of the community’s top volunteers and most recognizable boosters ever since, even earning Citizen of the Year finalist status last year.

Through it all, she has remained loyal to RBC. She still has Safety Deposit Box No. 13 and she still has her original 1968 bank account.

Both Gair and Currie place high value on RBC’s community involvement. Currie played a large organizational role in the annual client reception parties, and she rolled up her volunteer sleeves for initiatives like the 2007 Royal Bank Cup national Junior A hockey tournament, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Torch Relay festivities, and is now volunteering for the upcoming 2015 Canada Winter Games.

“I’ve had choices over the years. I could have gone to work at another bank and other opportunities, but the thought honestly didn’t cross my mind,” Donna said.

While Gair and Currie reluctantly admit they probably won’t be around for RBC’s 200th anniversary party, they are proud to be here for the centennial celebrations so they can applaud the company that has been so vital to their community and their own happy times in Prince George.

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An Industry & Trades

INDUSTRY AND TRADES

Exclusive Interview

with

Canfor president and CEO Don Kayne Frank Peebles Citizen Staff

During Canfor’s second visit to Prince George in as many years to hold the corporation’s Annual General Meeting, company CEO Don Kayne spent some ‘rapid-fire’ time answering questions for these pages.

I&T: In the next 24 months or so, how do things look for the lumber markets in the United States and in China?

DK: Firstly in terms of the North American market, we see some good signs of late that the markets in the U.S. are starting to improve.

We still believe the best way to approach it is with caution over the next 12 to 18 months at least. We think we will no doubt start to see some housing start improvements and some

improvement in the employment situation down there, but we think it wise to still be a bit cautious over that time frame. In terms of our company, we view that the starts next year to be in the vicinity of just about a million or just over a million starts.

In terms of China, again, China had a bit of a slow start this year, largely due, though, to the transportation issues and logistics issues that we faced in the Port of Vancouver with the independent truckers’ strike and also with rail car capacity. That seems to be improving a lot.

We are confident that the government in China is addressing some of the [lumber importation and timber construction] issues there aggressively and that should pay for itself long-term.

This year, though, we expect to be at or close to our numbers from 2013.

I&T: How goes the consolidations of the Quesnel and Houston operations? [in 2013 Canfor and West Fraser announced that they would each close the smaller of their mills and focus on the stronger of their mills in the two Central Interior towns, including swapping harvesting rights, in order to spare each company the last negative effects of the mountain pine beetle epidemic.]

DK: In terms of Houston, we think the transition has gone well. We will be improving the sawmill even further than it is today, and the planer too for that matter. We’re going ahead with that, and we are really pleased there.

In terms of [the closure in] Quesnel, we’ve been able to look after a good number of the employees within our own operations across

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES t h e province. We’ve also tried to help as many as we could for those who chose to stay in the Quesnel community. There are always a certain number we lose anyway through attrition – retirements and whatnot. Overall I’d have to say it’s been a pretty good process.

I&T: How is your company’s business plan responding to your new sawmilling operations in the Kootenays? [Canfor now has four spruce-pine-fir dimension lumber mills in that region: Elko, Canal Flats, Vavenby and Radium – including restarting the newly renovated Radium operation that had been closed for years, and the purchase of Tembec Industries in 2012 giving Canfor a boost of more than 1 million cubic metres of annual allowable cut.]

DK: The Kootenays, absolutely, we are excited to be down there. That’s a new area we’re in, in a pretty big position. We think there is tremendous

upside there. We love the location; we love the fiber; we love the access to markets. And there is some opportunity there in terms of value-added type products that come with a solid, world-class fiber base.

I&T: What are Canfor’s latest feelings on area-based tenure, currently a moving issue with the provincial government?

DK: Area-based tenure is a topic here of late that from our standpoint – we’ve been saying this for two years – we are not opposed to TFLs [Tree Farm Licenses] and area-based tenure at all. Matter of fact, we’re supportive of it on a longterm basis. We just think there’s a couple things – a couple of priorities that need to be addressed first. And then we think that the process has to be transparent.

It has to be at a length that we can do adequate due diligence into it. We think right now the timeframes are a bit tight.

And of course that’s important, with the social license we’re operating with. We think we need to make sure that occurs.

July 2014

CANFOR ANNOUNCES

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MAJOR LOCAL INVESTMENT

For the second year in a row, Canfor came to Prince George for its annual general meeting events.

The forestry giant held the AGM for its pulp interests during morning sessions followed by the lumber side of the corporation in afternoon sessions. Part of the public discussion of company business was a major investment announcement specifically for Prince George.

“Last year we held our annual general meeting in Prince George to mark the 75th anniversary of our company. We had such a warm welcome, we decided to come back,” said Canfor’s CEO Don Kayne. “2013 was our first AGM in Prince George, and it was the start of a very special year for Canfor. Throughout the year, we held events to celebrate our 75th anniversary in all of our operating communities.”

Coming back to Prince George for this year’s set of board meetings and AGM events is more than symbolic, said one senior official.

“The employment is here, the biggest bioenergy producer in North America is here and that’s our operation, and our fibre supply - our dowry - is here,” said former Prince George resident Brett Robinson, now president of Canfor Pulp Products Inc. “The draw-

back is, the AGM is not attended by as many people involved in the banking industry, the analysts, the people involved in global trading, all those support service companies involved in our operations but what you do have is the heart of your business. You have the employees, a lot of shareholders are here, and it’s close to the real action for both the pulp side and the lumber side.”

Canfor’s officials used the occasion to describe the investments being made in company equipment, facilities, and other major tooling so productivity is improved - about $850 million since 2010.

At the top of the list outlined on Wednesday was a big-ticket item for the Prince George economy.

“Just yesterday, we received approval from our capital committee to proceed with two new significant investments which I am pleased to announce today,” said Kayne. The first: “At our Polar facility in Bear Lake [half an hour’s drive north of Prince George] we will invest over $30 million to improve recovery and enable diversification into higher-value products, as well as replace the existing sawmill building.”

They will also pump $6 million into their Fort St. John sawmill’s log yard stabilization project.

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Mining simulator Frank Peebles Citizen Staff

Citizen photo by Frank PEEBLES

New Gold Inc.’s heavy equipment simulator teaches young people in school and new employment prospects the basics of operating equipment found on mine sites.

New Gold’s Blackwater site manager John Nicholls helps the participants use the virtual reality tool.

Playing a video game is not the same as performing a task in real life, but a simulation system for driving heavy equipment can go a long way to train up-andcoming machinery operators.

New Gold Inc., the mining company aggressively exploring the Mount Davidson area near Vanderhoof under the working title Blackwater project, has purchased a mobile training centre outfitted with screens and cockpit controls for a variety of machines common to the mining worksite. The simulator will be used to give teens and potential employees a chance to test out the basics of the equipment.

“The graphics are really good for training purposes, and the controls are exactly the same as the actual machinery,” said John Nicholls, New Gold’s manager at the Blackwater site. He laughed that he had to be trained to use the simulator at Thompson Rivers University, so he left the actual machines behind to go to video game school, and now he was reverse

engineering the situation to attract new people to the heavy industry professions.

“This teaches someone the controls – the ways to use the steering mechanism,” Nicholls explained. “The details like how the pressure on the dirt feels, that has to be learned with the actual machines, but if someone on the simulator it really cuts down on how much machine time you need before you’re mastering it. It also spares a $2 million piece of equipment the wear and tear of someone banging around getting the hang of all the controls. They get that in here.”

A set of Grade 11 students from Nechako Valley Secondary was all around Nicholls as he paced through the trailer making sure the youth were not only succeeding behind the wheel of each virtual machine, but having fun as they got the hang of it.

Outside, the same class had a chance to apply the virtual experience to the real thing, with a number of work stations where small equipment like a backhoe and a skid-steer tractor were available. School District 91 career and trades co-ordinator Darren Carpenter was overseeing the exercise held during

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES this year’s Minerals North Conference in Vanderhoof.

“This follows the district model of providing hands-on experience to real trades professions,” Carpenter said. “You can talk about it, give them lessons and books to read, but when you actually touch it, that’s where the most effective learning is. Hopefully when they are done here, they are a little bit more worldly in their views and cognizant of their choices.”

It was School District 91 that championed trades training at the hands-on level. While Prince George has Heavy Metal Rocks and other districts have done similar programs, where donated equipment and supervisors are set up for a day or two of high school try-outs, this concept was done first in Vanderhoof in the Project Heavy Duty program years ago. Still leading the way, that program is now being expanded to elementary schools and Burns Lake schools have a Mining 11 course developed by SD91 staff.

The proximity of New Gold Inc.’s new heavy equipment simulator will dovetail into what the school district has been working on for years.

“It is the only portable simulator in B.C.,” said

Tim Bekhuys, director of environment and sustainability at New Gold, who gave partnership credit to the Aboriginal Mentoring and Training Association. “We invested in this equipment because we heard from northern communities, First Nations communities, rural communities, that we had to go to them if we wanted to tap into the labour forces and human resources available in those places. Mine sites are too far away. If you want to engage kids early on, or any new candidates, they are not ever going to get a sense of what mining is unless you bring something to them that has some kind of hands-on meaning. And I can see this simulator already working. These kids are certainly grabbing hold of the controls a lot faster than I would.”

With an expected Blackwater Project workforce of 500 operations employees and 1,200 to 1,500 construction workers, New Gold is committed to hiring and contracting locally whenever possible.

“We know career decisions are made based on early influences,” said Bekhuys. “Bringing the simulator to Minerals North provided youth with hands-on experience and introduced them to new career opportunities close to home.”

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HOME BREW Story on page 22

Photo from Thinkstock

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES Frank Peebles Citizen Staff

Citizen photos by Frank PEEBLES

The modern do-it-yourself brewer can make beer with simple tools like an Erlenmeyer flask, laptop and smartphone app.

Major industry almost always starts with a small business gesture. The largest mine started with a prospector tramping around in the bush.

Commercial bakeries started with someone at home taking bread out of the household oven.

Ranches and crop farms started with a couple of cows and a garden.

There aren’t any 1,000-litre kettles being installed anytime soon, but in a garage in a neat subdivision in Lower College Heights, a couple of guys are “mashing in” and “laundering the wort” in search of just the right recipe for beer.

Colin Breadner and Martin Woons are the proprietors of Pulp City Brewery, even though the brewery is little more than a chemistry set and some big buckets. The two are not yokels with a hankering for barley sandwiches, though. Both are businessmen, both are trained in commercial kitchens, and they have been buddies for decades, first trying their hand at home-brew beer kits then discovering how to bulk order commercialgrade base ingredients, and now at the point of having a couple of flavours they can call their own.

“We keep trying new recipes. Every batch, usually there is something different about it. It’s all over the map, looking for that perfect result,” said Woons.

“We are looking for one recipe we know will be acceptable to a larger market,” said Breadner.

“Most of your sales will come from one beer, and your other flavours, the other lines you sell, those are subsidiary to that.”

They have a Belgian Wit and a California Common they both enjoy, their friends on the market testing team like them, but it is not yet clear to them if one of those will be their primary brand or if another from their experimentation phase will take the lead. The popularity of their recipes are making their friends and families salivate, so they know they are on the right track.

“We brewed our last two batches intending to have two brews for summer. Yeah. I think we have two bottles left,” said Breadner.

So back they have to go to the brewing process. The main feature of this is a Rubbermaid supersize cooler with the factory spigot swapped out for a steel valve and a hot water tank hose. Eventually, the active liquid will end up in here. First, though, the base ingredients have to be cooked together, the key addition

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being yeast.

“You put it on here [a temperature-steady hot plate] for a couple of days. It gets the yeast all happy and awake, so when you throw it in, it is going to go at it really aggressively,” Breadner said.

“There’s a lot of difference between a live, active yeast than a dormant yeast,” Woons said.

Grain and hops are the other two staple additions to the recipe. They crush the grain themselves by hand. They also filter the water they use (it is not distilled). All their equipment is routinely sanitized.

They also head a large amount of water up to 190 degrees, pour it into that modified Rubbermade tub, they wait until the temperature drops to 159, they add in the grain, which plummets the temperature down to somewhere in between 152 to 148 degrees, and that’s where they hold it. The temperature of this mash has a direct effect on the body of the beer at the end of the assembly line.

They move on to a two-step “batch sparge” grain rinse process which Breadner said “basically rinses the sugars out of the grain,” and Woons added” it ups you efficiency an gets you maximum value for your batch.”

There is a certain amount of waiting around for the chemical reactions to happen in the organic porridge. They use that down time to prepare the next step in the system, or to kick back and watch episodes of Brew Dogs for insbeeration.

The process requires a hardware list that is specific, but not difficult to obtain. Their operation has that modified cooler (they sourced the parts and did the modifications themselves), four fermentors, a stir-plate, two big kitchen pots like you’d use for major pasta meals or big stews, some assorted flasks and measuring cups, a propane heater, the grain crusher… They estimated they have invested about $1,000 in that stuff, plus more than a dozen books and some field research.

If there is anywhere any home brewer with aspirations wants to go it is Oregon.

Combinations of complementary agriculture (especially hops crops), government support, and historical factors all conspired to make Oregon the Mecca for independent breweries.

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I’m not the kind of guy who feels the need to make a million dollars out of this. I’d just like to see some great tasting, locally made beer out there making people happy.

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES Proximity to Oregon and a shared s-beer-it for interesting brews has made B.C. one of the world’s fastest growing jurisdictions for craft brewers. The very largest of those – also one of the oldest – is Pacific Western Brewery in Prince George. While other notable indie brewers like Granville Island and Columbia-Kokanee have sold out to the nation’s major brewers (Molson’s and Labatt’s respectively), PWB is still a private company.

Smithers was home to the recently closed beer company Plan B Brewing (founded by Glen Ingram of Francois Lake and Mark Gillis of Vanderhoof / Prince George), Prince Rupert has recently opened Wheelhouse Brewing Company and Quesnel has seen the opening of Barkerville Brewing Company which has already won a national silver medal for its inaugural brand less than one year after opening.

“The big dream – I’m sure every home brewer has the dream – is to do it commercially. I’m not the kind of guy who feels the need to make a million dollars out of this. I’d just like to see some great tasting, locally made beer out there making people happy,” said Breadner. He said it was bad when a brewery gets too big, “because sooner or later your beer will be brewed by an accountant.”

Pulp City Brewery is still just a pile of receipts in a kitchen drawer. No accountants needed. But like a good batch of mash, once the sugars and yeasts start to engage, greatness can grow.

Woons and Breadner believe their business recipe is just about as close as their wort concoctions.

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Martin Woons (wearing toque) and Colin Breadner are proprietors of Pulp City Brewery, which is a home-based beermaking operation they hope to grow into a commercial venture.

Colin Breadner savours the visual qualities of the hand-crafted beer he and brew partner Martin Woons make under the Pulp City Brewing Company label.

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Winery PLans Frank Peebles Citizen Staff

The blueprints for Northern Lights Estate Winery have been revealed, and the development of the property approved by Prince George city council.

“Northern Lights Estate Winery (NLEW) received city council’s support in response to its development variance permit,” said operating partner Doug Bell.

The planned winery which is to be built at 746 PG Pulpmill Rd. will feature an orchard, a wine shop, and outdoor event facilities.

“This spectacular facility will highlight wood architectural features as well as a modern feel that will truly represent the Prince George area both past and present.

Pat Bell, development partner says “We want all of Prince George to

be proud of this winery, it will be a place where people will gather, celebrate and have those special moments.”

The planned winery will specialize in fruit wines made from onsite and primarily locally purchased hardy apples, haskap, gooseberry, hardy cherry, raspberry, black current, and rhubarb.

“The Facility will be built approximately 30 meters from the Nechako River and overlook a beautiful orchard,” said Bell. “Thanks to city councils decision the facility should be constructed in 2014 and will be available to the public by summer of 2015.”

Before there can be Northern Lights wine there must first be northern leaves. From the leaves and flowers will come fruit. From the fruit will come the north’s first commercially produced estate vino. Bell and his partner, father Pat Bell, recently installed

Renderings submitted by Northern Lights Estate Winery

Artists rendering of the planned winery, which is to be built on PG Pulpmill Rd.

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES more than 2,200 of those initial trees and shrubs at the base of the cutbanks.

Apple wine will be one of the priority wines produced by Northern Lights Estate Winery.

Two-year-old Goodland and Honey Crisp trees were the first to be planted, in anticipation of fruit production two more years from now.

“We relied heavily on the experience of Jos Van Hage [owner of Art Knapp’s Plantland], Karen Kellett [owner of Northern Farm Products Ltd. and Sweder Berries U-Pick] and [sustainable food advocate] Don Bassermann for a lot of our thinking around what to plant,” said Pat Bell.

He also pointed to another central figure in their startup agri-food business, their recently hired agriculture manager Noemie Touchette.

“Noemie is French Canadian, she got her degree from Laval University and her passion is cold weather agriculture and production in marginal climates,” he said. “We feel we were given a gift when she showed up. She is so knowledgeable we just do whatever she tells us.”

“They chose the varieties, but I know what to do to bring from these trees the greatest plant health and best yields,” said Touchette. “I’ll be working with soil nutrients, moisture levels, all the growing conditions.”

She is pouring herself into the job motivated by gratitude similar to what the Bells feel about her arrival on their threshold.

She is a five year veteran of evergreen production at PRT Red Rock seedling nursery, followed by three years on parental leave.

“I came to this area because of forestry, and I love this place for raising my family, I do not want to leave, so my goal was to jump on the best career I could in agriculture,” she said. “I knew there were not many professional agriculture positions in the region, but I had faith that something would come up. It’s like this job was written especially for me.”

In the meantime while the trees mature into fruit bearing plants, the winery has contracted other fruit and berry growers for their produce to service the wine making. Doug Bell said they would always need an intake from local growers.

“We see the opportunity for our operation to be the catalyst for fantastic expansion of agriculture capacity across the whole area,” Doug said. “Their growth plans and our growth plans will fit nicely together. The broader wine and agriculture industries have been incredibly supportive of our plans, and it seems that we will be complementary to the expansion of this region’s product possibilities.”

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Renderings submitted by Northern Lights Estate Winery

Artists rendering of the planned winery, which is to be built on PG Pulpmill Rd.

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GEOSCIENCE BC Gets Funding

Frank Peebles Citizen Staff New funding for Geoscience BC will be new money in the pockets of northern British Columbians in particular.

Entire communities have multi-million-dollar economic injections already underway thanks to this unique public agency, northern ones specifically, and the provincial government’s new commitment of financial input gave a bright outlook to more of that.

With Geoscience BC officials Robin Archdekin (president and CEO) and Andrea Clifford (project manager and communications manager) in the room, B.C.’s Minister of Energy and Mines Bill Bennett took the stage at the Minerals North conference and trade show in Vanderhoof and announced a $3 million operating grant to Canada’s only arm’s length agency devoted to collecting baseline geological data for the benefit of all land-use stakeholders.

“It’s quite extraordinary. There is no question there is a linkage between the record investment in mining exploration the last couple of years and the work Geoscience BC has done [since it was invented in 2005]” said Bennett.

“New Gold’s Blackwater project (a proposed gold mine near Vanderhoof) and the Huckleberry Mine expansion (near Burns Lake / Houston) are two good examples of how it benefits all of us.

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Story continued from page 26| When you look at Huckleberry, their data formed a lot of the information that led to the discovery of enough mineralization to carry on another 10 years at that site. That’s a decade’s worth of good-paying jobs for 100 employees and their families, and revenues shared by the province and the four First Nations of that area. That’s a lot of economic upside to one file Geoscience BC was involved on. So we think that $3 million of taxpayers’ money to Geoscience BC is one of the best possible examples of smart government investment.”

New Gold official Tim Bekhuys agreed.

“I have to say thank you for the work Geoscience BC has done,” he told the Minerals North audience. He said the Blackwater project “probably wouldn’t be in existence were it not for their data” but because of the information their baseline studies provided, New Gold embarked on one of the most aggressive exploration programs in Canadian mining history, pumping tens of millions of dollars into northern pockets especially in and around Vanderhoof.

Clifford said the benefits of their work were not just for the sake of a mining company. Environmental groups, First Nations, other

resource industry players, etc. all have free and equal access to the information Geoscience BC collects. Their data can be used to spare those various interests the massive costs of futile searching in areas found to be lacking in geological features, as much as pinpoint areas of particular interest.

It also takes the burden of raw data collection off of the private sector so mining and petroleum and other sectors can invest more precisely in the province.

Geoscience BC does this by collecting all known historical data from these regions of study (public information plus as much private information as companies will provide), plus deploys professional geologists and other needed scientists out into the field to gather earth and water samples for brand new analysis. All of it is held in a

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES public trove of information that may be useful in the decades and centuries ahead in ways no one can yet predict.

“We add value to existing data sets,” said Clifford, who is also a professional geologist herself. When it all gets put together into “some pretty intense software” and turned into maps, graphs and charts, “we can become one-stop shopping and hopefully used for vectoring new exploration.”

Archdekin said the negotiations with government were challenging because the taxpayer’s purse is tight these days. The $3 million is likewise accounted for closely, they are just grateful to have it.

“We were really pleased to have minister Bennett there at Minerals North to send this message,” Archdekin said. “He has always been a champion of Geoscience BC and we really value

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This investment is going to support new business opportunities and jobs. That is at the top of our minds once we collect our science.

his support. He said it well that Geoscience BC is part of attracting investment to B.C. and making a positive difference in the ongoing plans of the province. This investment is going to support new business opportunities and jobs. That is at the top of our minds once we collect our science.”

The bulk of their work is being done in the north, and a significant amount of it in the Central Interior where large tracts of land have never been seen by the drills, lasers, satellites and microscopes used by Geoscience BC, depending on what the study is for.

The future of the agency still hasn’t been established, though. Archdekin said this was clearly an issue they needed to address with government, but Bennett’s announcement was specifically in aid of those negotiations.

“This is interim funding while we work out together what the long-term funding formula is going to look like,” said Archdekin. “We are happy to have this, knowing they are committed to thinking about our long-term. In terms of this year and the projects we are involved in, this is a good amount. We are very happy with what they’ve given us.”

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Trelle Morrow’s BIG SMOKE

Frank Peebles Citizen Staff

The smoke has cleared from the Prince George air. The pungent sawmill clouds have almost dispersed into the mists of time, but local historical archaeologist Trelle Morrow has bottled some of the last foggy memories in a book explaining the significance of that icon of the industry - the beehive burner.

The Big Smoke was the none-too-affectionate nickname for Prince George in the heyday of the sawmilling industry. From the early to mid 20th century, hundreds of sawmills dotted the local landscape, and every one of them had a megafire in the iconic furnaces known as beehive burners.

Regardless of their size, or the volumes of timber they accessed, every one of these mills would have been quickly overwhelmed by the amounts of wood waste their sawyering generated. Sawdust, bark, limbs, slabs, woody debris of every description are unavoidable byproducts

of cutting logs into lumber. Even one day’s work can create truckloads of the stuff. In those days, though it horrifies the recycler’s mind in modern times, the only thing to be done was burn it all on the spot.

“The mills are long gone; the derelict beehives remain,” in a few locations around the area, said Morrow. Two of them signal the presence of still-used ghost town Penny, one especially prominent alongside the Fraser River where it has been frequently painted and photographed.

One of them still burns in Tete Jaune and another in Vanderhoof. A couple of them are still actively used for wood waste in places like Babine Forest Products and Carrier Lumber, but instead of incinerating the stuff, it is transported to pellet plants where it is turned into bioenergy products. You can look inside the one donated by The Pas Lumber Company to the Prince George Railway and Forestry Museum.

“Most of the derelicts are on private property and some owners now are preserving the

structures, in some cases using them for animal shelters. You can see that alongside Highway 97 at Alexandria where one has been turned into a barn for cattle,” Morrow said. “In every case, there was once a whole mill there but that was dismantled, leaving only this icon of sawmill architecture behind. It’s a sign of a bygone era to which people have become attached. The beehive burner has become a symbol of past greatness. Economics, too.”

And they look interesting. There is nothing else in northern B.C.’s resource-based history that has, even dormant, such a striking appearance similar to grain elevators on the prairie or windmills in Holland. With an inferno in its belly, it could be mesmerizing even to a familiar viewer.

Morrow’s research found the first one in this region was built at Giscome in 1922, in the Colby style. The first mill incinerators were tall, plain cylinders like a silo but these proved inefficient.

The intense heat at the bottom of the structure

necessitated a flare be built, as done by the Colby manufacturing company.

More advancements were made in the floor grates, the air injection systems, the cyclones and screens at the top, dampers, prefabricating the structures in lego-like panels instead of one-piece construction (this cut on-site building times from weeks into days), and the architectural lines to the cone-shaped structures topped by a “beehive” screen that were most common in these parts.

Some of that engineering was invented by Prince George fabrication innovators. Some of it foreshadowed the technological future that has now arrived. What was once called the Alexander Mill then bought and renamed the Lamb Brothers Mill on Cottonwood Island used the blasting heat from the beehive burner to generate steam energy used to power the machinery of the mill. Now, generation of productive energy from a mill’s waste energy is a central part of a modern lumber operation.

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INDUSTRY AND TRADES “Always, even back then, waste management was the critical issue for any mill. You couldn’t have a mill without a beehive burner, back then, or the bioenergy products that get made today,” said Morrow. “A lot of engineering and science and hard work had to go into that issue.

Beehive burners had a beginning and an end, and a window of about 90 years where they existed. I think, from an historical archaeology point of view, that had to be documented.”

Morrow is famous for his fascination and affection for local history. He has written several books that examine the region’s past and keep important information collected in a public record. As a retired architect, he was professionally interested in a topic centred on a structure, but the beehive burner topic pushed more buttons than that.

“I have a 15- or 16-inch planer knife sitting on my desk. It was in my dad’s toolbox when he passed on and I kept it for my office. That was probably my incentive for The Big Smoke. Dad was a planer man. He worked in planer mills [where rough lumber is shaved into smooth boards] as a young man; he managed small mills later on. My grandfather was a saw filer. I grew up around these places.

I worked in a few mills as a teenager. And I became fascinated by beehive burners for all the obvious reasons, but also wondering why they remained when all the rest of these mills were dismantled and carried away. They are redundant today, but still an icon and marker in our lives. That struck a chord with me. I saw it as a story about our community that was in danger of being lost.”

The Big Smoke is a new title available now at local bookstores.

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The bee hive burner at Babine Mill that is used for storage of wood waste.