Written by Frank Peebles Workers at sawmills in these towns and more have been recently told that their place of business is closed for good, taking a long shutdown, or is in some kind of production limbo. Not as well lit are the lists of contractors and small businesses that provide every imaginable service and good to these mills and millworkers. Those small firms have no Human Resources departments to help them locate work elsewhere. They have no Employment Insurance. They have no transition funds or severance packages. They, too, though, are out of work and the payments are still due on their homes, vehicles, and often expensive tools of their trade like logging trucks, excavators, tree processors, etc. The Official Opposition party (BC Liberals) was recently in government, and they have been hollering criticisms and complaints towards the current government (NDP/Green coalition) that when troubles hit small communities, they rolled out the machinery of aid. Where was the government to help the workers now fearing for their homes and livelihoods? The Citizen-Industry & Trades asked the government for input on the actions they were taking to ease the pain of the forest
industry’s current downturn. No details were provided. The province’s official forestry critic, MLA John Rustad of the Nechako-Lakes riding, and a career forest worker prior to elected office, theorized why the industry was suffering so dramatically right now. For those who contend his views are purely partisan, he said, follow the statistics and check his assertions. Challenging factor were already afoot, he said, like the mountain pine beetle disaster, the massive wildfires of recent summers, trade disputes with the United States lumber lobby, and soft markets in America and Asia. What pushes the situation into crisis territory, he said, were factors closer to home those broader pan-industry problems. “Government policies have driven up our costs and made our industry uncompetitive. That’s why we are seeing the curtailments,” he said. “We have become the highest cost producers in North America. When there isn’t a recognition by government that that is a problem, it is hard to see how we’ll come through this anytime soon. There is an ongoing structural problem within our forest industry. Our uncompetitiveness in this province is a real problem. Alberta mills aren’t down. U.S. mills aren’t down. Other mills in Canada are not down. Why are we
Thursday, July 25, 2019
down? We are down because we are the highest cost producer.” The costs he speaks of include layers of taxes, layers of red tape, and a sluggish permitting process that all combine to topple companies that were only barely hanging on in the first place because of the aforementioned broader challenges. The Prince George Chamber of Commerce recently called a number of direct and indirect stakeholders of the forestry sector together with some opposition MLAs in the room to hold a free-flowing conversation about what effects they were experiencing in their operations, and how things could perhaps be helped. Those stakeholders spoke frankly under the promise of withholding their identities. Some were bankers, some were accountants, some were indirect contractors who supported the forest industry, some were direct contractors like loggers, some were mill owners or managers, some were in management in other industries. “On the contractor side, it is as big a workforce moving up the supply chain to the sawmill as it is at the sawmill, and even the strongest contractors in the province don’t have the infrastructure internally to handle the worker issues when there is a major shutdown,” one small business operator
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said. “So they desperately need that outside intervention from some other entity like government to be able to come in. The contractors don’t even know what the options are and won’t know how to interface with participants in other industries or what the options even are under support services from the government, so to expect them to try to manage that process, while at the same time they might be losing everything because they’ve got all these dollars financing their equipment, with their houses securing that financing, that is a significant challenge on their own mental health so how do they look after workers, too? There is more of a need for government support in that supply chain than at the sawmill, and it’s needed there, too.” An accountant said “why isn’t there a playbook? Why isn’t this just rolling off an assembly line?” while a banker said his staff were starting to get key information into the hands of many of those affected in the hardest hit communities, but without government officials standing shoulder to shoulder with them, it was harder to leverage financial aid, and harder to impress upon a head office in another province how best to handle the clients who were now suffering and under deep financial threat. Story continued on page 14