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A Raw Deal
The Youbou Sawmill Story
By Carole Pearson

When I was young, you talked of getting married, raising a family and getting your kids into the woods or the mill,” says former mill worker Darreld Rayner. “That was our attitude back then. Now it’s, ‘Get an education and get the hell out of here.’”

Rayner is one of 214 employees at TimberWest’s Youbou Sawmill at Cowichan Lake on Vancouver Island who lost their jobs when the mill shut down permanently in January 2001. Ken James is another. “I come from a large family and if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be eating,” he says. One of eight children, James grew up in B.C.’s Cowichan Valley. At 53, he’s out of work and in debt, but filled with determination. Unfortunately, you can’t pay the rent with that.

A survey conducted by University of Victoria sociology students one year after the closure found that “a substantial portion” of the workers still felt confused over why the mill was shut down. It had been turning a profit, the workers argued. It didn’t make sense. Still, the workers received their layoff notices, and it appears the owners may have shut down the mill simply because they could.

Back in 1998, the B.C. Ministry of Forests issued a replacement document that allowed for the transfer of Tree Farm Licence 46 from Fletcher Challenge Canada to TimberWest Forest Corporation. During this transaction, a crucial section of the licence was left out. It was Clause 7, which states: “The licensee will not cause its timber processing facility at Youbou to reduce production or to close for a sustained period of time.”

Tree farm licences are a part of B.C.’s Forest Act, which was enacted in 1947. These licences grant companies exclusive timber harvesting rights on publicly owned provincial land. In return for these long-term area-based, renewable leases, the government sets social, economic and ecological conditions, creating a social contract between companies and communities. Forest companies must provide capital investment, infrastructure and job creation. The Act, through attached clauses such as Clause 7 in the original Youbou agreement, requires companies to operate at least one mill in the areas licensed to them, to process the harvested timber.
“I was the eternal optimist,” says James. “I was shocked when the announcement came that the mill would be closed. We thought they couldn’t do it because they’d lose their tree farm licence. We didn’t know they no longer had that clause in their agreement.”

Today, the underlying reason the mill was closed has become evident, and the knowledge has made the workers angry and bitter at being set adrift after, in some cases, decades of working at the mill.
Rayner spent more than half his life working at the Youbou mill. He speaks of his 29 years there with pride. “I did pretty well everything, right from the front end right down to the end stackers. I touched every piece of machinery you’d find in a mill.” He had been following in the footsteps of his father, Murray, who had put in 38 years at the same mill before he retired.

Rayner was 18 when he quit school in Grade 10 to work in the mill. “Back in ‘72, you were crazy to be going to school,” he recalls. “There was so much work around then, it was never-ending — logging, milling. There were three mills and 4,000 union loggers in this area. Now, there’s a hundred.”
“The first contract I remember, I think we got a dollar-an-hour increase and a cost-of-living allowance,” says Rayner. “We were getting big, big increases every contract.” He started out making $3.50 an hour, which was a good wage then. “A case of beer was four bucks. That’s what we remember, eh?” he chuckles. “Cigarettes were 40 cents a pack. It was unreal.”

Rayner married and supported his wife and their four children on one income. They would go camping in the summer, the kids were in hockey — life was pretty good. His daughter Melissa, 28, worked at the mill during the summer when she was going to school. Today, his eldest son Rick, 30, works in a camp cutting cedar blocks to length with a power saw, but doesn’t have the same guarantee of a steady, long-term job ahead of him like his father and grandfather did.

“Economically, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” says Rayner of the mill closure, describing it as “having the rug pulled out from under you.” Getting another job wasn’t easy and, in the meantime, he used up his severance pay and unemployment insurance benefits. He even took Math and English 11 courses as a step towards completing his Grade 12. “You get doing different things to try and keep the wolves away.”