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Besides other changes to the Forest Act, eliminating the requirement that licence holders manufacture logs in B.C. “paves the way for a rash of plant closures.” It makes value-added products uneconomical and “facilitates the export of raw logs and cants” (partially trimmed logs).

“The export of raw logs is one of the things that shouldn’t happen in any country, let alone Canada,” says Wilf McIntyre, IWA Canada’s national first vice-president. “My understanding is, even before the NDP left office, we were exporting about 100,000 cubic metres of raw logs a year. Today, we’re over 4 million. When you ship your raw logs out, it means there’s no manufacturing done with that log in your country, so there’s a loss of jobs because of that.”
Jessica Clogg works for the West Coast Environmental Law Association, one of 60 groups comprising the B.C. Coalition for Sustainable Forest Solutions. She says, “The forestry changes made by the province are an assault on communities and the environment. You have policies that break a historic social contract, whereby companies got access to public and indigenous land in exchange for responsibility to communities. When you see that being broken and very little being given back to communities, that affects everybody.”

Mills are closing around the province, but B.C.’s coast is particularly hard hit. Of the 12,000 coastal forest workers, 5,000 are not working and almost one-third of the 33 coastal mills are shut down. There has been less investment in modernization on the coast, so the mills there are older, smaller and more expensive to maintain. Some logging communities are accessible only by water and air, making transport difficult. It’s more costly to harvest timber on the coast, so companies are choosing to invest money into forest operations in B.C.’s interior instead, creating large, centralized mills at the expense of smaller ones. For example, Canfor plans to open the world’s largest sawmill in Houston, B.C., which will produce 600 million board feet per year.
There are a lot of factors affecting B.C.’s forest industry. The downturn in the Asian economy saw sales of B.C. lumber to Japan drop by over one third. There’s the softwood lumber dispute with the U.S. over stumpage rates, and competition in the global economy from other wood-producing countries whose costs or prices are lower. Some American regions and countries of the South have climates that produce trees ready for harvest in 12-year rotations. B.C. trees take between 40 and 120 years to be ready for cutting. According to the PPWC, B.C. also has one of the lowest rates of value-added processing in the world.

The forest industry has been hard hit by this combination of punches, and one community after another has seen their mills — their main source of employment and the communities’ economic foundation — shut down. B.C.’s coastal area is becoming like a roll call of ghost towns: Youbou, Port Alice, Gold River, Tahsis.

Port Alice is the community most recently affected by closures. Its pulp mill, formerly owned by Doman Industries, was put under the control of Brascan, a multi-national asset management company, as a way to stave off bankruptcy. When the mill was closed last April, Mayor Larry Pepper told a CBC interviewer, “...within 18 months, it would be my guess we’ll lose our hospital, police and most of our school. The whole thing is devastating.”

Port Alice was founded by the opening of a pulp mill in 1917. When the village moved a few kilometres up the Neroutsos Inlet to its present location on Northern Vancouver Island in 1965, it was touted as the province’s first “instant municipality.” Gold River shares a similar history. Built in 1965, it was the first “all electric community in B.C.” But, its pulp mill closed in 1998 and property values plummeted as houses were put up for sale and people left. Tahsis officials have bravely tried to put a positive spin on this, the community website bragging how these former family homes “are being snapped up as fishing and recreation vacation retreats.”

"When I
look at
whats
happened
I feel bitter"
RICHARD WEIR

"One of
the biggest
things we
learned is you
need to have a
strategy"
KEN JAMES

"The mill
wasn't just a
place where
you put in
your eight
hours and
went home"
KEITH DICKENS

"I'm not going to be forced out
by corporate
giants and
the government"
ROGER WILES