Forestry jobs: out-of-country and up-in-smoke

Last week I highlighted a couple of forestry issues during Question Period in the legislature, both of which mean fewer local forestry jobs due to government decisions.

The first was the unfortunate revelation of the indefinite closure of the Kitwanga mill that occurred October 7. This was only months after the official opening ceremony, attended by the Premier, in July.

The parent company, Pacific Bioenergy, says the closure is due to weak markets for dimensional lumber in China. But what others, including workers, are pointing to is a lack of wood at the right price. All while the government allows raw logs to be shipped to places like China at unprecedented levels – a 207% increase province-wide last year.

We need to find ways to ensure B.C. mills like Kitwanga get the log supply they need from our commonly owned resource – the forest. It must be B.C. logs for B.C. jobs. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Kitwanga.

The second issue I raised in Question Period was the mind-boggling amount of wood piles being burned this year on logging sites in the Burns Lake area. 3,600 piles. A conservative estimate of useable wood from those piles is 180,000 cubic metres. That’s the equivalent of 4,500 logging trucks of whole logs. And potentially hundreds of B.C. jobs – local forestry jobs – simply going up in smoke.

There are projects in Burns Lake and other rural communities that could use the wood from piles like these around the province for value-added initiatives.

Sure enough, a bioenergy initiative using waste wood, proposed by Burns Lake, six First Nations and a private partner, was rejected by BC Hydro in August.

Why? It wasn’t chosen because fibre supply costs were too high. Fibre like the wood being incinerated in piles around Burns Lake and other rural communities in the north.

Meanwhile the government has been promising to deal with the issue of waste wood usage for the past three years. They’ve also been studying the issue of extremely high raw logs exports since May.

It’s time for action on both these issues so that local forests mean local jobs.