Surrey BC: Oldgrowth logs, squared into cants, ready for export. Quick company profits and lost BC wood worker jobs.
Eight Thousand New Jobs
"But I don't want to sell hotdogs to tourists making $6 an hour. I am a wood worker. I have a good paying job and I want to keep it!" This angry refrain is being heard all over rural Vancouver Island. It is a heart-felt negative reaction to all proposals to preserve more old growth forests.
The BC government has not yet devised a job creation strategy to deal with the layoffs in the forest industry that are sure to come if the current tenure, harvesting methods and corporate "restructuring" continues. And studies show BC's fast growing "green" industry-tourism-can only provide jobs for some. The lure of increased tourism with more park protection brings little comfort to those currently working in the industry who like the logger lifestyle and working with wood.
With or without more lands set aside for protection, wood workers on Vancouver Island have good reason to be worried. Thousands and thousands of wood worker jobs were lost on Vancouver Island during the last decade due to increased mechanization and the demise of the oldgrowth Douglas fir forests on the South Island and the closure of the mills that depended on them.
The situation has been made worse by the forest industry's general failure over the last few decades to establish wood manufacturing facilities on the Island to keep up with an increasing rate of logging! Today, with 85% of the South Island's low and mid-elevation old-growth forests and overall 66% of these high value forests on the whole Island already logged, all but the most ostrich-prone diehards concede that the rate of logging must come down substantially- a terrifying thought to wood workers whose ranks are already reeling from past layoffs.
Where then does the solution lie? Some say it is in providing more support for the big forest companies who "used to do a bad job" but who have "reformed" and say they are "doing a good job now." During the last several years big industry has financially supported the formation of "Share" groups who do just that.
Comprised of angry and frightened wood workers who want to protect their jobs, these organizations have cropped up all over rural Vancouver Island. They view environmentalists and their "preservationist agenda" as their "enemy." Share groups demand stronger corporate control of the forests in order to " preserve" the "working forest" (the forest that is irrevocably committed to the logging industry) thereby hoping to protect their jobs.
Although few Share members would agree, many environmentalists believe that these big companies are using the workers to lobby for them for continued high rates of logging and to prevent the government from taking away their tenured forest lands. It is a strategy sure to increase short term company profits and maintain the current levels of employment under current management. At the same time, it is a tragic course for the environment and it will not provide sustainable long term wood workers jobs.
BC government policy steals over 6,000 jobs from Island workers and gives them to Vancouver Lower-Mainland and US workers.
"Moderates" are now emerging in both rural and urban Vancouver Island. They call for a job transition strategy- a plan to get from where wood workers are today, to where they want to be tomorrow and allow for the environmental preservation and protection needed to save the forest ecosystems into the future. Central to their solution is decreasing the power of the big timber companies. Not an easy task!
Currently, the BC government subsidizes the export of raw log shipments from Vancouver Island to Lower Mainland mills for processing.
About half of all the trees cut on Vancouver Island are not milled on the island. 90% of the trees cut on Northern Vancouver Island are milled outside the region. Why? On reason is that the large forest companies are allowed to deduct transportation costs of moving timber to off-island mills from the stumpage payments they make to the government.
This is a massive subsidy amounting to millions of dollars of tax money "robbed" from the public purse. It is money that should go to the BC Forest Service to better manage the forests. At the same time this practice in effect "steals" jobs that should belong to workers on Vancouver Island and gives them to Lower Mainland workers. And, since most of this wood is only minimally manufactured in BC and then shipped south of the border for further manufacturing in the USA, even more jobs are lost.
Mills have closed in the southern part of Vancouver Island because the old-growth has run out there. The big companies could have built plants on the Northern Island. Instead, they shipped the wood and workers' jobs to the Lower Mainland, with their shipping charges paid for by the BC taxpayer to boot!
Currently, about 15.5 million cubic metres of wood are being logged annually from the forests of Vancouver Island. But only 9.1 million cubic metres of this wood is actually used in Vancouver Island lumber and pulp mills. The rest, 6.4 million cubic metres, is shipped off as raw logs. That represents a net loss to Vancouver Island mill workers of a total of 183,000 full logging trucks. Using Ministry of Forests statistics for current average jobs per cubic meter generated in milling, this amounts to 6,600 jobs! If the tenures were revoked-and most on the North Island TFL 6, 39, 37, and 39 are up for replacement this year-and the rules were changed requiring on-Island manufacturing, this would mean 6,600 new wood worker jobs for Vancouver Islanders!
Stopping the companies from exporting Vancouver Island's wood in raw log form is just the beginning. Over 1,000 more Vancouver Island wood worker jobs could be derived from halting the export of cants (squared-off logs) to foreign mills and requiring the large companies to manufacture wood products at home. This was recommended in a government report from the Legislative Standing Committee, chaired by NDP MLA Corky Evans.
Commercial thinning-selection logging-of 40 year old (and older) second growth forests, if done right, can create additional wood volume for manufacturing, at the same time increase future wood value, and provide habitat for wildlife by shifting the forest to uneven aged stands. Commercially thinning Vancouver Island's second growth forests that are ready now would create more than 1,000 jobs. All this while generating millions of dollars in tax revenue. Ask the BC government why it is not making these changes to create jobs.
Yes, with a Vancouver Island Jobs Creation Strategy we can have more protected wilderness, more tourism jobs and more wood worker jobs! But to accomplish this environmentalists and forest workers are all going to have to work together and change the current system that greatly favours a few big companies at our expense.
