Conservative Party leader says BC's resource, forestry sector is in a crisis
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- čas přidán 12. 05. 2024
- The leader of the Conservative Party of BC says the NDP government’s approach has created all kinds of chaos in the forest sector.
On Monday, John Rustad sat down with NowMedia to discuss the recent closure of Canfor’s Polar sawmill in Bear Lake, which was announced on Friday.
The company also announced it would be shutting down a production line at its Northwood Pulp Mill in Prince George and suspending a "planned reinvestment" in Houston.
Canfor president Don Kayne said timber harvest levels have dropped and the provincial government’s policies and regulation changes have impacted the company.
The company said this will impact 180 jobs at the Polar mill and 220 at the Northwood facility.
Rustad called the announcement “tragic.”
“When workers lose jobs, they're not going to be around. They're going to have to go find a job, work somewhere else,” he told NowMedia.
“So you lose your baseball coaches, you lose your hockey coaches, use your volunteers, right? And you lose the spin off of the people working (and) supporting the forest sector.”
NowMedia pointed to the impact these closures have on small, rural communities.
Rustad said communities like Bear Lake and Houston are “very dependent” on the forest sector and that the impacts will be felt elsewhere, particularly in the “spin off” jobs in places like Prince George.
“The government is saying it's because of the commodity cycle. In my riding alone, 2 million cubic meters a year is not being issued, permits are not being issued by BC timber sales,” Rustad said.
“That's 6 million cubic meters over the last three years that hasn't gone out. How do mills operate if they don't have wood?”
Rustad was re-elected MLA of Nechako Lakes in 2020.
He said the news was devastating and he could not understand why the NDP government is “throwing the average everyday worker under the bus.”
NowMedia pointed to a need for better forest management.
Rustad said that BC governments have allowed forests to grow older than they normally would historically and firefighting practices have impacted the health of the province’s forest.
“People have this idea that you know we need to preserve this old forest. Well, the problem is in most of the province, particularly through the interior and in the north, fire has been dominating the landscape for thousands of years,” he said.
“We've removed fire from the landscape. There's a whole bunch of things that need to change with regards to that, but nothing will work when you have a government that just (doesn’t) seem to understand the forest sector.”
He said the NDP government doesn’t seem to care about the forest sector, workers or “good forest management.”
Rustad said David Eby’s focus on “environmental votes” and ideology shows they don’t care about BC’s economy.
“They do not care about our forest sector, the backbone of so many communities across this province, and they're willing to sacrifice all of that just to try to get votes in the lower mainland,” he said.
“That is not a good government. That is not a government that we need in British Columbia.”
Earlier this year, Canfor said it lost $117.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Rustad said forestry is one of BC’s top industries and that they NDP government’s policies around forestry will continue to impact jobs, the economy and will lead to increased taxes and deficits.
With the upcoming election in mind, NowMedia asked Rustad what the Conservative Party of BC will do for the forestry industry.
Rustad said they will be putting out a more comprehensive forest policy in the coming months.
“The first thing we have to do is drive down our cost structure. British Columbia is the highest cost producer in North America. We have to be able to be competitive, so we have to bring our cost structure in place,” he said.
“The second thing we need to do is clean up the permitting process so that mills actually get wood so that these dying trees in the forest can actually be utilized for creating jobs (and) so that we can get those trees or get those forced forest lands rehabilitated.”
Rustad finished by saying that the province’s resource sector is in a crisis and things need to change in the provincial election in October.
To read the full story on KelownaNow.com
www.kelownanow.com/watercoole... - Zábava
The more I get to know John the more I agree with his ideas. Pls John 1st 3 things to solve in your 1st month. SOGI, Drugs, Carbon tax. Then on from there.
J Rustad is right on the mark. Get government out of the way and they need to be small. Big government is a recipe for disaster.
The Federal Government needs to get out of the business of Provinces.
Governments power creep is getting disturbing.
Centralized Government policy is disturbing. Ignoring the rights of Provincial governing powers.
THIS IS ALL INTENTIONAL
yup. just made the same comment.
We need to get rid of the bother provincial and federal governments. Canada is a resource based economy! Get government out of the way and bring back jobs! I have always voted Conservative.
Where will all the timber come from to build the 3.9 million new houses Trudeau and EBY dream of. Or will we keep our natural resources pristine and import lumber from some other supplier without the restrictions placed upon our ethically produced forest industry, kind of like bringing in Saudi oil to Irving refineries in Atlantic Canada instead of from Western Canada. Why is lumber so expensive? Wonder why houses cost more to build?
Houses built in the east are built with brick and stone. Houses built of wood are temporary houses. Easily destroyed.
The BC Wildfire Service needs a complete overhaul. Citizens dont need to be exposed to 14km long back burns that burn their communities down like what happened last year in the North Shuswap.
I’m definitely voting BC Conservative.
Me too voting conservatives I have high hopes for John and the BC Conservatives
NDP NFG
Rustad is an MLA not an MP. He is a member of the legislature not parliament.
Vancouver Victoria urban versus rural is the whole story. I'd add E. Vancouver Island, in fact the whole of Van Island is full of retired Tilley hat former government bureaucrats from all over Canada. They got their pensions and they never worked a real day's work in their lives and they keep voting liberal or NDP.
As an islander, I find there are more and more people waking up (thank god) so I’m hopeful there will be a major shift!
Now you know why we have a carbon tax ; to make up for the loss of income from the resource sector .
John rustad for premier. Get rid of eby sogi and the ndp
yes, yes, yes get rid of Eby, Dix and Bonnie Henry
foretsry made BC .
how many mills / has canfor bought up and closed ? 300 Mills, 700 mills ? over the years ?,,,
NDP are not capable of running BC. Except to line the pockets of big party donors. Eby lost all support when he didn't stand by the other premiers against the carbon tax.
You can thank our Prime Minister and the current premier as they are on the same program they want to completely eliminate not just the forest industry but every industry and we don't have much left.
Ban open fires, Make electric companies have a huge swath around Is power lines, and every campground should have a closed fire pit. You can also take DNA off of a cigarette butt that's been thrown on the side of the road and a fire has been started, then the person should be fined!
lower costs... i hope he doesnt mean the guys that get it out of the bush ... get a pay cut...
yes it is canfor buying up all the mills, then closes them all., now its buying mills ,in Alberta and closed them next ?
share
I have been living here in British Columbia now for 35 years
I have yet to see a government in this province who wants any kind of industry at all
ignoring climate change
Not ignoring but Liberal NDP using it as a cash cow is not the answer
This piece was very disappointing, and I found that you two focused on opinion instead of fact.
In their financial reports, Canfor keeps talking about how they are not able to “access economically viable fibre”, which is a cute way to say that it costs too much to get the wood for what the market will pay for it. Some basic research would tell you that it currently costs $500 to make 1000 board ft of wood that sells for $390. I find it very hard to believe that the permitting process is responsible for 25% of Canfor’s operating expense.
What you also don’t address is how much money Canfor made during the pandemic when lumber was $1,734 per 1000 board ft. There were not a lot of complaints about government regulation three years ago, but I guess that’s easier when you’re making hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter.
Canfor is absolutely blaming the government for a rough economic cycle.
Government policy is the most important factor in a "rough economic cycle"
@@shanewoolsey940 Rake in the 100s of millions of $$ in the good times, and blame the government in the rough times.
@@QuantumMechanic343, what most people forget to calculate into the price of lumber, are stumpage fees. Which in B.C. is anywhere from $40-100 per cubic meter, based on what species being harvested. A logging truck can typically carry up to 40 cubic meters per truck. For a single truck the stumpage on the "raw" logs can anywhere from $1600 to $4000 per truck. That's what the province takes before any milling takes place. A 1000 board feet is 2.36 cubic meters of "finished" lumber. Once you calculate the waste from the milling process the cost of stumpage goes up on the finished product. So when lumber prices are low the government is taking the lions share, because stumpage fees are a fixed rate. If stumpage fees were tied into market fluctuations instead of being fixed, then forest companies could venture further out to get fiber for the mills. The high lumber prices during the pandemic were an anomaly not the norm. People had nothing better to do. They couldn't go on that $10,000 vacation, they started doing projects on their homes. I know, I'm a carpenter by trade, and almost overnight the building trades people couldn't keep up to the number of people wanting projects to be taken on. The law of supply and demand kicked in, and lumber prices shot up. Mills and lumber companies don't set the prices, the stock market does, and the people who made all the money were the brokers dealing in lumber futures, buying up the production. For me the prices were so volatile, if a customer wanted a quote, that quote was only good for seven days.
@@andyfunke9484 Canfor is publicly traded, so we can actually see how much money they made when lumber prices were high, and it was hundreds of millions of dollars. Currently they are losing tens of millions of dollars, but that’s kind of how it goes in a business that is cyclical.
Canfor is doing what they need to do to “appease their shareholders”, which is a lovely way to abstract away the fact that Jim Pattinson owns about ~50% of those shares. The cancelling of projects and closing of mills is capitalism/corporate greed, plain and simple.
Aso, stumpage fees are not set at a fixed rate. Since 2004 they have fluctuated using the Market Price System that is spelled out in the Coast Appraisal Manual and the Interior Appraisal Manual. Some businesses actually complain about the market price system because it adds complexity by making it harder to estimate costs. While we’re on the topic of stumpage fees, I think it’s a good idea to remember what they represent. It’s important to remember that as British Columbians we are all owners of our forests, and the stumpage fee is what we, as a society, charge these companies to harvest the resource that we collectively own. As a British Columbian and part owner of our forests, I believe that stumpage fees are just compensation. Maybe you feel different about them, but I’m not really about giving away what I own to corporations, for free, who then use it to rake in millions of dollars in profits.
BC has all kinds of fees that make it economically non viable during downturns. Which previously, BC used to be the most economical
BC never gets it. Too many liberals and NDP supporters there. They are ruining that province
Climate change -- too many immigrants -- save canada 🇨🇦 Send them home -- save the tree's -- no polar ice caps left -- global warming -- money will destroy canada --- wait for a few plaques to come Big trouble on the way -- trust me .....