Tough times for rural region
The last federal census confirmed what is painfully obvious for most longtime residents of the region. Prince George’s population is holding steady and even growing slightly but for hundreds of kilometres in every direction, the rural areas are emptying out, and fast. The news this week was devastating, for Quesnel and Fraser Lake in particular.
West Fraser is permanently shutting down the third shift at its sawmills in those two communities, putting 60 employees out of work in Fraser Lake and another 75 in Quesnel.
That was the second punch in the gut in as many months for Quesnel. In October, Tolko announced it would be laying off 100 workers at its mill there.
Canfor, Conifex and Interfor are also slashing production rates, and less lumber means less workers.
This is a particularly bitter bill to swallow for unionized workers at these companies looking to negotiate new labour contracts. The profits at all of these forest companies are strong and many of them are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the global marketplace, buying up mills in the United States.
On Thursday, Canfor announced its plan to spend $580 million to buy 70 per cent of a Swedish lumber producer.
It’s understandable for area forest workers to feel that the benefits of their labours are not coming back to them through job security and fair wage increases but are instead being used to benefit the industry in places like Mississippi, South Carolina and southern Sweden.
Yet the forest companies are simply doing what they’ve done for the past 20 years: diversifying their operations, expanding into the global marketplace, posting healthy profits to maintain investor confidence and spending heavily on technological improvements that lead to greater efficiencies, less waste, maximum value for each ton of timber harvested and reduced expenses (fewer employees, that is) per thousand board feet.
Factor in the significantly reduced levels of available trees to harvest, a problem that won’t improve for decades thanks to the mountain pine beetle epidemic and the increasing frequency of wildfires, and it becomes easier to understand why B.C.’s forest companies are looking beyond provincial and national borders for business opportunities.
Sadly, the challenges facing the rural Central and Northern Interior of B.C. go far beyond the forest sector.
The cancelling of proposed resource development projects, from the New Prosperity mine to the Northern Gateway pipeline, comes with repercussions felt in this region, not in the cozy confines of a Starbucks on Robson Street in downtown Vancouver or in the halls of the legislature in Victoria.
Regardless of how one feels about the political beliefs of John Horgan and the B.C. NDP, the fact that they only have four seats – two in the Kootenays and two representing the Central and North Coast – outside of the heavily populated southwestern corner of the province should be an additional worry for the region’s residents.
Their Liberal MLAs can sound the alarm but it would be naive to expect the Horgan government to appreciate the plight of rural Interior communities, never mind spend significant time and money to alleviate the problems.
Put another way, approving construction of a new hospital for Fort St. James is great but it’s not going to provide income for the community’s unemployed mill workers.
These are difficult days for Prince George’s neighbours in the outlying rural areas and there doesn’t appear to be much relief coming in the months and years ahead.