ONLINE COMMENTS

Re: All major forest companies in B.C. cut production

The lumber industry has always been cyclical. I know the AAC has decreased and the B.C. forest industry has over logged and clear cut B.C. forests. Closing mills and slowdowns was going to happen sooner or later because of over cutting B.C. natural forests. Bad forest management by B.C. governments letting forest industrial mongels rape and pillage our B.C. forests and spit out the hard workers. — Lynda Iwanik But my old boss at the sawmill told me I was making a mistake by not sticking with the forest industry. — D Tran Hmm but we ship raw logs all the time. — Howdy Dowdy Well, sure. How else do you expect to keep sawmills in Mississippi and South Carolina running, both of which are “right to work” states with low wages, by the way. It’s rather self-serving for Gorman to claim there’s no governmental policy to address this problem when a policy tying timber to processing in the jurisdiction it’s produced in would go a long way to ensuring that these jobs would stay in B.C.

— Les_Vegas There was for many decades “a policy tying timber to processing in the jurisdiction it’s produced in” but the provincial government of the day changed it when the Americans had so depleted their forests that they started offering high enough prices to the Canadian corporations so that they determined it was more profitable for them to ship raw logs than it was to process them up here. Many thousand of good paying forestry jobs were lost and the logs were floated south to US mills where the wages and benefits were far lower. It’ the same old story, money talks and the politicians listen.

— WWallace Mud I would think the hurricanes and now wildfires would help restore prices.

— Karl Schneider Re: Making the PR pivot “Most votes are ignored”; Governing parties have “absolute power”? You really disrespect our democracy, don’t you, despite Canada being consistently ranked among the world’s most democratic countries (Economist Intelligence Unit). These so often repeated statements about votes being wasted, not counting or ignored is fundamental misstatement of the importance of voting even when you don’t win. You recited major gains of enfranchisement (missing the very significant extension of the vote to Japanese- and ChineseCanadians in 1947/48) but don’t pause to wonder what the brave men and women who struggled over those hurdles would think of spoiled ingrates of the next century whining that their votes are wasted because their candidate didn’t win. Nellie McClung would probably have taken such PR propagandists out behind the woodshed for a good hiding for so disparaging a system that she and others fought to be part of.

— ndale27 No elected party, even the Pro Rep system, can afford to ignore the voters they didn’t get.

What is brutally clear is there is no going back, if Pro Rep is allowed in. Once we drive this one off the lot, we are stuck with it. I don’t buy anything that comes with a no return policy.

— NDPhack Pardon? No going back? You must have missed the part about revisiting the question in two election cycles. That is an eightyear trial and we can go back to FPTP if we decide to.

— Cathy Fortin Yes, more politicians, boundaries have to be changed and redrawn, this will cost the taxpayer more money. It never ends. Will the service improve? Not really. Instead of dealing with only one MLA, probably will have to deal with a number of people instead. Then, here we go, pass the buck to another , and to another. Yes, let’s make the political system more complex. Real dumb. Keep the old system and one MLA per area.

— jointeffort PR does not change governing with less than 50 per cent of the vote, it just makes fringe parties hold more power as they make deals to govern with 50 per cent of the MLA votes.

— canucks_rule A process that moderates all voices is more representative of the population. That’s what proportional representation means. Get it? In B.C., you’ll have to have five per cent or more of the popular vote to be represented in the legislature at all. That means you’ll have to garner north of 100,000 votes just to show up on the radar. Sounds easy, but it’s not. There is no basis for your fear. It’s all based in ignorance.

— Elliot Gibson