Small town struggles with sawmill closure
VAVENBY — On the afternoon of June 3 foremen walked through the Canfor Corp. sawmill telling the morning shift to shut it all down. The company would be making an important announcement at 3 p.m. Workers were to meet outside the main office building at once.
Production had been interrupted before. In January, Canfor had announced a six-week curtailment due to dwindling log supply, costs and market conditions. But the sudden order to turn off all the machines – an exceedingly rare demand – left knots in many workers’ stomachs.
They were right to worry.
Canfor had reached an agreement to sell the forest tenure – its cutting rights for publicly owned timber – linked to the Vavenby mill to Interfor for $60 million.
The mill would again be shutting down, this time forever. More than 170 people would lose their jobs in a community of about 700.
Workers didn’t know how to react. Many had toiled at the mill for decades, raising children in nearby Clearwater and sending them to college on good union salaries. Where would they find local jobs as bridges to reach retirement?
Others had been there just a few years and had young families, large mortgages and truck payments. How far could they stretch a severance of 10 days pay per year of service?
“There weren’t too many questions because everyone was in shock,” said Madeleine deVooght, 50, a planer tech who worked at the mill for 30 years under various owners.
Rumours had been spreading since Christmas about imminent mill closures across B.C. – up to a dozen facilities, some speculated. But the North Thompson River valley community held hope that trouble in the forestry industry, due largely to a dwindling allowable annual cut, wouldn’t hit them hard.
Two months later, Clearwater and Vavenby remain stunned. The impact of the mill’s closure has been felt far beyond the mill workers who lost their livelihoods that Monday afternoon.
Forestry industry in peril
B.C.’s forestry industry employed more than 57,000 people in 2017, when it exported $14.16 billion in wood, pulp and paper products. It brought in $1.065 billion of the provincial government’s total of $52 billion in revenue for 2018.
But in this year’s budget, government warned that forest revenue was expected to remain flat for the year and decline by 3.2 per cent annually over the next two years, mainly due to lower overall stumpage payments.
Canfor CEO Don Kayne said in June that his company made its decision to close the Vavenby mill in the face of log supply constraints, the high cost of fibre and continuing depressed lumber markets.
“The B.C. forest industry has recognized for several years that sawmill capacity must be reduced as the annual allowable cut decreases following the end of the mountain pine beetle epidemic,” he said. That epidemic killed so many trees that the province had upped allowable cuts to remove dead and dying timber.
Since Jan. 1, 2019, an estimated 3,984 workers at 22 mills in B.C. have been hit by closures and curtailments. Nine of those mills belong to Canfor Corp.
Three B.C. mills have closed, 12 have done temporary curtailments, six have done indefinite curtailments, and another has only reduced shifts, according to the Ministry of Forests.
The mill in Vavenby – a community of 700 people about a half-hour drive east of Clearwater, population 2,300 – had been producing 250 million board feet of lumber annually. Its last board, a 2 by 6, ran through the planer on July 4. Workers signed it and are keeping it in a safe place.
The sale of its $60-million tenure now hinges upon the consent of Forests Minister Doug Donaldson, who is looking at whether the proposal has been discussed with communities, First Nations and unions, and whether the companies have considered ideas from within communities to use the timber.
Bill 22, an amendment to the forest act enacted in May, requires forest companies to obtain government approval before transferring tenure agreements to another party. The proposal made by Canfor and Interfor will be the first tested by the new policy.
Loggers and other contractors hope to resume work locally when the deal is approved. Interfor has said the Vavenby tenure will help sustain its mill at Adams Lake, about a 1.5-hour drive south of Clearwater.
But already, some families have left Clearwater for Kamloops or elsewhere for work, Mayor Merlin Blackwell said. While there hasn’t been “a mass exodus or fire sale” of homes, the “trickle-down effect” of the mill’s closure will come to sting, he said.
“(Vavenby) is obviously going to suffer as well because a lot of people who live here, work at the mill,” Blackwell said. “There really isn’t anything else in the way of employment right now.”
Blackwell said his phone hasn’t stopped ringing since the mill closed. Logging contractors and their employees are “living in a bubble of uncertainty” while they wait for news from the companies about when work will resume, he said.
“I’ve got one guy who’s got two trucks with $24,000 a month in payments on those trucks alone,” he said. “Every month where he doesn’t know whether to sell or move them is another month where he’s draining his financial reserves.”
The uncertainty has put the future of the valley in peril, said deVooght, the planer tech.
“People will go retrain and find work elsewhere, and sometimes it’s way better than what they had here. But it’s not going to help the community. That’s going to be the biggest loser in all of this,” she said.
DeVooght, recording secretary of United Steelworkers Local 1-417, said workers have been offered some support from WorkBC and local agencies. But they are frustrated by the slow response by the federal and provincial governments, she said.
“Just acknowledge that the forest industry is in crisis,” she said. “Every time you turn on the news it’s ‘There’s an opioid crisis, there’s an oil and gas crisis, here’s a crisis, there’s a crisis.’ Well, you know what? We’ve got a crisis.”
Canfor held a job fair on June 19 in Clearwater, bringing representatives from Interfor, WorkBC, and other service agencies. It was attended by 116 people, deVooght said.
Some hadn’t typed up a resumé since the 1980s and struggled to recall where they worked before the mill, said Frances Johnson, an oiler who worked there for 20 years.
Johnson, 55, said she is racked with worry about what she will do next.
“It’s stressful,” she said through tears. “It’s a huge loss. I was hoping to be able to retire – that’s all. Fifty-five doesn’t take me there.”
Johnson is now considering the LNG industry, given the sad state of forestry.
“When you look at all these small towns and these mills, what’s going to happen? Where is the economy? There’s going to be a ripple effect and it’s going to affect a lot of people. Because now we’re all in the market looking for jobs,” she said.
Local businesses hit hard
On June 28, more than 50 people attended a meeting for local business owners at the Dutch Lake Community Centre in Clearwater. A panel including the mayor, representatives from the regional district, the province, WorkBC and the tech industry gave them an updated on their efforts to soften the blow from the mill’s closure.
Jodie Dodd, owner of Clearwater MediSpa, and Kurt Dodd, owner of KDC Forestry Consulting, said everyone they know is linked to the mill in some way.
“I have a lot of clients who won’t have the disposable income they used to,” Jodie Dodd said at the meeting. “I’m a little bit worried about that because their husbands work at the mills or they’re some sort of business that’s supported.”
KDC has a staff of 20 to 30 for forestry development work such as timber cruising, layout and GPS mapping. It primarily does contracting for Canfor, Interfor, TimberWest, Interfor and B.C. Timber Sales.
Kurt Dodd said he had six people working on the Canfor account who were moved to other projects. He hoped layoffs would not have to come next.
Kelly Graffunder, 39, owner of Fleetwest Enterprises, sells industrial, automotive and logging supplies. He had more than 20 Canfor contractors as clients. “They’re our bread and butter,” he said. “We can get by on just being a community. I’d have to downsize soon, if nothing gets going. I’m not sure how extreme that’s going to be.”
Graffunder is now looking for a way to keep 11 staff on at least until summer’s end.
“I think a lot of the people in the bigger centres don’t realize how industry-based and single industry some of these communities are,” he said. “They read about a mill closure and they don’t see how people are directly effected, immediately.”
Doug Borrow, 50, owner of construction firm Borrow Enterprises, was the mill’s main road maintenance contractor. He had 28 employees working on Canfor projects, running graders, excavators, dump trucks and sand trucks. Most faced layoffs.
“(I’m) kind of sick to my stomach,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re going to do, what all your employees are going to do. You’ve got big payments.”
Local businesses and workers aren’t the only ones suffering. Linda Selbee, 61, finance chair for the Clearwater District Food Bank, said they used to make an average of 165 hampers each month, but made about 190 in June.
“It’s not people coming in because they’re starving,” she said. “Now, what we’re doing is we’re subsidizing. People are paying their bills and they have to cut somewhere, and it’s groceries.”
Hope for forestry in B.C.
Ian Moilliet, pastor at the Vavenby Christian Church and a lifelong resident of the community, said some parishioners are young mill families who just moved into town. The church has been praying for them each Thursday morning.
“Some people are pretty distraught. They just bought land or a house and they have to move on now. It’s pretty difficult,” Moilliet said.
But Moilliet, 67, has seen the community recover many times. During the 2009-2011 shutdown, workers took jobs with railway contractor Remcan. When the Weyerhaeuser mill closed in 2002, they left for other mills and industries.
“It’s discouraging, but we try to keep hope alive,” he said. “I’m really trying to encourage people that there’s something else around the corner. Don’t be dismayed.”
Around the corner at the Vavenby General Store, co-owner Joylene Bailey said she and her husband Michael have no plans to sell. It’s a popular stop for friendly logging truckers who grab a coffee in the morning, a deli sandwich at lunch and a six-pack at the end of their shift.
“I’ll buy less to sell less,” she said. “We’re just making a living, that’s all we’re doing, and have a heart for our community.”
Harry Nelson, associate professor of forest policy and economics at the Faculty of Forestry at the University of B.C., is certain the province’s forestry industry will endure. In recent years it has experienced wildfire, the mountain pine beetle and the global final crisis, but the trees always grow back, he said.
“Definitely, we’re going to be smaller and we’re going through this kind of reorganization and transition, but we’re still one of the great timber baskets of the world,” he said.
“We’ve got the ingredients you need skilled people, skilled management, trees.”
But the question, now, is how those ingredients will be sustained to benefit B.C.
For Blackwell, part of the solution requires British Columbians to stand by their rural neighbours and support work to protect the province’s resource sector. It requires recognizing that farmers, tourism operators and mill workers make big contributions to the economies of large city centres like Vancouver.
“This is where the money starts,” he said.