Transition team needs broader reach

Claudia Chender has a point when she suggests the province’s forest transition team is unbalanced.

Neither she, nor anyone else as far as I know, is questioning the team’s stability — emotional or otherwise — but five of its nine members are on the public payroll, while four are from the forest sector, which is really hurting right now.

Chender believes the team, formed to help the sector through the loss of its biggest market when Northern Pulp closed, needs more representation and clout from the communities that are feeling that hurt.

“... what we would like to see is a much more robust, important engagement ... of all the communities that are so deeply impacted by this ...” she said.

Her point was sharpened last week when the transition team’s leaders — three provincial deputy ministers — appeared before a committee of the legislature and admitted the extent of the economic pain is a mystery to them. They know that Northern Pulp laid off its mill workers. That’s around 350 people. But beyond that, the team seems pretty much in the dark about the scale of the problem.

The province is counting on people to self-identify as a casualty of the mill’s loss by registering at Nova Scotia Works offices. The government is offering free job counselling, retraining and apprenticeships and is trying to match workers with employers who need them.

Northern Pulp had estimated at least 2,000 forest jobs were dependent on its mill. But, judging by the range of businesses that have said they’re in trouble since the mill closed, the ripples are more like tidal waves spreading across large parts of rural

Nova Scotia and threatening to sink a lot of previously sturdy enterprises.

Opposition leader Tim Houston is right to question the effectiveness of the government’s response when the team tasked with that response can’t quantify the problem they’re trying to address. The province has allocated $50 million to help the sector and individual workers but hasn’t said how it arrived at that figure.

Houston said the government doesn’t have a plan and doesn’t seem to have progressed much beyond Premier Stephen McNeil’s year-old assurance that an internal government committee was looking at all possible options. For more than a year, it has been clear to anyone who cared to look, that unless the government extended the Jan. 31 deadline to close Boat Harbour as the mill’s effluent treatment facility, the mill would, in fact, close.

While many in the forestry sector may have felt that the province would extend the deadline, only the government

Shelburne:

knew for sure. And, knowing the deadline would stand and the mill would close, the province should have been better prepared to respond to the economic fallout.

“To hear the government members, the transition team members, say that they don’t have a handle on how many people are impacted, that’s a disservice to Nova Scotians,” said Houston.

When the Bowater mill closed in Liverpool in 2012, the NDP government of the day formed a committee that included local business and forestry leaders, who came up with a response that was submitted to the government and acted on, Chender recalled.

This time, she said, the province is missing an opportunity to take a broader look at the future economy of rural Nova Scotia.

Transition team member Ava Czapalay, associate deputy minister of labour and advanced education, said new capital projects planned for 2020 should create more than 200 jobs that could be filled by displaced forestry workers.

The team is also looking at opportunities to find markets for low-quality wood as a heat and energy source, although details about companies interested in that opportunity are being kept confidential.

Lands and Forestry Minister Iain Rankin said the province has identified six sites that will burn low-grade wood from private woodlots for heat. That will start next fall. Wood chips, a major source of revenue for sawmills that sold them to Northern Pulp, can also be used for heat, but first have to be dried. He said the province could expand the use of low quality wood as a heat source and is looking at a total of about 100 buildings as potential end users.

While the province has some irons in the fire, so to speak, it seems like it wasn’t ready for the massive economic dislocation that was predictable once Northern Pulp closed. After all, it was a provincial decision to close Boat Harbour on schedule that — while right — created the problem.