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‘We’re Dying up Here.’ Inside BC’s Forest Industry Crisis

Mills closed, jobs gone and vanishing trees. First in a series.

Ben Parfitt 3 Oct 2024The Tyee

Ben Parfitt is a reporter at The Tyee covering forestry and related issues.

Few communities in British Columbia have been hit as hard by the declining fortunes of the forest industry as Mackenzie.

The town was built by forest companies in the 1960s. At the height of the boom it was home to two pulp mills, a paper mill, a handful of sawmills and a specialty mill that processed rejected lumber pieces from sawmills into higher-value products.

Today that’s almost all gone. Union jobs have vaporized — 1,700 in one wave of shutdowns in 2007 and repeated losses over the years since.

All that remains of the network of mills that drove the town’s economy is a lone sawmill limping along on one shift and the value-added mill that remains in business only because of imports of rejected lumber pieces from Alberta.

With a provincial election in the offing, Mike Morris, MLA for Prince George-Mackenzie, says he is shocked that so few people comprehend the scale of the crisis unfolding in the province’s forests and forest industry — a crisis, he says, brought on by logging rates that even the provincial Ministry of Forests knew were unsustainable.

Clearcut after clearcut

A case in point is the sprawling forests that make up the Mackenzie timber supply area, or TSA, one of the largest forest administration zones in B.C. Timber supply areas are the basic forestry management units in B.C., with government setting the amount of wood that can be harvested by companies operating in each area.

Logging has been most active in the southwestern portion of the TSA for decades, because the trees there are much closer to paved roads than the trees in the north, making them more profitable to log and haul.

To the south of the town, “it’s clearcut after clearcut after clearcut,” says Morris. “There’s no biodiversity. The average age of the trees is 25 years, if that. There should be no more logging in there.”

Morris is better positioned than most to say what that concentration of logging has meant in terms of wildlife losses, which are spiralling downward in lockstep with the more than 40,000 jobs lost in the province’s forest industry in the past 20 years.

He owns a trapline and has spent more time in the backcountry than most of his colleagues in the legislature. He has seen first-hand the steady losses of marten, fisher and other fur-bearers, plummeting populations of songbirds and raptors and the disappearance of large numbers of ungulates like caribou and moose — all due to logging-related habitat loss.

“The moose populations here have disappeared — a 70 per cent decline,” Morris says.

“Meanwhile, our province’s chief forester continues to behave like a chief timber officer. He keeps trying to build the case that there’s a steady supply of wood for our sawmills. And he’s totally wrong.”

The north-south divide

In B.C., the province’s chief forester is responsible for setting permissible logging rates throughout the province. In the case of the Mackenzie TSA, a new approved rate, known as the allowable annual cut, was set by the current chief forester, Shane Berg, in May 2023.

At first blush, Berg’s decision to set a new rate of logging at 2.39 million cubic metres of trees per year represented a massive decline in approved logging rates in the Mackenzie region.

A decade earlier, the maximum approved rate was almost twice as high at 4.5 million cubic metres.

But that much higher figure was understood to be far in excess of what could reasonably be logged each year. It had been approved only on a temporary basis by Berg’s predecessors — as had logging increases throughout central B.C. — so that logging companies could “salvage” or rapidly cut down millions of lodgepole pine trees killed by mountain pine beetles.

Knowing that such an increase would accelerate the depletion of forests in the Mackenzie region, companies were told to concentrate on logging dead trees as much as possible and to avoid focusing on any one portion of the TSA.

Neither happened.

Part of the town of Mackenzie in the evening, with a motel and pub sign and a mountain in the background.
Mackenzie was built on the promise of the forest industry. Photo by Goh Iromoto.

As Berg noted in his reasons for setting the current and much lower limits on logging:

“The ministry’s data indicates that licensees have not complied with either the partition limiting the amount of harvesting in the southwest or the partition limiting the harvest of green trees.”

In plain English what Berg said was that logging companies had hammered the south far more than the north while “salvaging” a great deal of healthy, living trees as opposed to the dead trees the ministry wanted them to log.

A cornerstone of Berg’s 2023 decision to reduce logging rates in the Mackenzie TSA is that only a portion of the trees logged should come from the heavily logged southern section. The maximum harvest from the south each year should be 1.17 million cubic metres, Berg ruled, which means that in the future just under half of everything logged can be in the south while the rest must come from the north.

But Berg fell short of making his direction mandatory. He would wait to see if the companies eased off logging intensity in the south, where for the past decade more than 70 per cent of all the trees logged in the TSA have come from.

If they fail to do so — as they failed to do following similar directions by earlier chief foresters in 2014 and in 2019 — Berg warned, he might ask the forests minister to issue a “partition order” that would force the companies to comply. Such an order is also known as a hard partition.

But it has yet to happen in the Mackenzie TSA, despite clear signs that, if left unregulated, the logging companies will continue to log out the forests to the south and west of town.

Grossly overharvested

Berg and his colleagues in the Forests Ministry were warned of the risk by the region’s Indigenous communities, including the Kwadacha, Nak’azdli Whut’en, Takla and Tsay Keh Dene First Nations and the McLeod Lake Indian Band.

In a joint submission to Berg’s office in 2022 as part of the public consultation process, they noted that “non-legally binding” measures hadn’t worked and unconstrained logging “has led to severe impacts in the southwest partition zone resulting in First Nations’ highly constrained ability to meaningfully exercise their rights.”

For Mackenzie Mayor Joan Atkinson, the deterioration of the region’s forest industry and the overlogging of forests in the southern part of the TSA are a major worry.

It is not only the geographic disparities that concern Atkinson, but an industry that has abandoned “salvage logging” and focused on the forests with the greatest number of healthy trees.

Forests filled with dead pine trees have effectively been abandoned by logging companies in favour of forests with large numbers of spruce trees.

“That has been a huge issue and the government is well aware of that,” Atkinson said. “They have been harvesting spruce, which is part of the timber supply, but it has been grossly overharvested.”

Atkinson says logging companies have abused the idea of salvage logging and that it’s come to the point where a stand of forest with just “two infested spruce trees” gets logged in its entirety on grounds that the whole patch is unhealthy, even though dead trees have always been a presence in natural forests.

That means spruce-dominated forests have been increasingly logged in the southern portion of the TSA. “It’s way cheaper to harvest and move wood when you’re 20 minutes from pavement,” Atkinson says. Logs from the northernmost reaches of the Mackenzie TSA may have to travel as far as 400 kilometres on resource roads or by barge down the massive Williston Reservoir, on whose southernmost shore the town of Mackenzie lies.

Underscoring the cost disparities north to south, a massive log carrier known as the Williston Transporter has been anchored outside of town and rarely used. With a deck about the size of a football field, the vessel has been used to move up to 5,000 tonnes of logs at a time down the Williston Reservoir created by the W.A.C. Bennett Dam.

Goodbye pine, hello spruce

Atkinson’s concerns about the logging industry’s deliberate targeting of spruce-dominated forests, especially in the southern reaches of the TSA, is borne out by information collected by the Ministry of Forests and available on a searchable database.

The Tyee used that database to examine all logging in the Mackenzie TSA in 2023. The data reveals that just under 42 per cent of all the trees logged were spruce trees. Of those spruce, a majority — 56 per cent — yielded grades 1 and 2 logs, which are among the most sought-after logs because they are generally free of any defects associated with damaging insect attacks.

In the forest industry, targeted logging of the best trees is called “high-grading.” It leaves forests depleted of their most valuable trees, which sets the stage for mill closures as companies run out of economically attractive forests to log.

A large industrial plant, with conveyers and other equipment, is empty.
The closed Mackenzie pulp mill was once a key employer. Photo by Goh Iromoto.

In just the last five years Atkinson says her community lost 180 jobs when Canfor closed its Mackenzie sawmill, selling its provincial government-granted logging rights in the Mackenzie area to the McLeod Lake Indian Band and the Tsay Keh Dene Nation.

Shortly after, the Paper Excellence pulp mill in town closed its doors and another 253 of the highest-paying jobs in town vanished as well.

“Nobody recognizes we’re dying up here,” Atkinson says. “It’s all very frustrating.”

Most frustrating, Atkinson says, is that provincial political parties on both the left and the right ends of the spectrum have failed to enact forest policies that might give communities like hers something to fight back with when companies decide to pull up stakes and leave town.

Shortly after the BC Liberals under Gordon Campbell’s leadership came to power in 2001, they did away with a clause in agreements between logging companies and the province. In exchange for companies receiving guaranteed logging rights from the provincial government, the companies agreed to deliver logs to mills in nearby communities.

The appurtenancy clause, as it was called, ensured mill jobs benefited local communities.

With that clause gone, Canfor and other companies choosing to close mills in B.C. faced no consequences for their actions, including the potential cancellation of their logging licences.

Not only did Canfor close its Mackenzie sawmill, but it sold the shuttered operation to Peak Renewables, a company owned by Brian Fehr, a businessman with long-standing ties to Canfor. Fehr then took all the equipment out of the Mackenzie mill and shipped it to Plain Dealing, Louisiana, to reinstall in a new sawmill owned by Teal-Jones.

That effectively killed “any opportunity for anybody else to come in and operate that facility,” Atkinson says.

The horse is out of the barn

Atkinson says her community and others have called on Liberal and NDP governments alike to reinstate appurtenancy, but their calls have gone unanswered.

Now, the mayor says, “the horse is so far out of the barn I don’t think there’s any going back.”

The consequence, Atkinson says, is that the Mackenzie TSA is even more vulnerable to being stripped of its trees to the benefit of companies operating sawmills outside of town.

This has been the trend for some time. Data analyzed by The Tyee shows that most logs to come out of the Mackenzie TSA last year went to mills owned by Canfor in Bear Lake, Prince George and Vanderhoof, mills owned by West Fraser and Dunkley in or just outside of Quesnel, and other outside players.

A big question now is what will happen as a result of announcements by Canfor that it planned to wrap up operations at its last remaining sawmills in the north of the province.

On Sept. 4, Canfor announced that it will be closing its Plateau mill outside Vanderhoof and its Fort St. John mill. The announcement came less than three months after the company said it would close its Polar mill in Bear Lake, a small community to the southwest of Mackenzie.

Forests Minister Bruce Ralston was quick to respond to Canfor’s latest closure announcement.

“We are disappointed by the business decision made by Canfor today and the impacts that will be felt by families and communities in northern British Columbia,” Ralston said in a news release. “We will be there to support workers’ families and communities impacted by this corporate decision.”

Ralston went on to say that the government continues to do what it can to stabilize and stimulate the wood-processing industry in the province through the BC Manufacturing Jobs Fund, a provincially funded program that has channelled nearly $90 million to date into helping companies in the forest sector and others install new equipment in manufacturing facilities.

The government says the fund has helped to either increase or stabilize jobs in a number of existing manufacturing facilities, including Mackenzie’s lone remaining lumber producer, the Conifex sawmill.

But Atkinson would like to see the government go further, particularly when it comes to responding to companies like Canfor that are shutting down mills while still retaining their government-granted logging licences.

“They [Canfor] have shut down multiple mills and they’ve still retained the wood,” the mayor says. “Government has to have the guts to bring in regulations. The government should be taking back 10 per cent to 20 per cent of that wood and reallocating it.”

Logging that helps, not harms, communities

If that happened, Mackenzie’s mayor says, the smart thing would be to turn that wood over to a community licence jointly held by the town of Mackenzie and the McLeod Lake Indian Band.

Atkinson notes that for the most recent year, 38,000 cubic metres of timber was logged under that jointly owned and managed community forest, and both the McLeod Lake Indian Band and Mackenzie received $400,000 in dividends and another $200,000 was placed in a not-for-profit that manages that community-owned licence.

“If we can have that much return on 38,000 cubic metres, I think the government is missing the boat. Instead, they just throw us bread crumbs,” Atkinson says.

Despite all the upheaval, Atkinson says, there are small signs of encouragement for Mackenzie.

People have moved to the community, including people who work remotely for the chief forester’s office, drawn by low housing prices that average $175,000. And school enrolment in Mackenzie is up.

There have also been between 75 and 100 families in Mackenzie who are living in town because they have jobs in gold and coal mines in the wider region.

But more needs to be done to shore up the forest industry, and that begins by figuring out how to spread the logging around. If the hard partition advocated by Atkinson and others does not materialize, Berg is blunt in his assessment of what awaits.

The forests in the region’s south will be gone and “there may well be no harvesting in the TSA.”

Next up, Parfitt will examine where the B.C. jobs are going.  [Tyee]

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