British Columbia's forests minister says the province will fight against "unfair duties and stand up for forestry workers" after Canfor Corp. announced the closure of two northern B.C. sawmills, partly blaming "punitive" U.S. tariffs imposed last month.
Bruce Ralston says the U.S. Department of Commerce's decision to increase punishing softwood lumber duties, on top of low prices for lumber, is hurting forestry communities.
Canfor Corp. announced Wednesday that it was shutting the Plateau mill in Vanderhoof and its Fort St. John operation would also remove 670 million board feet of annual production capacity.
The company blamed the closures on the challenge of accessing economically viable timber, as well as ongoing financial losses and weak lumber markets, but said the final blow was the big increase in U.S. tariffs.
Ralston says the forest sector is a "foundational part" of the province and the government will work to support local jobs.
He says the province is focused on supporting the approximately 500 workers who are impacted by the closures, and is also working to increase access to fibre and support for made-in-B.C. wood manufacturing.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 5, 2024.
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lumber, timber, has been demoted to "fiber" that lifeless, trash that can be turned into Pellets for burning, or glued together with toxic chemical binding agents to make artificial "dimensional" wood products, all in aid of making us forget the once majestic trees - actual living entities blanketing our continent from coast to coast. Making us forget that if we want forests again, and real wood, we have to replant our disappearing trees. And while we do that, employing hundreds of unemployed lumber mill workers we could also be salvaging our streams, rivers, mountain soils and the forest habitat essential to thousands of species that all contribute to the forest ecosystem. Why are birds disappearing? Thousands of acres of barren, eroding, forest trash strewn land, do not a viable living ecosystem make.
Bears from the shabby remnants of our forests should be mobbing the homes of the exploitative timber barons, except the thieves have all fled the forests they have destroyed to live in luxury concrete condos in the centres of wealth and power, they and all the rest of the kleptocratic extractor multimillionaires who tear non renewable resources from the planet's living skin and even recklessly destroy the living renewable resources because they are too greedy and too stupid to actually sustain that which makes them rich.
This is the colonial history of North America; cut down forests for the masts of ships which come back to cart even more stuff overseas; furs, fish, and when they are exhausted, wheat and corn grown where once a living prairie covered the land while it conserved the soil, fed the herds of many herbivorous species which in turn fed the nomadic indigenous peoples.
To make this beautiful land "suitable" for Europeans they first had to clear the forests, then kill the bison and other grazing animals, replace them with domesticated cattle and sheep and then kill the predators whose normal fare had been exterminated...irrevocably shattering the productive natural environment. What to do? how to make money? now that the beaver and their essential ponds have vanished, now that the prairies have blown away in clouds of dust?
The next step is to discover the land's mineral wealth and it's fountains of oil and gas, spewing poisonous, noxious waste into the air, the waters and eventually poisoning the people.
How to turn a pristine land mass into a seething cauldron of poison in 400 years. The land god gave to the Murderous Cain is well and truly here.