Mr. Speaker, University of B.C. researchers found a link between sawmill workers who experienced more periods of unemployment and the incidence of their children attempting suicide.
Analyzing data collected in rural B.C. over the period of 1985 to 2001, the report states that “male children of fathers with low duration of employment at a study sawmill while their children were less than age 16 had a greater odds of attempting suicide than children of fathers with high duration of employment”.
Steelworker president Rick Wangler, Local 1-363, based in Courtenay, wrote in a recent letter, “People's lives have been turned upside down, communities have been devastated, and forest industry workers suffer fatalities, injury and suicide at alarming rates”.
Softwood lumber tariffs close mills. With mills closed, raw logs are approved for export under federal law. Workers and their families watch as truckload after truckload of our logs leaves to create work in mills across the border.
Something must be done for resource communities before more studies find more drastic and deadly consequences.