The member for Winnipeg Centre is absolutely right. It is economic treason. What we are seeing instead is that good paying jobs are leaving our communities.
The Youbou Mill closed down a few years back. A large percentage of those workers never recovered the good paying jobs they had. Many people had to leave our community to find work and it is because that social contract was taken apart. The Youbou Mill no longer had access to the fibre supply that was essential to keep that mill, which had been in the community for decades. Generations of families worked in that mill and it was taken apart.
A man by the name of Ken James, who works with the Youbou Timberless Society, has been a tireless advocate in raising this issue and bringing it forward to federal and provincial politicians. Hundreds of trucks have been loaded leaving the valley for mills elsewhere and the families in Nanaimo—Cowichan are without work as a result of that. It is shameful in this day and age that we continue to support policies that are eroding the health and vitality of our communities.
Under the heading “An End to Guaranteed Wood Supplies for Value-Added Mills, the same report states:
A second pool of timber was also available for bidding, but the bids were restricted to manufacturers of value-added wood products. This included a wide range of companies producing everything from finger-jointed boards (long boards created by gluing shorter pieces of wood end-to-end) to high-end products such as window frames, furniture and musical instruments. Under such auctions, companies were required to submit “bid proposals” that essentially identified the kind of product to be made, how many jobs would be generated in the process, and where.
Further on the report states:
The bid proposal program was subsequently scrapped, with the end result that value-added manufacturers no longer have access to a separate pool of wood and must now compete directly in the “open” market. The problem is that serious questions remain about how open the market is, and whether value-added mill owners can compete on an equal footing with big lumber producers and other larger consumers of logs.
In many of our communities we are talking about small manufacturers which do not have the ability to compete with the larger manufacturers on an open market. If we want to ensure that our communities are economically diverse, we need to build on our skills base, ensure the supply chain, which goes all the way along, is in place and ensure we support community efforts.
Value added wood in many of our communities is critical to our economic survival. In my riding of Nanaimo—Cowichan, we have many small window and door manufacturers that employ 30 or 50 people, plus all of the spin-offs. Many of our custom furniture manufacturers make great products that are in high demand but they are often struggling for access to fibre supply. I live on Vancouver Island where we have a large supply of trees but these small manufacturers cannot get access on an equitable basis.
When we want to talk about economic vitality in communities we need these kinds of policies and strategies that will support these initiatives.
I now want to talk about the pine beetle for a moment. In British Columbia, it is an economic and environmental disaster. I would like to quote from a 2001 report entitled, “Salvaging Solutions: Science-based management of BC’s pine beetle outbreak”, by the David Suzuki Foundation. The numbers have become far worse but I will use these numbers in the report because they are quite startling. The report states:
Since 1997, mountain pine beetles...have infested over 300,000 hectares of lodgepole pine...forests in the central interior of British Columbia. In previous outbreaks, mountain pine beetles have killed as many 80.4 million trees distributed over 450,000 hectares per year across the province, making them the second most important natural disturbance agent after fire in these forests.
The current approach of the British Columbia Ministry of Forests is to aggressively harvest infested and killed trees to slow the outbreak, mitigates its impact on timber supply, and reduce losses in timber values. Measures to facilitate this approach include increases in the Allowable Annual Cut for some areas, reductions in environmental regulations and planning....
The big issue around this is that this large scale salvaging sanitation harvesting has long term economic and social impacts on our communities. We are not looking far enough in advance to talk about the economic plan that we need to put in place in order to deal with what will impact on these communities over the next 10 to 15 years.
Many of the communities are heavily reliant on the forestry sector and without an economic plan to help them deal with the impact of this kind of harvesting, I wonder what the future will be for those communities. We have seen other communities in British Columbia lose their sole industry and have to close down.
In the context of this motion, we should be looking at much broader strategies around economic community and economic development that looks at that triple bottom line.