Forestry was on the agenda Wednesday night as the four candidates running to be the new MLA for Prince George-Mackenzie were questioned by a panel for a CFIS 93.1 radio debate.
Taking questions were Shar McCrory of the NDP, independent candidate Rachael Weber, the Green Party’s James Steidle and Kiel Giddens of the Conservatives. The moderators were Res Krebs, Nicole Fraser and Trudy Klassen.
“With the decline in forestry jobs and the closure of sawmills devastating northern communities,” the question went, “what specific sustainable forestry practices and policies will you advocate for to ensure the survival of forest-dependent communities and prevent further economic collapse?”
Steidle was picked to go first.
“We've got to get back these sawmills back going, and, you know, to that end, we need to really do a lot of work on tenure reform in this region,” he said. “We've up with a situation where, under the the BC Liberals, the BC Conservatives now, they got rid of appurtancy, which is a requirement to have local logs for local jobs. And when we got rid of that requirement, it allowed all these little community mills to get shut down and a lot of these big mills to expand and do all the production at these fewer and fewer places. And at the end of the day, they close down their mills and they sit on the tenures.”
This has happened recently, he noted.
“Like in Mackenzie, we've got an entire timber supply area up there with no manufacturing capacity. So we need to, say, and bring in legislation that says, you know, you've got a few years to get a mill going or you lose the tenure,” he said.
“We give it to somebody like John Brink, you know, he stepped up to the plate, said he wants to use these tenures and provide jobs for the people of our region. I don't want to see just one John Brink take over from Canfor, I want to see multiple John Brinks, but I think that's kind of the model that we need to move towards is basically call the bluff on companies like Canfor and say, you don't own the timber, okay, this is public resources, and you can't sit on the tenures and not provide a community benefit in return.”
Giddens said the Conservatives have a plan to revive Northern forestry.
“We're uncompetitive in our major drivers of our economy right now because of higher taxation and less certainty for industry. We need to provide that certainty for industry,” he said.
“So we're going to do that by making sure permitting and red tape are streamlined. We're going to make a one-project-one-permit approach to make sure that we can get those logs to the mills. We also need to make sure that we're able to get those logs to the mills. We also need to make sure selective logging and better forestry practices are part of how we get our industry to be sustainable. This is a renewable resource, and we need to make sure that it can continue for generations to come.
McCrory said the NDP would look for efficiencies to boost the industry, and would call on big forestry companies to assume more responsibilities when logging in a community.
“I think that moving forward, we have to ensure that when we bring in big organizations, that there's a better social obligation to taxes and to jobs, and that commitment is confirmed and we use it,” she said.
“When they leave, those tenures, those forest licenses should go back to the community so that they can use it for community forests and other smaller mills and those kind of things. The BC NDP are speeding up permitting, that's part of the platform, as well as increasing fiber security on first and second users.
The party is also enthusiastic about the Resource Benefit Alliance, she noted, saying they bring leaders to find ways for the North to become more self-sustaining.
“That is something that we have to do, is work together and work as the North and ensure that we are able to advocate for the needs that we have,” she said.
Weber said she knows many families directly affected by mill closures.
“I live in Mackenzie, and I can tell you the devastation that has caused so many families to be sent home and to not know how you're going to pay your mortgage, to not know how you're going to feed your kids or keep your lights on,” she said. “That's a real thing in Mackenzie. It's devastating. When I was door-knocking, I had a gentleman come running up to me and he was crying, and he said, ‘Rachel, I just bought my wife a house, we're going to have a baby, and I just lost my job. How am I going to do this?’ And he was crying, and I didn't know how to help him, because I'm just a candidate right now. So we need to start pushing back on this and stop letting these mega-corporations take over the sustainability that we have right here in Prince George and Mackenzie.”
She advocated for streamlined regulations and said it’s key to work with First Nations.
“We need to promote sustainable forest practices, but we also need to build relationships with our First Nations communities,” she said. “We need to reach out and say, how can we work together? Working together is key and vital for this.”
It’s also critical that mill closures don’t leave communities without employment options.
“We need to encourage innovation in new markets and we need to retrain our staff so that when they are let go from a mill, they still have other skills that they can go put into society, and to be able to bring home those cheques to continue paying for their families and not have to look elsewhere for their livelihood.”
The candidates were given two minutes to add to their responses or challenge their opponents on theirs after each round of questions.
Steidle, founder of Stop the Spray, writes a column for The Citizen (on hold during the election campaign) that often focuses on forestry issues.
He said the tenure system means logs are being shipped all over the province unnecessarily.
“You hear this all the time, the log costs have gone through the roof, and then the reality is we've logged all the stuff that's close to town. I'm hearing stories of people hauling logs from Mulberry, the other side of the Rocky Mountains, to Bear Lake. This is ridiculous. And part of the reason is we have these crazy, complicated tenure systems like what's happening with Mackenzie, with logs getting logged up in Mackenzie getting shipped to Dunkley. We also have the raw timber being shipped overseas.”
Giddens responded: “(Conservative Leader) John Rustad has worked in forestry for 20 years, and the Conservative Party has the most innovative solution to that in modernizing stumpage …”
Weber interjected, speaking over Giddens to say: “If John Rustad worked in forestry for 20 years, why didn't he go help when Camp 4 shut down in his community?”
Giddens didn’t respond, continuing with: “So that we have value-added the process rather than at the log cost at the front end. That's modernizing stumpage to make actually encouraging the value-added that I think we need.”
Steidle said the NDP has not approved permits for selective logging in plantations.
“I think that's like the future of logging,” he said. “You can go into some of these 30-, 40-year-old pine plantations. It works great.”
He cited one such operation he visited. “They got 80 loads of logs out of this little area just spinning out the pine trees, and the NDP is not approving those permits,” he said.
Other topics discussed during the debate, which aired live from 7-9 p.m. on CFIS 93.1, included health care, housing and Indigenous relations. It was the second of two such events, with the first on Tuesday, Oct. 15 focusing on Prince George-Valemount.
