Pete Stoner may have forgotten, but his wife Maggie had the evidence: An old Prince George Citizen article laid out on the table.
Pete stared in wonder at his slightly younger self looking back at him down the barrel of a birch log on his small sawmill.
It was the main story for the Saturday Report published Jan. 5, 2002, headlined Balance Beam.
“Man successfully logs own land without huge clearcuts and minimal impact on area wildlife,” read the intro.
A light flickered. “I remember,” he laughed, his good humour still sharp. “They used that statement at the university,” he said, pointing to a highlighted quote and repeating it: “The trees aren’t for me, they’re for whoever takes over from me.”
That small sawmill operation received a lot of attention over the years, and rightly so. There’s a plaque on the wall from Woodmizer, the manufacturer of his venerable sawmill, celebrating two million board feet of production. “It’s three million board feet now,” Pete told me proudly, a pretty wild achievement with a one- or two-person sawmill.
Nevertheless, it’s been easy for government policy makers to ignore operations like Pete and Maggie’s.
In their nearly three decades of sawmilling Pete and Maggie put out as much production as the big Polar supermill at Bear Lake, now closed, would put out in less than three shifts.
Pete doesn’t run the mill much anymore, but it’s still there, with a log on the deck.
You could say he outlasted the big boys.
It wasn’t that long ago you didn’t need tenure to crown land to get into the wood business. In the late 1990s we had 2,300 logging and 500 sawmilling firms accessing 9.5 million cubic metres of timber every year through the Small Business Forest Enterprise Program (SBFEP), many of these in the Prince George region.
This program was established in 1979 to prioritize small producers without timber tenure on crown land.
However, the BC Liberals changed all that.
In their mind, if you didn’t have a corporate head office, you weren’t worth anything. They scrapped the small business wood access program. They cut the Small Woodland Program at CNC that trained people on how to do what the Stoners did. They transferred the millions of dollars in Forest Renewal BC funding directly to the large corporations to spend in a failed Forest Investment Account. To top it off they passed a disastrous Forest and Range Practices Act, eliminated appurtenancy that allowed the big mills to close their small mills, and sold off BC Rail that serviced the small producers.
These were huge unforced errors we will feel more sharply in coming years.
Despite those setbacks, the Stoners persisted. They had private land and could get their own logs.
But much of what grew on the bluffs and benches overlooking the Fraser River on their land was deciduous hardwood; aspen, birch and cottonwood, wood the big industry called junk.
The Stoners didn’t listen to any of that. They milled clear birch blocks for sale to Japan. They milled quarter sawn aspen for a luthier in California. They sold rough-sawn aspen lumber to make pallets.
They weren’t alone. Some others came together to form the Quesnel Hardwood Cooperative. Then-NDP forest minister David Zirnhelt brought leadership and vision. They made use of the now-defunct Wood Enterprise Centre in Quesnel where a big four sided planer could turn out tongue and groove flooring and paneling.
Before the government did the majors a solid and squeezed the little guys off the land, there were around 30 small sawmills between Quesnel and Prince George turning out value-added wood products, much of it based on birch and aspen.
It was an era to rival the Second World War’s local birch boom. You can read this in the Quesnel museum. Half of Britain’s wartime aircraft birch supply ─ much of it used for the famous wooden Mosquito airplane ─ came from our region. (This is a cool fact I think should be celebrated a lot more at both the Central BC Railway and Forestry Museum and the Kelowna mosquito exhibit at the KF Centre for Excellence.)
Pete and Maggie are pretty much the last memory of that bygone era of our sawmilling history, and as the time comes for them to move on, I was left with a somber thought.
Time takes, without asking, your health, your memory, your ability to move the big logs and boards around.
But it can’t take your legacy.
