Prince George, B.C. – It was an optimistic John Allan who met with members of the Prince George media this morning to talk about all things forestry including the moving of the Prince George COFI office. 

 

Allan is the President of the Council of Forest Industries and is in Prince George for a community dinner slated for this evening. He says the Prince George COFI office will move into the new Wood Innovation and Design Centre when it is completed in 2014.

 

Allan says forestry is starting to emerge from what he calls the “grim years” created by the crash in the U.S. housing marking. Not only   are housing starts in the U.S. increasing, he is hopeful starts will be in the 1.5 million range within 4 years. “If we have housing starts at that level, we will see pretty good markets for lumber.”

 

But Allan says the U.S.  housing market crash taught the forest industry a valuable lesion “We needed to diversify our markets, and we need to keep our markets diversified.” Allan says the reward for dedicating  the industry to serving the U.S. market resulted in the U.S. “As a reward for that dedication to the U.S., they kept suing us through various ways and means over the last 30 years.” The good news says Allan is that there is no litigation underway at the moment “And that is a rare event, it’s like the passing of Haley’s comet, it comes around every 200 years.” 

 

The good news moving forward, is that mills are now more efficient than ever “They’re the most efficient in the world and we are well positioned to take advantage of the market in the U.S.” Still, with the timber supply noted to be critical for some producers in the Cariboo, the  lack of fibre supply could result in the loss of production which would be the equivalent of 8-9 mills.

 

COFI launched its own investigation into the two  sawmill explosions and fires which   left 4 people dead and dozens more injured and Allan says they are  still waiting for results of test samples and the reports of the other investigations into those fatal blasts. “I’m very anxious to have a better track record on this front. WorkSafe (BC) has given us a directive to get our dust down to 1/8^th of an inch or less in our mills and we’ve gone through a real rigorous training process in the mills to manage for dust.   We don’t yet know if dust was the combustible in the mills, the WorkSafe investigations aren’t finished yet, but, it’s a likely culprit. Of course we don’t know yet what the ignition source was either, a control panel, a motor, whatever, but we should have those investigations completed by late fall.”

 

The switch from volume based forest tenure to area based, such as is planned for the   Burns Lake region, has both pros and cons says Allan. “Some of our members would like to see area based tenure. The pro is you’re more like an owner than a renter and the old traditional story is, I rent a house   I never fix the roof, I don’t paint it and it kind of falls apart unless the landlord comes in and does it. As you know the landlord in this case, the British Columbia government, has been criticized heavily by the Auditor General   and by others, that they’re not doing enough on forest health whether its research inventory, silviculture etcetera.”