Its interesting as to how the Politicians etc; like to give the impression that these closures are a big surprise.

Are we to believe that Canfor and West Fraser could do a forest tenure swap without the knowledge of the BC Government. Are we to believe that the Government wouldn’t know that the swap would result in the closure of these two mills.

If the Government didn’t know, then they should have, and if they did know then they should quit the BS about being surprised.

Palopu- Scroll down a couple of stories and you will find one titled

“Forests Minister Says Mill Closures No Surprise”

My comment from last week:

“I see the Liberal “Jobs Plan” is still on course… so lets see 11,700 jobs lost plus this 5,400 jobs lost equals; 17,100 jobs lost.”

Add to this total the jobs that will be lost at Houston and Quesnel with the closing of these two mills…

Maybe the Liberals should just call their jobs plan a success and wrap it up, I don’t think we can take much more of their “Jobs Plan”.

Found out West Fraser did not mention the news to their employees in Houston before it was made public.

Lonesome Sparrow. I read what the Forest Minister said, however in another media to-day, Shirley Bond said that they were totally surprised that these closures came as soon as they did.

I doubt that the Forest Minister would be surprised as he would have been involved from the get go.

I think that the people who were really surprised was those who work at the mills, and who will now have difficulty selling their homes etc;, because of the downturn in the economy in their respective towns.

Palopu

I agree that the loss of 200 jobs will hit communities the size of Quesnel and Houston hard and one can only hope that they can bounce back like MacKenzie has done. I do not think these decisions are made by choice as I keep hearing that we are in the early stages of a lumber super cycle that will last the next 4 or 5 years.

Hopefully once power gets up to Bobquin Lake there will be some mining jobs available to Houston and there are also some developments proposed down the Blackwater that might help Quesnel the way that Milligan has helped FSJ and MacKenzie.

With any luck this will be the last time for an outbreak of this scale as they have mapped the genetic code of the MPB and with any luck will find a chink in the armor of the little buggers.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/scientists-decode-pine-beetle-genome/article10472828/

“With any luck this will be the last time for an outbreak of this scale as they have mapped the genetic code of the MPB”

So now they will alter the code so that we will get super beetles …. ;-)

BTW, to put that into context, they have mapped the human genome some time ago …. still have not found a cure for cancer, Alzheimer’s, etc.

Volkswagen already has a trademark on the Super Beetle:0

I think the difference is that they are trying to save the lives of people with cancer etc but the opposite with the bugs by any means possible be it screwing with their natural antifreeze, pheromone communication or finding something like btk that will do them in.

History has shown that man is very inventive when it comes finding new ways to kill;)

If a tree falls in the forest, will it make the sound of one hand clapping?

Does Shirley Bond still think its a good idea to use public funds to go to Ireland to recruit workers?

When we all saw the sea of red trees a decade ago, we knew this was coming. It’s not corporate greed or other conspiracy, its dead trees, millions of them. If you want to get political on this issue, how about the NDP doing absolutely nothing as the bugs spread. Tweidsmuir park was ground central and the NDP with their “no logging in parks” mantra let it explode. No one knows if it could have been contained, but doing nothing has led to this.

If people#1 was aborted, would the forest care?

While Forestry has taken a hit, I would say that mining and oil and gas have more than picked up the slack. Like Dow said, it’s not like we couldn’t see this coming.

Interesting, so all those Liberal trips to China to diversify our lumber market yet we end up being restricted by a limited wood fibre supply anyway.

dow… I seen this cartoon and thought of you ;-)

[url}http://www.gibbleguts.com/mosquito-hits-hemorrhoid.html[/url]

oops… http://www.gibbleguts.com/mosquito-hits-hemorrhoid.html

I rarely, if ever connect to your links people. Now I know why.

I have asked many times, what eco warrior firm pays you? No rational person could spam this site with your swill without backing of some sort.

Dow7500- You are right, everyone saw this coming. So why do we not have enough trained workers to fill jobs here? Why is Shirley Bond looking to Ireland for workers? Because she and her Liberal cohorts failed miserably in providing the necessary education and training programs.

Who needs education when we can have Sea to Sky highways, Olympics and large convention centers.

The Liberals have given us bread and circuses, and we now reap the whirlwind.

Dow 7500- Please stop repeating the utter nonsense that “if only the NDP had clearcut Tweedsmuir, then we wouldn’t have a MPB problem”

Do even a little research and find out how utterly mistaken you are.

Your constant repetition of basic lies lead me to wonder if you are a paid hack of some retrograde party such as the provincial Liberals or federal Cons.

labor is a moving dynamic. Its the responsibility of employers to see needs and adapt. The oil patch is figuring this out the hard way. This why the Harper government is proposing changes to the currant system, wich I am sure you don’t approve. Train for what industry needs not what government/unions want.

WTF has sea to sky hiway to do with this topic?

Umm… I believe herbster is referring to the obscene amounts of money the Liberals spent to on the Sea to Sky highway, the Convention Centre, BC Place Roof, Owelympics, etc.

Money that could / should have been spent on educating and training British Columbians for jobs in the trades, where there is currently a massive shortage.

Yet this seems typical of the Liberals, spend lots of money on “things” but invest very little in “people”!

You parenthesized something I clearly didn’t say herb. O well, it’ clear your a dipper toad, so what ever.

Guess who has majority power
Herb. Cons and Libs. Must suck to be a Dipper huh? Not like some retrograde party who is in power. Bring it on leftard.

Dave Zirnhelt. Where are you?

Too bad they weren’t as concerned about the Hazelton-Prince Rupert-Kitimat area when their mills all closed.

This ongoing discussion of a labor shortage can be deceptive … this link from a day outlines the Shortage Myth argument better than most

http://www.vancouversun.com/business/bc2035/skills-mismatch/Tales+labour+skills+shortages+myth/9063706/story.html

There is no real labor or skill shortage.

There is a shortage of CHEAP skilled labor.

So what is Shirley doing in Ireland? She is look for cheap, instant fixes to select shortages. Why? Because her friends in industry do not want to commit to the 3 – 5 years that it takes to bring an apprentice up to speed.

In our current model of trades and skills training, industry has to commit in order to receive the benefit. Government (left or right) can chin wag, give speeches all night long, and dump truckloads of spending on training, nothing will change until industry commits to developing work forces.

Could it not be that any shortage in skilled labour needs to be filled NOW, not “in 3 to 5 years when apprentices have been brought up to speed”.

Case in point, several years ago, when a company called Northern Telecom was beginning to be noticed as the then current darling of Bay Street, and some financial gurus were already making predictions that Canada was going to ‘lead the world’ in wireless telecommunications, a young friend of mine was strongly encouraged to pursue a degree in electrical engineering.

By her family, and especially her brother, who was already a newly minted one, and making a good living at it. There was going to be a ‘massive shortage’ of electrical engineers, he said. Guaranteed employment, graduates are being snapped up as soon as they’ve got their degree.

Of the 36 people who were accepted into the course at UBC when she was, 13 made it through the full six years of study to get their degrees.

Of those 13, only 3 were able to secure employment in their chosen profession. The other 10 were told they’d maybe made a bad choice, the world was now awash with electrical engineers.

Northern Telecom hired her, she was one of the 3. And for a few years she, too, made the ‘big bucks’. But not for long, and then it was time to get re-trained for something else. Electrical engineers, by then, were a dime a dozen. And Northern Telecom was about as useless as a mill without timber. Or a mine that’s been mined out. Or a gas deposit that can’t be fracked any further.

dow: “I rarely, if ever connect to your links people. Now I know why. “

You’re way ahead of me. I don’t click on People’s links at all. Waste of time.

socredible … several valid points in your post and I acknowledge your sad story about the engineers at N Telecom … several key differences I would suggest:

– even a first year apprentice is producing within the first year albeit it at a reduced rate and lower level
– an engineer is usually hired to create while a trades or skilled worker builds at the hands on level and then maintains, the trades or skilled worker will still be in demand in 3-4 years, maybe at a different site but still employed as the hands on skills are not changing at the same rate as an electrical engineers
– hands on skilled and trades workers are not as easily outsourced as an electrical engineer, any profession that is computer based can and will be outsourced over the Internet to cheaper locales like India and China (look at the recent bank stories) … what Shirley is trying to do is get the CHEAPER skilled worker from Ireland to come here for the hands on work that is in the pipeline. (Pun intended)

Even with your scenario of immediate demand, each imported trades worker could be matched up with a local apprentice … how much would you want to wager that will happen? …

My opinion is that many local industries are choosing to ignore the opportunities to develop or even hire qualified local or BC based workers because it is CHEAPER to import workers … it would be interesting to find out how many BC based workers are doing apprenticeships in Fort Mac … I have 4 family members currently employed there as apprentices and commuting back and forth … local industry chooses not to compete

In thin Harbinger sums it up best in two words.

anotherside, as a long-time owner of what might be called a ‘local industry’, (though I’m not in or around Prince George, but in another area of BC), it isn’t a question of ‘choosing’ not to compete, but rather one of our continued ability to compete.

I suspect most other local industries are in the same position. Be they large, or small. The level of profitability needed simply is not there any more. There are many reasons for this, and more seem to be added to the list all the time. And I could list them all, and the effects each has had on our ability to continue to try not only to make a return where we can stay in business and retain whatever level of competitiveness we currently have, but just to tread water long enough to wear out the rapidly depreciating junk we’re currently using and see the present employees get closer to retirement. Not that that is going to be something to look forward to economically for them anymore either.

I’ve spent considerable amount of my time trying to understand what the root cause of what’s happening is. Most people put it down to ‘corporate greed’, but in a world where profit as a percentage of sales is continually declining over the long term, this is hardly an adequate explanation.

In fact, I would put it to you that unless this tendency can be reversed and business profits improved we’re not going to have very many businesses left doing the things which we look to as traditional bases of employment.

We can talk ad infinitum about ‘free trade deals’ and our efforts to ‘capture global markets’ through them. But when we look at what’s going on in those markets we hope to capture, European countries now, for instance, who already have the type of trading arrangement we’re joining into, yet still can’t pay their bills to one another, how do we expect they’re going to be able to pay us either?

I think we need to get our priorities straight. We’re too focused on the ‘job’ as the be all and end all of everything. We tend to forget that if your employer isn’t getting his, it’s not going to be very long before you’re not going to be getting yours. The whole process is supposed to be circular, with business costs = incomes = spending from those incomes. And profit, savings, and interest being continually made possible through the ongoing nature of this flow. But this isn’t what’s really happening nowadays. And if we don’t correct it soon, it won’t matter who gets trained and who doesn’t, for both are going to be out in the cold financially.

There use to be a time when “costumer confidence” played an important part in the economic outlook of our economy. Today, in a business dominated world, consumers have been treated like “workers” who are a business expense.

Thusly, in an attempt to reduce expenses, wages are lower, unions are weaker, and our middle class is disappearing. Amazingly, no one, including business, thinks this has anything to do with our stagnating economy and communities!

You have business costs that are workers’ (consumers’) incomes, People#1, (which are wages, salaries, and to a much lesser extent, dividends), and business costs which are the incomes of other businesses.

Who, in turn, will have the same two divisions of cost. And so on. Only consumers’ incomes can finally liquidate the costs of production as that production becomes consumption.

Which is the PRIMARY reason for producing anything. Not so that someone can have a job, nor so some business can book a profit.

Our problem today is that overall, consumers’ incomes are falling in ratio to the overall costs of production that those incomes are being called on to fully liquidate through prices at the point of final retail. A PART, and a declining part at that, cannot ever FULLY make up something that it is only a part of.

Raising wages only relieves this problem very briefly, because the increased cost of the wage has to then be recovered through an increase in the prices of those things that wage has to buy. All we do in such an instance is work with ever bigger figures. What the increase in wages leads to is a push for businesses to try to reduce costs by displacing labour. Through automation, mechanisation, or even outsourcing jobs abroad. (Or bringing cheaper labour in here to do the same thing.) All of which currently make the situation worse for those who thought the wage increase was going to be their great salvation.

The answer to the problem lies in recognising that consumer incomes that are ‘earned’ from employment need to be augmented by incomes that are not, but rather are based on the overall increase in capital appreciation that’s ongoing in every modern economy over that of capital depreciation. The latter we are currently being asked to pay for as a component of prices, (which is as it should be). But we are not being fully CREDITED, as we should be, with the MONEY with whgich to pay it. And enjoy the material progress which the efforts of all have wrought.

Pretty hard to believe that these Companies are having hard times. Seems like Jimmy Pattison cant buy enough Canfor Shares, in addition the Bentleys, 3 M Management in the USA, and the Quebec Teachers Federation, have huge investments in Canfor.

The closure of the mills in Quesnel and Houston are purely for economic reasons, and have very little to do with the beetle epidemic.

If one listened closely to the comments from Canfor’s top brass, you would have heard the statement. **The harvesting part of the operations in the effected areas should remain about the same, however it is the production areas that will be the hardest hit**.

What this means to me, is that the same number of logs will be harvested, but they will be milled at other mills, through out the area.

Sooo. The huge savings will come from closing two mills, and laying off some 450 employee’s.

**Truth is the first casualty of war, and it seems it is also the first casualty of corporate, and Government press releases**

I would love to get into this site to do some poking around and look under some rocks, but it’s restricted and password protected.

http://industryabout.com/north-america/canada/1215-canada-wood-industry/11596-canfor-quesnel-sawmill

The Canfor mill in Quesnel went to metric a few years ago, and cutrough economy lumber for China.

This lumber was trucked to Prince George and loaded in Containers then on the Prince Rupert. Now that the mill is closing will this mean that there will be less business going through the Prince George CN container terminal, and therefore more lost jobs??

Just askin.

There are lots of customers waiting in line to use the terminal. Hell, Lakeland was right close and couldn’t use it. I’m sure they will take up the slack if there is any, once they fire up of course.

cougs78,. Have those customers who are waiting in line gone to the metric system.??

With the US market up the way it is, I suspect that selling to China is no longer a **big** deal. Probably don’t get anywhere near the US price,.