I think Trudeau will be the far bigger threat to the BC forest industry than Trump. He will sell our industry out to get consesions in places like Atlantic Canada and Quebec, just like last time.

My thinking on this is that Trump wants out of the Middle East and the 6 trillion it has cost America since 9/11. He talks of this all the time but is silent on new tarrifs for Canada. Trump wants North American energy security so America can have full sovereignty in their foreign policy against the globalist so. He is prepping for war with the global banksters surrounding himself with big oil.

Trumps strategy needs Canadian energy as we are the source of 60% of American energy imports and critical to his strategy of North American energy independence. He appointed the head of Exxon as Secretary of State to secure his policy, and a pro Keystone guy to head the EPA.Trunp has been a loud advocate for Keystone going ahead to secure Canadian oil.

We simply need to tell him it’s a two way street and if he threatens Canadian softwood lumber imports with a tariff then we will impose an export carbon tax on energy. Simple as that. Follow the law as deliberated by previous tribunals or it’s a full blown trade war. Trump respects a well founded argument and appreciates energy security and cheep building materials for the US construction industry… Tie in some favorability in relation to his foreign policy objectives and the deal maker in him will come around.

Problem is, like Joe Biden said last week Trudeau will be the stick in Trumps foreign policy and he will relish this partisan role at our expense.

The best thing we could do as a province is reinstate the local auprentacy rules for local logs, to limit log exports from local regions… Say 200km ish. This is essential to protecting rural BC and then implement better provincial management of our forests with all Crown logs flowing through local log markets with a base price that can be budded up by any new entrants.

We need to move away from monopoly capitalism and back towards free enterprise with equal opportunity to do business by anyone willing to bid the market price for logs. Trump is anti monopoly and his view of the BC industry especially as profiting from monopolistic practices will be the Trojan horse that kills us.

Logging companies today, truckers, equipment owners, foresters… All at the beckoning whim of monopolistic forest companies that divide and contour and set policy and prices with complete disregard for the market forces of other players they subcontract from.

Build a government agency to oversee the Crown forest lands in opening up opportunity for small business contractors to bid on harvesting jobs, and then have the forest companies bid through Crown log yards for the raw logs, or bush grind, or chipping logs… And allow market forces to innovate and expand through certainty to access the natural resources to the highest bidder. This provides a degree of separation from the monopolistic forest companies and the small business harvesters, as well as leaves the door open for any new forest companies looking for access to fiber (in local market areas).

It seems like a no brainer to proceed, but with monopoly forest companies financing our government we are all held hostage to the banksters on Wall Street that own all our monopoly forest companies.

We are their puppets unless we all stand up for free enterprise in our forests.

Backed to Quebec being the only important province in Canada…is it being subsidize? We have a part time drama teacher with his only take on economy that you can spending our way out of debt, a budget balances itself. Someday going down to negotiate with someone he looks down his nose at. Better have his hair all done up for this one.

“In the last few years, other forest product markets, especially in Asia, have been further developed which is positive. However, we also need to think in new ways. For example, why not the creation of a forest product marketing board that could negotiate trade and pricing with a variety of countries around the world?”
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That was tried once, under the Tommy Douglas CCF/NDP government, in Saskatchewan. It led to a mass exodus of northern Saskatchewan sawmillers to British Columbia. Bob Williams, former NDP Premier Dave Barrett’s Forest Minister was poised to set up the same thing here back in the early 1970’s. It was one (of many) reasons that hapless government went down to defeat.
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“That being said, we not only need diversity of markets, we especially need more diversity of product, i.e. extracting more value from our vast, rich forest resource. Why not establish forest tenure policies that foster such advances? Furthermore, why not hive off a portion of stumpage fees to communities for local economic and infrastructure development?”
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Have you ever tried to ‘value add’ anything that’s already valuable, Peter? It’s the kind of notion that holds that a large, valuable gemstone, say like the Hope diamond, could be made more valuable by cleaving it into a number of smaller diamonds simply because the work and wages of the diamond cutters would be multiplied. But will the smaller stones, when they’re all faceted and finished, ever add up to the price that could’ve been had for the one big one? ‘Value adding’ has it’s best success when the raw material has little or no initial value. Then you can add some to it. If it’s high priced to start with, all you’re going to add is further cost that becomes ever more risky to recover in price.

Peter Ewart:-“For example, why not the creation of a forest product marketing board that could negotiate trade and pricing with a variety of countries around the world?”
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This, as I mentioned above, was tried once in Saskatchewan. Various private schemes along the same lines have been tried in BC and elsewhere. One, Seaboard Lumber Sales, was successful for many years. It had amongst its members a variety of sized sawmills, from some of the largest majors like Canfor, to relatively small export oriented one mill only players. The ‘problem’ with this approach is that, just like when ‘marketing boards’ have been tried in agriculture, they do nothing to control a producer’s costs. Which continue to rise, often times at a faster pace than the return from his product does. Companies are hemmed in by their ‘quota’. The only way they can control those rising costs then comes down to the acquisition of MORE ‘quota’. By buying some other player’s. That’s the only way open to them to reduce their ‘unit costs’. By producing more ‘volume’. This leads to the very type of corporate concentration that we’re trying to avoid. And it often ends up as being a concentration of the inefficient, which ultimately leads to a demise of the producers.

Peter Ewart:-“Furthermore, why not hive off a portion of stumpage fees to communities for local economic and infrastructure development?”
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What kind of stumpage fees is the BC government getting from beetle killed pine? Two-bits a cubic meter? Doesn’t seem like there’s too much room for any ‘hiving off’ if that’s the case.

I once listened to a speech given by a former leader of the BC Green Party, Ms. Carr. She railed that companies were getting Crown timber for that low a stumpage charge. That it was terrible. She didn’t specify what kind of wood, or why.

My company was getting timber from a local woodlot operator ~ all the blowdown that occurred every time they tried to do their small, selective harvest thing. They’d open up a little patch here, and there, all over their claim. Then the wind would come up in the winter and blow down as many trees around the edge of these openings as they’d selectively taken out. Might as well have clear cut it.

By the time they got back to harvest the blowdown the ambrosia beetles had holes in it. And when it went to the log dump, those logs were culled. No one could tell how far the beetles had gone in. So they cried to the Forest Service and got that wood for 25 cents a cubic meter.

We took it, and paid them on the actual ‘good’ lumber output tally. Most of it, the bug holes were only in the sapwood, which generally wasn’t very wide on their smaller logs. On the faster growing, larger trees, with wider sapwood, they’d gone in a long ways. A scaler wouldn’t have been able to tell, and even at that low a stumpage rate, they’d have got nothing for those logs if they’d been paid for on the scale.

There is NOT a lot of margin in the lumber business. Never was.