Here we go again, with this SWL dispute!! When will Canada stand up and say, "you know what Mr. U S of A, how we harvest our trees, and how we apply our stumpage fee's, is none of your damn business" You want our lumber, this is what it will cost you.......... Don't like it, buy it somewhere else!! End of story!! The forest industry is in the dumpster, and these clowns want to play more games. What a bunch of BS!!

Come on Pat Bell, stand up for what is right for British Columbia for a change!! Quit selling our province short!!

And while we are at it, why don't we demand California pay thier HYDRO bill to us??? HELLO

T: "Come on Pat Bell, stand up for what is right for British Columbia for a change!! Quit selling our province short!!"

Give Jay Hill, Dick Harris and Stephen Harper a phone call! The Feds are supposed to be in charge of the SLA - they signed the spineless thing!

"...the Minister of Forests and Range, Pat Bell says the Province is prepared to go to court."

There you have it. What else can he do? Call in the Spanish Inquisition?

California went to court and won because the rates charged by NDP/Hydro/Power Corp were claimed to have been too high and ruledd to have been a form of extortion.

Besides, California is broke.

So diplomat, we should just sit back and say, "crap happens"!! Give me a damn break already!! We are pathetic as a Province, and as a Country, and as a people!! It is time we stand up, and yell to these blood sucking politicians, that WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH!! Don't sit there and say there is nothing we can do!! There is lots we can do, if we get off of our big fat you not whats, and REBEL!!! Get off the Internet for a while, and go out on the streets, and holler bloody murder. These are our taxes that these morons are sending down the sewer!! I am fed up with it ALL!!

I am fed up with a provincial government that continues to take my personal income tax and give it to these big corporations in the form of welfare.

Did any of the workers who took upwards of 20% wage cuts get any tax breaks from the provincial government similar to Canfor?

Did the mayor of Mackenzie offer any tax breaks for the home owners in Mackenzie that will go to work for less money at this Canfor subsidised plant?

When will we stand up to big business in this province and say "if you want my timber you will pay what I want to sell it for". Instead everytime these poorly run big lumber companies (who make no adjustments to thier business model), continue to cry to the province for another bailout.

No, you know that the freaking SLA is not the fault of our local MLA, no matter from what party he/she is! Big brother USA has us over the barrel! Canada was winning every SLA law suit when the Federal Conservatives decided to roll over and give in!

The USA is subsidizing banks, farmers, oil companies, car makers and just about every other activity one can think of - and it gets away with it! Might makes right, apparently! You are fed up with it and so am I!

You know how much attention we would get from the USA if we would holler bloody murder in the streets?

Zero.

Lawsuits are the only option and we were winning. Then we gave in to them. That was a pathetic thing to do.

Expect more protectionism and threats from the USA as time goes by!

Just another reason the BC Liberals are on the right track to promote and increase lumber sales to China.

Canada is the largest supplier of oil and gas to the U.S., just a thought.

I'll be looking forward to seeing you standing out there with YOUR sign taxinapothole.

Oh yeah, maybe you should run for a position in a political party too. You'd show 'em wouldn't ya !!

Remember the old saying ---- "I used to say somebody should do something about that --- And then I realized I AM somebody".

I can hardly wait for you to fix this US tariff nonsense for us all.

palomino

If California is broke. If California cannot take in enough taxes to stay afloat, what better indicator is there that the State of California is subsidizing the businesses and people of its State?

If the USA is going more and more into debt, the feds too are subsidizing whoever can con them into subsidizing them.

Before the SLA Canfor huffed and puffed and threatened to carry on the court challenge till hell froze over. Once the Fed Govt began the SLA discussions they claimed that was the only way to go. The prov Libs fell in line with unqualified support.
European countries quickly linked all imports to Europe to proposed US steel tariffs a few years ago. They began to identify everything that they could legally attack. The US backed down.

Our problem is that too much of our economy and political support of fed and prov parties have an American component involved. Alberta would never stand for energy being linked to forestry. Face it, too many of us are Americans by another name.

rufus1 your point drives home the fact that we are inextricably connected to the usa. Our spineless leaders, over the years, have permitted Canadian companies to be taken over by american interests, that is the real problem, now. We are hooped, might as well sign the papers, and become proud ( ? ) american citizens now, beat the rush.
metalman.

Seamutt: "Canada is the largest supplier of oil and gas to the U.S., just a thought."

Not even one of the companies that extract Canada's oil and gas from the ground is Canadian owned.

Besides, according to NAFTA we can not cut off anything for any reason, and that includes energy and water.

PetroCan is Canadian in name only. It was sold off to foreigners years ago, just like Tim Hortons, btw.

You got that right diplomat.

We dont have to take any crap from the Americans. What we can do is tell them to go to hell, and keep all our Lumber, Oil and Gas, Hydro, etc; and then shut down the Country, because everybody would be out of work.

Its time to wake up and smell the roses. Anyone who thinks we are not trying to screw the Americans by flooding their market with cheap lumber is just kidding themselves. We have been doing it for years. They have a right to protect their markets, and they are doing that. We have a right to sell as much as possible into thier markets, however we do not have the right to put them out of business.

The Mackenzie deal is a bunch of Political hokas pokas by the Liberals, the Town of Mackenzie, and Canfor to reduce costs, and put a few people back to work. The timing is suspect. The result to this point has been to piss off the Americans.

If the reduced stumpage for the Mackenzie mill, along with the reduction in taxes from the City, and concessions from the Unions results in the Mackenzie mills going back to work. Dont you think that down the road the mills in the Prince George area will become effected, and they will have to get concessions, or they will have to remain closed.

When it comes to the bottom line. Shut the Mackenzie mills, or the Prince George mills, what do you think you would do.

Same thing applies to the USA. Shut the Washington Oregon mills, or shut the Mackenzie Mills. Hmmmmm Wonder what option the Americans would vie for????

The Harper Government is trying to get some trade agreements with the European Common Market. If successful this will give us another outlet for our Lumber, pulp, and paper etc; This is a good thing, that should have been tackled 20 years ago. We used to do a lot of trade with Europe in days gone by. Unfortunetly we tied our wagon to American horses because it was EASY, AND PROFITABLE. We are now paying the price.

Americans buy 80% of Canadian production. Until this changes we can holler and scream all we want, but they as usual, WALK SOFTLY BUT CARRY THE BIG STICK.

we got screwed with the nafta and the SLA.
Now the usa is crying because canfor wants to re-open a mill and has received some concessions from our government to make it happen. Surely we could find other buyers in the intentional market for dimensional lumber. If they really would prefer us not to compete with their companies, let's not sell to them.
I know this is billions of dollars at risk. We just cannot keep taking it up the back side just because they are our closest and biggest buyer of this and most other Canadian made products. Surely south and central America has a market for our stuff and the far east as well. If we cut off their supply, they will have to do make some hard choices on how they play with international trade.

I dont think there is much point in pointing out who owns what company. They are mostly multinational. besides, canadians own a lot of companies on foreign soil. Our resources, however, are ours and extraction and sale of them has to benefit canadians (through royalties, stumpage, etc.) How much we profit is the hard part to sort out. If we charge a lot of stumpage we have the industry crying out that we are overcharging. IF we charge too little then the US interests start screaming...Wait a minute, they actually scream either way... Anyway, it is a tough row to hoe.
This is just a thought (silly i know) but folks here COULD try buying canadian goods instead of chinese american and so on. This isnt going to help with lumber, i know, but it might help the value added if we didnt buy pine furniture from sweden. We could go so far as to actively seek out and purchase local (at least canadian) products even if they cost a little more. I am not protectionist by nature and i see little future in trade barriers but we could actually win the trade with the US and other countries if we reduced our imports of cheap manufactured products. It would go a long way towards reducing greenhouse gasses (for those of you interested in such things) and it might even allow canadian forest companies to find markets for higher value products right here at home.
Or we can just blame the Government.

“ subsidizing timber stumpage rates in order to artificially keep otherwise uneconomical lumber production on line.”


Obviously he doesn't read the news a lot.
If the MacKenzie mill wasn't economical, I'm sure it would have accidentally burned down long ago.

I think Palopu's post about sums it up.

I think it is about time the Americans keep their bloody noses out of our affairs. We all know our economies are inextricably linked but we need to run our businesses for Canadians and Canada, not for the US and Americans.

Shut down the power...shut down the oil. Well on second thought we would probably turn into another Iraq with the Americans saying WE have weapons of mass destruction just so they could invade...

"Shut down the power...shut down the oil"

And then what? Cut more EI checks to the people who are unemployed as a result of them not needing to produce these things for the US market? Maybe we could put them to work growing fruits and vegetables, since we likely wouldn't see any of those coming back across the border the other way. Too bad we couldn't grow enough to supply our population. Oh well, pork and beans and dog food isn't all that bad . . .

Isn't it interesting, they say they don't want or need our lumber so why in the hell are we shipping truck load after truck load of logs over the line. I also notice that these logs are not peckerwood but prime spruce and fir that our mills would just love to have.

"these logs are not peckerwood but prime spruce and fir that our mills would just love to have."

-Not out of this reigon..

I believe most of the raw logs exporting is done by first nations... whole other story.

We need a large export tax on raw logs. Russia has one.

The myth that raw log exports to China were restricted, is just that, a Myth. The legislation was never passed.

Most people on these posts probably have no conception of the amount of lumber that is shipped from Canada to the USA. The amount is astronomical.

When the market is normal there would be approx 3 Trains at one and a half miles per train. or 4 or 5 miles of lumber per day shipped out of Prince George and points West, and Nort 7 days per week, 365 days per year.. When you add in all the lumber from other BC points, then Alberta, Sask. Man. Ont. Que, NB, NS. you start to get some sense of the amounts involved.

You would be pretty hard pressed to find other markets for this volume of lumber, certainly in the short term. You better get used the the Americans buying our products, and producing jobs. Without them we sink.

A mile in the old English language is 5280 ft. In the gibberish thats called metric it would of course be different, buy hey, who gives a hoot about metric. Certainly not the Americans, they never went along with the metric **crap**. Only the compliant Canadians bought into this system.