OBAC and the strange case of the missing word

By Peter Ewart

     Part 1 - By Peter Ewart

It is often said that Alberta has its oil, while BC has its wood.  BC produces a huge amount of primary wood products such as lumber and pulp & paper.  To a much lesser extent, it also produces “value-added” wood products.  But many have long felt that, as the primary sector reaches its limits, the future of the industry lies in how much it opens up the “value-added” sector, which has the capability of manufacturing a vast array of solid and engineered wood products.  Wood is such a unique and versatile substance, the argument goes, that the only limits to its uses are those of our own vision and imagination.

That being said, you would think that the development of “value-added” wood production would be at the top of the list of any economic development priorities for our region, especially as formulated by the provincial government-funded Omineca Beetle Action Coalition (OBAC).  After all, we are facing the unpleasant fact that, in this region, most of our pine forests will be destroyed by the pine beetle over the next few years and getting more value out of the remaining trees is a matter of community survival.

Given the above, you would also think that the term “value-added wood,” would come up again and again in OBAC newsletters and publications, given its importance for our future.

But you would be wrong on both counts.  You can scan the 11 “priority topics” in OBAC’s “Business Plan and Workplan” posted on its website, but you will not find a mention of the word “value-added wood” anywhere.  In fact, you can scan all of the 7 online newsletters OBAC has published so far and come up empty. 

This is very strange indeed.  Words are powerful things.  They can say as much when they are excluded from a document as when they are included. 

In the Prince George region, we are surrounded by wood.  Our region is considered to be one of the great wood manufacturing centers in the country and in the world.  In fact, we have several generations here who have spent their lives working in the forest or the primary wood industry.  There is no doubt about it - we excel in the logging and manufacture of wood.  When anyone talks about “economic diversification”, it is a no-brainer that diversification of the wood industry should have top priority. 

But this appears not to be the case for OBAC.  Besides “alternative energy” (i.e., biofuels) and the vague statement “regional community-based interests in future forests and fibre use,” OBAC sees “destination tourism,” “mineral exploration,” “agriculture” and other non-wood topics as being its “priorities”. 

How did it arrive at this list of “priority topics”?  One important vehicle, according to the OBAC website, was the “Community Dialogue Sessions” it organized in the Spring of 2006 in towns across the region.  In the section on its website entitled “Year in review 2005-2006 - Identifying the priorities and preparing to address them,” OBAC writes that the input it received during these sessions has “shaped the Coalition’s business planning, informed priority setting and will guide the diversification planning and action that the Coalition will undertake.” 

But this is where things get strange.  If you click on the section of the website “Links and resources”, and further click on the “Community Dialogue Sessions”, you can read the notes from these sessions.  The session in Prince George attracted only 6 people from the general public (Prince George has a population of almost 80,000 people).   The one in Fort St. James attracted an equally small number.  But, nonetheless, the notes (which are quite scanty and disjointed) are there to read. 

Leaving aside the legitimate question as to whether such poorly attended and organized sessions should be the basis for setting the economic development priorities of an entire region, it is illuminating to examine the notes from the Prince George “Community Dialogue session.”  In that public session, not surprisingly, a “value-added wood incubator” is brought up as a suggestion by one of the handful of people in attendance.  Another audience member adds that “we have a huge supply of fiber coming on stream; the attention being given to this situation doesn’t meet the seriousness of the situation.  New markets and fiber utilization.”  Another person asks: “Why are we not able to make a real go of “value-added wood products?  What are the barriers?”  Still another says, “Industry refuses to look at opportunities that are diversified, beyond dimension.” 

Interestingly enough, on the same OBAC web page, there is a link to some more extensive notes that were taken by OBAC at the “Stand Up for the North Conference” in November of 2006.  According to OBAC’s own statement, these notes provided additional input on its “needs and priorities.” 

Unlike OBAC’s “community dialogue sessions”, the Stand Up for the North conference was well-attended with over 175 people coming together from across the region.  OBAC did not participate or assist in the organizing the conference whatsoever, but, for reasons of its own, decided to send a “note-taker” and publish the results in a document on its website.  The resulting notes don’t even come close to capturing the importance that a variety of speakers at the conference put on developing value-added wood production in the region.  But, nonetheless, when you scan them, it is clear that value-added wood was an important priority for those in attendance.  

Going over these documents, it is hard not to get the impression that OBAC is cherry-picking its priorities for economic development in this region. 

And it gets worse.  On its website (on the drop down menu under “First Nations”), OBAC talks about a report put out by the Northwest Tribal Treaty Nations (NTTN) entitled “Working Together to Create Sustainable Wealth.”  OBAC claims that “a number of the concerns, challenges and opportunities” put forward in NTTN’s report are “the same as those described in [OBAC’s] Beetle Action Proposal and Business Plan.”  To emphasize this point, OBAC provides a direct link to the report on the left hand side of the web page.

But OBAC either did not read the NTTN report or, as in the community dialogue sessions and the Stand Up for the North conference, ignored the content. 

 How else to explain the following?  The NTTN report clearly states that “adding value to the wood is crucial to creating viable and sustainable wood for First Nations communities.”  To emphasize the point, the report further states that “there is growing awareness by more people in the Northwest and from all levels of government that development of value-added processing and an expansion of the value-chain for primary resources are essential to the economic future of the region.”  It couldn’t be put more plainly than that. 

What is also quite astonishing is that OBAC appears to completely ignore the fact that there is a “value-added” wood industry already in existence in this region, both native and non-native, and there has been for a very long time.  Did OBAC consult with this industry when developing its “priorities”? 

Clearly, something is haywire here.  We are talking about an organization that claims to be the “voice” of “community interests” in the region in “setting priorities” and developing “a regional diversification plan” for the challenging times ahead.  OBAC has received $1.7 million so far from the provincial government. Yet we have a slipshod process, and an entire value-added industry edited out of existence.

Why has this happened?  Over the next several days on Opinion250, we will be discussing this issue further in other articles in this series. 

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