I have been hearing about the necessesity for more value added wood products coming out of PG (and BC in general) for more than 20 years. It's a no brainer that it's necessary, but do you really think it will happen if the companies can simply churn out studs and send them south.

If there was ever a area where some government incentive was needed to kick start a new industry, then surely this is it. Pat Bell was talking about this when he first ran as an MLA. Did he done anything when he some influence in the Ministry of Forests during his first term? I strongly suspect that new value added wood industries are a long way down the government's priority list for PG, and I bet it's not even on the companies' lists.

Do you think there is anyone who is capable of showing even a teensy bit of leadership here?

pat bell wouldn't know hard wood from laminate if he was lying on it. this guy was a trucker not an agriculture or forestry expert. he is just a token cabinet member and yes man in Gordi's government. he has no pull.

later..........

Pine is a softwood which takes very little everyday wear and tear.

Anyone who knows anything about wood and QUALITY furniture knows that one does not use such wood and expect it to last a few hundred years and become an antique.

To put as many hours into such a piece of furniture as shown in the picture is a waste of a craftsman's time in my opinion. If I were to spend that many hours on a piece of furniture, I would want to make sure it lasted a long time, could withstand the everyday wear and tear of furniture under real living conditions, and look the same 30 years after I bought it or made it as it did on the day it was first finished.

Use the wood for furniture by all means, but use it for the type of furniture that pine is typically used for - utilitarian, everyday furniture such as is sold at JYSK and IKEA, as well as home-made furniture built by hobbyists.

If you want to make furniture or other building materials such as flooring and solid wood panelling, begin to look at the birch all around us. I am unsure of the quality of the birch trees around PG, so even that may not work.

One cannot force a situation just because one is ending up with "denim" wood.

I would imagine there are lots of ideas for value added wood products, if people think about it.

For instance, years ago when I wanted to put down a parquet floor I tried to get birch parquet, and it is just not available. Plenty of oak from ?Ontario is available, but no birch parquet, although there is at least one mill producing strip flooring from birch around PG. I was also able to by parquet from South American hardwoods years ago, but not birch. I am positive this is a wasted resource locally, and I don't believe there is anything wrong with local birch.

The fungus discoloured wood may not be hardwearing but it does look good. It would make nice panelling for walls, especially if patterned off with some dark cedar for contrast, but I bet you can't buy really nice ly finished panels.

There's no market, of course. And absolutely no interest in spending the money necessary to create a market throughout the whole of North America with 300 million people. You couldn't sell it, you see!!

You said: "Do you think there is anyone who is capable of showing even a teensy bit of leadership here?"

I would think that the first bit of leadership by the government would be that they recognize that they do not have the expertise in marketing required to match the raw material with the population of the world, never mind North America.

Thus, what government needs to do is to invest in hiring some brains capable of marketing the raw material as one or more manufactured products. None of the licensees is capable nor interested in doing that since their expertise lies elsewhere and they are geared up to only provide the products they have been providing for half a century and longer. The market and the product has to be developed quite quickly since some or all of it is very time sensitive. Of course, that is one of the challenges itself: determining what the raw material could be used for in the short term, the intermediate and the long term.

Thre is likely room for a consortium of several licensees in the Timber Supply Areas involved plus government to come up with a spectrum of approaches.

The first thing one has to ditch is the closed minded approach of using the "denim" characteristic of the wood as a key value of the final product. While it is an interesting aspect of it, to keep those blinders on will hamper any true exploration of the marketability of the raw product in a manufactured form.