I agree Ben. This downturn will have a huge effect on this area in the long term.

Those who are losing their jobs will have to burn up their severence first, then unemployment insurance, so it could be a year or more before the full brunt of this downturn is felt. I suspect a large number of people will pack their bags and leave for greener pastures.

What can we expect from our Political Leaders, mostly lip service, hand shaking, and back slapping. The same as 2007.

This Country has lost its way, and to a large extent is now being run by people who have no concept of leadership, or fiscal responsibility. Unfortunately we the Voters allowed things to get to this point, and therefore must accept some responsibility. We are masters of bitching, bellyaching, and complaining, but when it comes to **action** we are sadly lacking.

The people of this City have been grossly manipulated by the Mayor, Council, and City staff for the past 10 years of more, and for the most part taxpayers dont even know it.

It seems there is a huge lack of interest in what is happening, and what should be happening. I could give lots of examples, however I will use just one, and that is the Ice Oval which opened this week-end.

Figures released indicate that they hope to surpass last years figures. Last year the Old Oval had 18,000 visitors,so they are hoping to get 20,000 this year.

Now here is the manipulation: The 20,000 visitors are in fact approx 200 to 300 people who use this facility on a regular basis. So in effect we could say that using this facility on a 7 day basis 16 hours per day, by 7 people per hour, over a 6 Month period would generate 20,000 visitors. This number of course includes kids who use the facility for playing scrub hockey, which they can do in any school yard in the greater Prince George area. Much like one person going to the library 100 times per year. The stats would show 100 visitors, however there was in fact only one person making 100 visits.

Now:: John Rustad Liberal MLA says that they need to find six to seven million dollars to finiance the second phase of this facility, so in effect we are going to spend 7 Million dollars so that a few Boni Fide, speed skaters joined by a small group of *normal* skaters can skate around in circles if the weather doesnt get to cold.

Common sense tells us that this money could be better spent on Highway Improvements, tax reductions, the homeless, disadvantaged seniors, to name a few, and not on frivoulous facilities for a vested interest group.

This is one of many projects that waste taxpayers money, and no one seems to be accountable.

Once these facilities are built they are rarely if ever utilized to their maximum, and then become a huge cost to taxpayers to maintain. Some examples are the new horseshoe pits (24) that are used approx once per year, and in fact have small trees and grass growing out of them. Another is the Sportsplex that is having a less than stellar , membership drive.

No one ever seems to go back to these projects to see if they are in fact operating anywhere near where they were projected to be.

We have to quit this foolish spending and get back to the basics.

I think Ben raises some very good points. One thing that the current forestry slump will certainly do, is give us absolute evidence as to how diversified our local economy is.

The only diversification recently would be the pellet flame plant moved 2km closer to its maximum point of impact on air-shed distribution in the city. I guess they could all get a golf clap for that kind of land use planning. Not much else comes to mind.

Most of all the real value added jobs like Woodland Windows and Canadian Woodworks I think all disappeared over the last couple of years.

I notice former state representative and former House Majority Leader Jeanette James, the "Railroad Lady" of Alaska was in Ottawa again in December promoting the possibility of an Alaska railway extension to Northern BC that would eventually be part of a continental infrastructure project that would link Asia via the Bearings Straights to Alaska down through Northern BC to the rest of North America.

I think it has potential to be the next 'inland port' kind of thing the promoters in PG could hype for 2008, and if ever it did go ahead, then that would mean huge economic activity for PG has a hub and service center for the first intercontinental railroad. I'd like to see at least one of our politicians looking into those who are looking into the railroad to Alaska and Asia idea… to maybe see if there isn't anything PG could do to assist and benefit from those kinds of infrastructure investments. Maybe even draw a conference to PG to promote PG as a future international hub and make money for the hotels. IMO it has a lot of merit. If we’re going to have promoters… lets at least put them to work promoting something big and bold IMO.

Pal: "Once these facilities are built they are rarely if ever utilized to their maximum, and then become a huge cost to taxpayers to maintain."

If we don't have the money to maintain them we can either raise the taxes or borrow the money to do so (that's been the mindset up to now) or we can properly mothball them and wait for better times.

In the meantime, let's get real and evaluate what we really need and what we can afford.

The present Mayor and the rubber stamp council have shown that they are not the kind of people to put things in proper order of actual need versus spending for the sake of spending on yet another project.

Happy New Year 2008! It may turn out better than we think if we believe in ourselves and the odd miracle!

I remember when we the entire country relied on beaver pelts ..... then grain from the prairies ....... then forestry ..... the car manufacturing ..... and now Alberta oil ......

wait ..... I forgot that fishing for cod came before beaver pelts ..... I guess I don't remember that well after all ...

;-)

"the first intercontinental railroad"

?????? ... and what about the one between Europe and Asia?

When you exploit without any thought as to what comes in the years to come you'll end up with what you deserve. I cannot feel sorry any longer for humans be they in BC or Brazil. EVERTHING wrong on planet Earth is the result of greedy, selfish humans and all those that make excuses for them. The weak blame beetles. The strong take a hard look in the mirror and accept their sins. Planet Earth is currently under the power of the former. Life will become good when the majority are the latter. Until then things in PG and everywhere else will just get worse and worse.

There is not a single problem on our planet that cannot be solved and will be solved when most think in terms of "we" instead of "me".

"The only diversification recently would be the pellet flame plant moved "

Tongue in cheek, I assume since moving an existing operation is not exactly diversification.

In fact, even the product is not a diversification. It is still dependent on the forests and is a part of the forest industry. What pellets have done is keep a few more jobs in the forest industry through alternate use of the waste. In the meantime, more jobs have been lost in the industry per cubic metre harvested due to efficiency increases. That is slowing down a bit now as we begin to peak until the next tech change.

However, that loss of forestry jobs over the decades pales in comparison to the recent cyclical loss due to the housing slump and the more structural loss expected due to the eventual effect of the MPB.

Interestingly no one ever speaks of that. I think that is a bit too complex for those who look at the world through 2 or 3 year bins rather than decades or generations.

http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-82307-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html

Read the lower part of the linked page and you may come to the realization that first the fall of the Canuck $ and then the MPB has allowed a short upward “blip” in the local jobs for a decade or so. We are now on a downturn that was observable some time ago. I don’t know who in this province looks at these indicators and reacts to them so that the impact is lessened and diversification measures are taken.

Remember “forest renewal”. The loss of jobs and the re-education of the forest work force put out of work at that time?

From most of the posts here it appears that too many are living in a time bubble that is 20 years outdated and have not come to the realization yet that they are living through a major industrial shift. The infrastructure we have is for the “old industrial imperative”. If we wish to survive we need to invest in those who are looking to the future, not the past, and we need to help them by slowly adding to the infrastructure which is required to support the new industrial imperative of the 21st century.

I'm with you Ben. My family relies on the forest industry. So far, we are fine, but the storm clouds are near. Thank you for your good wishes, and Happy New Year to you, my friend.

from the above linked web page:

• About half of the total Canadian volume of timber comes from British Columbia and one-third of Canada's direct forest industry jobs. ….. that means that BC has one job per timber volume to the rest of Canada’s 2 jobs ….. maybe that is why the compressed wood fibre fire logs for sale at Zellers come from Quebec rather than Prince George …..
• Direct industry jobs peaked in British Columbia during 1979 at 95 thousand; declining to 75 thousand during the recession of 1982 ….. I think most of us remember 1981-82 …. That was the time housing prices in BC, including PG took a nose dive ….. and the times following that the prices in the GVRD took off like there was no tomorrow … with PG not following that for some 20+ years later …… so, we are still here, we are still consuming, we are still travelling, we are still moving to bigger houses for some weird reason or other … life went on and the sky did not fall.
• in 1950, 1 thousand cubic metres of timber generated two jobs; in 1989, it generated one …. Even the MPB is not going to have as great an effect as tech change ….
• employment in the BC timber industry has been dropping at a rate of approximately 2 thousand jobs per year (about 40% of the forestry jobs in the province are in the region north of 100 mile house)
• The annual cut in 1990 was 74.3 million cubic metres on Crown forestland, well above the government's own estimated long-run sustained yield target of 59 million cubic metres per year …. I think that is noticeable for anyone who looks at Google earth images of this area, or flies over the area on a clear day every now and then. Any grade 2 kid with eyes can tell you that the 0 to 5 year old patches are more than 2 to 3% of the forest cover.

Google Earth allows us to look at some land uses in other countries and other parts in our own, especially the way foret resources are harvested.

Look at Sweden, for instance, and a completely different pattern emerges which, even to the untrained eye, likely looks to be a more sustainable harvest pattern and frequency.

What I can't figure out, is why hasn't someone in China set up a load of truly super mills, brought in wood from Russia to be processed and shipped it to whoever needs it at prices that may be too good to be true? Obviously the shipping costs would be high, but the labour would basically be free compared to what we are paying people in the industry here, not to mention the lack of environmental considerations, free trade agreements, collective agreements, etc.

I'm certainly no logging expert and I'm not sure what infrastructure would be needed to pull it off, but if I were in the industry in BC, I'd be more concerned about that scenario than MPB. I would think it could do for the BC industry what Walmart does for small town hardware stores. I suppose they would still have to transport it to market though and they would probably need really smart people with industry experience to set it up, provide consulting, etc . . .

A portion of that answer lies in the fact that Russia is switching from raw law sales to producing products at home, then shipping them out. There are new laws in place which will see an annual reduction in raw law exports.

So, Chinese mills would lose feedstock over a very short time period.

I think what many fail to understand is that forestry is not only Canada's business, but that there are also other large players. Canada plays primarily in the softwoods side of things and primarily exports to the USA. Other countries play not only in the softwood arena, but also the hardwood arena.

Canada is really not a big international player if one looks at the world map outside of North America. Canada has been trying to diversify by attempting to sell the rest of the world our house building technology. That is a major cultural change this country is expecting the rest of the world to make. It will fail miserably.

The latest news from Ikea and where they are investing in making furniture. Not Canada, not China ... but Russia.

http://www.neurope.eu/articles/80956.php

Here is a story that ran 2 years ago about the coastal forestry situation, one which people in this region seem to forget about. I find we are so parochial.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2005/11/15/bc_forestry-china20051115.html

Interesting.

Okay, so even if it were Russia instead of China that decided to supply the North American market with their locally produced goods. How much of a stretch would it be for them to invest in the infrastructure to get the goods across the Pacific and into the port system on the West Coast? It's probably quicker to market than going through China anyway. How could they benefit from rail links in Alaska that could go through the Yukon and connect down to the lines in BC, creating a truly North American network? Perhaps they could even follow pipelines that the US may be interested in building in Alaska to reduce their dependance on Middle East oil? Wasn't there "talk" of this already?

I know some of this stuff may be decades off, but really, a couple of decades in the timeline of an entire industry is nothing.

The topic can become quite complex, since there are many other factors at play as well.

For example, about 13 years ago, a model forest was set up in Eastern Russia as a result of the request from the Canadian Forest Service. A local group was involved with that. The local industrial forestry partners were not really interested in providing the services requested in a country that could eventually put forestry production in Canada to shame. Why would we help our potential competitors become more effective, was the thinking.

The other side of the coin was that no matter what was done, they would eventually be competitors to contend with. They had insurmountable advantages at first glance. However, consumers in the urbanized world were starting to show an interest in how forested landscapes were managed. Producers began to realize that what was needed was a more level playing field of how the business of forestry should be conducted.

So, the involvement with the far eastern part of Russia was to bring their standards up alongside what our standards were moving towards – so called Sustainable Forest Management. Today we have several standards throughout the Western World that address the issue in various forms. CSA has one standard by which most of the operations in the Central area of BC now abide. Organizations such a Tembec have adopted the FSC standard which is seen by some as a much tougher environmental standard.

We now have a Russian forest industry emerging which is playing by the rules set by those standards for the simple reason that they would not be able to sell their products to most of the world’s markets.

http://www.forest.ru/eng/sustainable_forestry/certification/fsc-russia.html

So, they have an inventory far exceeding ours. In fact, their Siberian forests alone have a larger biomass than the forests of the Amazon. They have a workforce which is very well educated. They have mechanical and industrial ingenuity which many people around here tend not to be aware of. They are learning the business skills of the West. They have a workforce which is expecting higher wages than those in China. Their GDP is 50% higher than China’s. They have a manufacturing infrastructure which is in bad need of replacing. They have both internal capacity as well as international interested parties ready to fund the building of major modern plants that will equal and surpass our best.

Expect serious competition in the next 10 years, if not sooner. Expect the largest players in the Western world to be producing inside Russia to supply world markets. (see link below) I do not expect this to be any different than the way other manufacturing has gone in the world over the past decades.

We will loose mass manufacturing in our forest industry. Look to Europe and the USA to see what can become a much more stable, diversified forest industry. We have been focused for far too long on one type of product – wood for the USA/Canada housing industry.

The Finish-Russian relationship re forestry.

http://www.virtual.finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=63946&intIGID=&intCatID=607&CatTypeNumber=3&LAN=EN&contlan=&Thread=&intThreadPosition=2

another backgrounder on Russian Forest Management.

http://www.borealforest.org/world/rus_mgmt.htm

The transcontinental link between northern Asia (Russia) and North America (Alaska) is to include rail, pipelines, as well as elctrical transmission lines. One of the notions about the electical transmission is that due to time differences between the two key population bases, electrical demand is in opposite cycles and would mean that it would be partially an exchange of capacity.

Of course, if it were just electical lines, I would think they they could be laid on the ocean floor and burried to protect them from aquatic life forms.

Here is some information about Russia's capacity increase in delivering oil to the Far East or Pacific Rim.

http://www.iploca.com/platform/content/element/302/3-FRI-NOVOPASHIN-ENG.pdf

How are we going to BUY all this cheap Russian lumber when our own mills are all shut down, or automated to the degree that they scarcely employ anyone anymore?
(Conditions we're rapidly appoaching right now.)

Reminds me of the story about former UAW President Walter Reuther's tour of one of Ford Motor Company's newest car plants.

Ford invited him to the plant's grand opening, probably as a goodwill jesture towards their old adversary. The plant was state of the art. Highly automated, computer controlled, with robotic arms to do most of the work Reuther's high paid UAW assembly line workers used to do.

About halfway through the tour, one bright young Ford executive pointed at the robot arms welding a new Ford together, and asked Reuther, somewhat sarcastically, "How you gonna get those 'workers' to go on strike, Mr. Reuther?"

To which Reuther replied, "How are you gonna get 'them' to buy your cars?"

And isn't just about the same with lumber? Sure we can import it 'cheaper' ('monetarily', anyways) from Russia. Just like the States could import way more lumber 'monetarily' cheaper from BC than they currently can produce more in America for. But if we, and the Americans, only distribute the incomes that'll buy that lumber through employment....??

The other thing, if Russians have so much lumber, how come Russians, in general, are so poorly housed? Wouldn't it make more sense to sell their own lumber to Russians in Russia first? Rather than exporting it all over here? But then, on the other hand, if Russia CAN'T buy ALL its own lumber with the wages paid out in the course of making it, how then CAN Russians buy any 'goods' we send them in exchange for their surplus lumber?

And if we're not making anything over here anymore, 'cause 'monetarily' it's cheaper to make everything we used to make here somewhere else, what real good is it going to be to the Russians to receive our 'money'for their lumber? There won't be anything made here to buy with it.

"To which Reuther replied, "How are you gonna get 'them' to buy your cars?" "

Nice smug answer. The reality is that people are till buying cars and cars continue to be made with efficiency increases in production including shifting piece work to offshore countires with lower wage rates.

Same realities that exist for the car industry and other industires will apply to the forest industry.

-------------------

Russians tend to build their housing of concrete and bricks, with wood being used in single and low rise buildings, often only in floor and roof construction.

They have lots more gravel and water and cemetn ot make concrete than they have trees.

The amount of building materials they have at their disposal does not relate to their housing standards.

Besides, a Russian might respond by showing you some pictures of how North Americans are housed.

Try this ...... and keep your eyes open when driving around the city and on North American highways in general, especially in the west, the far north, and the far south ...

;-)

[url]http://flickr.com/photos/captiveight/135740939[/ulr]

http://flickr.com/photos/21952403@N02/2119766812

http://flickr.com/photos/captiveight/135740939

hmm this is not new news! 1982 was the start!!! Lets move on to new industry...I made the change as most of my friends have also..yes there is life after logging..