I wonder if it is truly the economy or just Canfor showing their continued local support of jobs.....

Some house prices should be coming down as homes go on the market due to workers bailing...sad but true.

Canfor, our roots are in this community.

What a joke they are.

HATE TO SAY IT BUT I DOUBT TOLKO WILL BE UP AND RUNNING FOR SOME TIME AS ITS TIED TO "MARKET CONDITIONS". SO WHO'S LEFT???

Geeze, the vultures go right for Canfor. How much of a share do they have? Is it enough that they had a say in this closure? Do you guys know how business works? Winton Global and Canfor aren't in business to lose money just to keep people working.

I think the mud road did that mill in as the final straw. They b-train all that lumber in from the saw mill in Bear Lake to the planner mill on River (mud) Road.

Prior to the road fiasco they had no real plans for down time... Come to think of it the bridge closure didn't help them much either.

all of them could have have staged key curtailments and rolling shutdowns a year ago when lumber was $100mbf above where it is today. As soon as the CAD/USD started moving the way it did.

However no one wanted ot be the first...so now West Fraser and Canfor will be the last.
Last man standing...has always been their policy. The Canadian worker will suffer for the Gov't allowing it to go down that way, but nobody wants to stand up to the 400lb gorilla's.

Now where are we? Sad times we live in.

It is highly unlikely a mill would shut down or curtail production if it was making a profit. A shutdown is also unlikely if the mill was breaking even. As a matter of fact, almost in all cases a mill will continue to operate though negative modes(operating at a loss). The reasoning is, start up is costly and costomer relations do suffer. It is in the best interests of the plant to continue operations through the low periods. There is a huge investment here. It is a situation of serious desision and very costly for ALL involved when a plant shuts down.

Canfor, our roots are in this community.

What a joke they are.

I second that opinion, Canfor has all but turned it's back on local companies and community affairs. Canfor was made what it is today through the support of local companies and by using local companies to do work. Their dollar pretty much stayed in Prince George. Now, they turned their back on these people and their dollar is spent in the south of the province. Let me see, an example - the stopped using local rental companies to provide equipment for contractors doing work at the mills. Now they use CAT rentals, which is the most expensive rental company in town. Funny thing - Jim Pattison owns how much of Canfor, how much of Finning and Finning plays a major role in the Cat Rental ownership. HMMM - Jim's right hand feeding his left?

PISS ON CANFOR I SAY!!! Prince George doesnt need them!!!

canfor and west fraser will run until the stockholders get sick and tired of losing 100's of millions of dollars.

However hte missing piece of the puzzlle that they can't admit too is they are being subsidized with all the more free stumpage and these mysterious tax rebates.

SO why should anyone hope for more?

it's just your jobs...that's why they should/could have made some sound decisions a year ago.

It seems to me that to offset the countervailing duties the milling companies in this part of the world decided to reduce their product cost by increasing the productivity and running more shifts. Given that we had a MPB situation as well, it looked like a great strategy.

One of the possible results was a loss of safety in the field. I believe there were a record number of serious accidents, particularly in the transportation part of the industry. People were overworked, turn around times were horrendous, the infrastructure was strained.

Generally, life was great for those who measure their life in terms of dollars.

Many predicted that the local bubble which was relying entirely on lumber would eventually have to burst since the MPB infested wood would only last for so long before it became useless for those purposes. It was only a matter of a few short years before the artificial high would have to drop down to a low which would be lower than what we had become used to over the last few decades as being “sustainable”.

Few, if any, were seriously working on dampening the effects of that slow down. Few, if any, were working on diversification, or even understood what that really meant. Fewer still were discussing the diversification of marketplace – reducing the reliance on selling to the USA

The fact that the US was artificially propping up its economy through its monetary policies, and paying little attention to more and more people living on credit while supporting the addiction to more and more gadgets in their constitutional right to pursue happiness, and the eventual day of reckoning which would have to take place, really did not come into the discussion too much.

So, here we are. The predicted effects are here earlier than expected and, in some ways, for different reasons than expected.

However, the fundamentals are the same, at least in my view.

1. the efficiency of production of goods has been increasing at an exponential rate since the industrial revolution.

2. the marketplace (both due to total world population increase as well as affordability of manufactured goods) has been growing at a similar exponential rate.

3. the economies of the world are generally geared to the notion of growth. Few countries, if any, have mastered the ability to maintain a quality of life and even improve it with a stagnant population growth. Those who have, have done so by relying on trade to access a wider and wider marketplace.

4. a very large part of the world population has not taken part in that quality of life improvement. They have now emerged in a world where the latest technology is available to anyone and they can improve their lot by putting that technology to use in conjunction with a very much reduced labour rate. The labour intensive infrastructure is being built at a much lower cost. The products produced are produced at a much lower cost.

5. the disparities of material quality of life which exist in the world are beginning to be rectified at a greater pace than previously in the modern era. The equilibrium shift may include a consolidation of standards of living in those regions which have excelled in the recent past.

6. with the shift in equilibrium, there will be points of friction, the solution of which can and will take many forms.

So, how does PG, the hinterlands of BC, the west of Canada, Canada, North America, etc fit into this?

Who is ready to be the visionary to take this region through the next decade or two so that we will emerge at least as well as we entered into this time in our history. BTW, in hindsight, I consider that time to have begun in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in this region. We were so full of optimism that it was scary. Nothing could go wrong. By 2000+ we were going to be the size that the Kelowna region has turned out to be.

Some names please of people and organizations who you think have the capacity to be our real leaders?

It's the market, guys.
metalman.

"Canfor's Plateau mill in Vanderhoof is hiring - they are resuming their third shift. No one here can figure out how or why."

Let me try .....

House building continues in Canada and the USA. The demand for lumber has not stopped, it has slowed down considerably.

Companies are shutting down, thus total production is and will be decreasing.

The mill will run more efficiently at full capacity.

The mill is located closer to MPB infested timber.

The Canfor pulp mills need byproducts of the lumber side of the industry.

I am not an expert at this, so I might have forgotten some, and included one or two that are wrong. However, I am not sure why the increase in shift is so surprising.

Whenever there is a calamitous shift like this, there are winners and there are losers. Tyically those with the capacity, if they have been running a fundamentally sound operation, will be the winners in the long run.

In the US housing sector there have been people and organizations buying up as much of the stock that is for sale at liquidation prices as they have the financial capacity to do. They are betting that the bottom will not drop out, but that there is an adjustment occuring and they stand to gain once that period has gone by. In the meantime, those places can be rented in order to minimize the loss and increase the capacity to purchase more.

Just one of the several ways some people became millionaires during the depression years.

Remember the name "Jimmy Pattison" ....

:-)

"Who is ready to be the visionary to take this region through the next decade or two so that we will emerge at least as well as we entered into this time in our history. Some names please of people and organizations who you think have the capacity to be our real leaders"

Interesting questions indeed owl. May I suggest that the next "chapter" in PG's history (10-20 years) will not be one with forestry as the main character.

I'll bet that health care services, education, transportation and consolidated support services from around the North will provide more growth for the City over that time period than forestry.

Plateau is not adding a third shift!

We are adding a planer graveyard bobtail shift for a couple of months. The sawmill is out producing the planer and rough inventory is high. Chip supply problems at the pulp mills are keeping us from shutting the sawmill to let the planer catch up.

Plateau is again one of the top world producers. The 150 million dollar upgrades are humming and our production costs are very low. There is another $500,000 to a million dollar upgrade underway. The push is to keep more fiber out of the burner and in the hands of the pulp and pellet plants.

On Friday mangement took a 7 to 33 percent pay cut. Seven percent for line foremen, fiften percent for senior mangement and 33% for the president. Happy leap day!

The next thing coming at Plateau is a pay cut for workers, pressure to cut property taxes and stumpage rate changes. The race for the bottom is on and picking up speed. The big losser is the local economy.

The beat rolls on...lumber under a hundred.

You heard it here!

Lets invest in the Airport and CN Rail. Seams to be the only ones moving forward in Prince George's economy. (not counting te derailments)