Timber panel eyes logging protected areas, Wendy Stueck, The Globe and Mail, Jun 12, 2012
“A committee looking for ways to boost B.C.’s dwindling store of timber is looking at logging protected areas such as old-growth forests as one way out of a supply crunch…”
Categories: Environment, Forestry, Log Exports, Natural Resources
IN-SIGHTS 
I think cashing in all of my RRSP's will be a good way of boosting my dwindling supply of funds. It took me my whole life to save them but I should be able to replenish all of it in the next couple of years or so….right? Wait…a better idea…I will take the cash out of my nieces RESP instead.
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And, if you had two hungry children, you could feed one to the other. That would resolve the hunger for at least a little while.
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Our entire country is upon evil times, because of Harper. He is merging our country, into Communist China.
Harper's Campbell/Clark BC Liberals and Boessenkool, all work for him. Campbell gave our mill industry to Communist China. Freighter after freighter of our raw logs go to China. BC mill people will face huge layoff's, because a shortage of timber. We knew quite some time back, Christy was going to log BC's rain forest. China owns BC mines as well, we know swarms of Chinese will work those mines.
I'm afraid the three mayors pleading for help from Christy, to save their catalyst paper mill, will fall upon deaf ears. It wouldn't surprise me if, Communist China gets that mill too.
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Among all the terrible thing the BC liaRs have perpetrated on the people of BC, like BC Rail, Rape of the Rivers, the ongoing assaults on education and health care, to name just a few off the top, we tend to forget that these masters of economic management managed to virtually kill off the forest industry in British Columbia at the same time the United States (our co-landlord, with China) was experiencing the biggest building boom in its history.
I would have reservations about logging (and I spent many years logging) the few “special” forests left if the wood was going to mills in BC. However not a single surviving old growth tree in protected areas should be sacrificed to keep underpaid Chinese millworkers employed. Every raw log shipped to China should be considered a single charge of treason to the people of British Columbia and those who have allowed this travesty should be “guests” of the state for the rest of their natural life, unless you consider capital punishment applicable.
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Treason is a strong word, but I believe kootcoot has a point and this word will be used more and more to describe actions of so many members of our complicent media that aid and abet policies like lake draining IPP's, policies like Norm mentions here…not to mention participating in the stifling of info on BC Rail. What is their motive? We know the motive of the private corporations and lobbyists….money without regard for honouring social contract. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal”.
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I used to camp out past Youbou on Lake Cowichan here on Vancouver Island. I remember a mill worker telling me that barely two years passed after the mill put $1.6 million in upgrades to make the mill more efficient when it was shut down and the machinery sold off. That was mid-90s and the government has been increasing raw log exports ever since. Last summer, my boys counted 15 log-filled trucks heading out of the valley inside of an hour! If you need to put food on the table for your family and you haul logs the guilt you carry must be getting as heavy as your load. It's hard finding other work or selling your rig as your only asset, but how does the guy who worked BC timber make the government change the business plan and get our mills working again and build tertiary plants like an IKEA factory or something? When this government goes down, there'll be a few empty rigs parked on parliament steps I bet.
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Example of single-minded, short-sighted, obtuse thinking from an industry spokesperson:
“When you look at biomass – it still needs to be cut down and processed,”
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We will be the last generation of BC residents to make a decent living within the forest industry.
Say bye bye folks; it's almost over.
Not only have we mortgaged our kids future we will leave them without means to pay for it.
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What makes raw-log export to China particularly galling is China's proximity to Russia, which has double the amount of boreal forest as Canada has…Incroyable, n'est pas? Two nations, two solitudes, really, whose shared and long-disputed border was, and is, so remote from their respective heartlands that they abandoned the alternating taking and retaking of a frontier log fortress from each other in 1689 by settling the treaty of Nirchinsk.
It was the first treaty the Middle Kingdom had ever signed with a foreign nation, resented not only because it admitted, for the first time, a limit to its effective strategic reach, or because it made them joint treaty subjects with descendants of barbaric Russ, but also because the Chinese fancied ancient and predestined title to this wilderness on the Amur River. In reality, both contestants, like the semi-barbaric Norwegian and Danish mix-bloods just beginning to spread westward across newly-claimed North America (as the French and English) were interlopers in lands prehistorically occupied by aboriginal peoples, then for firs and maybe a little gold.
Today the resentment is the other way around. Russians in the remote east have been impoverished by the catastrophic collapse of totalitarian, Soviet communism, while reformed totalitarian, Chinese communism has made China an economic superpower. Chinese interest in investing in, and in manning, Russian sawmills idled since the Soviet collapse has been especially resented among the dwindling ethnic Russian population, magnifying endemic, particularly the anti-Sino, xenophobia patriotically cultivated since the Treaty of Nirchinsk. The Chinese have instead built new sawmills inside China, mills that can saw Canadian logs as just well as Russian ones.
But the bigger reason why Russia does not export more logs to China has to do with transport infrastructure developed in Soviet times when prices and production were centrally controlled and infrastructure was used cooperatively, resulting in fewer, but more heavily travelled roads and railways. Rampant post-Soviet corruption discourages both foreign and domestic infrastructure investment, leaving a system already rudimentary now in poor repair. In free-enterprise Canada, where profitability determines production and prices, more, but less travelled logging roads are built competitively instead of cooperatively. Despite this seeming inefficiency, plus the much higher labour component of forest products, Canada maintains its Chinese market share for raw logs mostly because of Russian ineptitude. And because we don't as yet have a free trade agreement with China, it can't countervail our logs the government almost gives away, like the Americans can. Long and short is: our logs would still be more expensive than the Russians' if it wasn't for their circumstance, one that will probably be remedied sooner or later.
It would seem, therefore, there is little future for us in the Chinese raw-log market. We haul logs off to China in a hurry like there's no tomorrow because, well, there probably isn't one once the Russians get their shit together. That makes it doubly foolish to bite into our preserved areas to make up for a “shortfall” of exportable logs.
One more thing: log supply shortage due to beetle-kill is a ruse. The reasons so much lodgepole pine was allowed to grow into the beetle-sucseptible age group of 60 to 70 years to begin with are, first, we put out fires which would have otherwise created a patchwork of multiple-aged pine stands less susceptible to beetles and, second, nobody wanted the stuff anyway. Claiming that this “shortfall” of pine that would never have been harvested should be “made up” in other, more valuable species, is a ruse.
Eta Pravda.
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