Flyin' Phil Gaglardi was credited years ago with calling pulp mill odor''the smell of money''shortly after Kamloops residents started covering their noses in response to Weyerheauser Canada's then new pulp mill. Phil's gone, but the eau-de-BS still lingers. What the Kamloopsians were objecting to was locating of the source of the odor right on the edge of the valley community where it shared the same dead air inversions with all those sets of lungs, not so much the mill or its jobs. There is certainly a parallel with the Crofton situation, but it's something quite common to the industry. The mills are often placed as near a water source as possible, thereby usually having high visual presence and greater potential to be near my species which also likes water. There is really no good reason for that anymore other than it's cheaper than piping water, a task most other heavy industry accept. In fact, I would propose the further pulp mills are from their water source the more likely it is that source will remain clean. Regardless, you can't have effective change unless the government is a serious and responsible player in this type of issue. I'll remind some of you of the almost unanimous whine ''we can't do it'' from the pulp mill industry in the early '90s when government did actually act and ordered emissions and discharges cut to a specific level by a specific date. The industry completed the upgrades on time and, I understand, benefited well from an improved image and even on the bottom line. For my money, I'd back this Matt Price who sounds like he has an understanding of the dynamics at play here. In fact, I would encourage Matt and others to keep working the low-key approach and leave the theatrics to those old rockers. If you want government action, don't re-elect this band of fools next May.

First Dollar sound to me like nothing more than a front for the Socreds, oops silly me, I mean the neocon Liberals, cut everything, strip everything and ship it out gang.

Norske is a Scandinavian conglomerate with a large interest in the Norske-Canada company that operates several mills in the province of BC, including one in Port Alberni. This company, on its website, crows about how it is driven by the triple bottom line philosophy of business, that is, that social and environmental costs have equal weight to economic ones. Yeah right. On the website President and CEO Jan Reinas states: "We do not harvest short term profits abroad. We build sustainable economic growth in local communities..." and subsidiary Norske-Canada's Senior Vice-president Jess Beaman also states "It is a sense of responsibility and stewardship that drive us to find cost effective, innovative ways to address environmental issues. Solutions good for the environment are good for business" is the same company who recently demonstrated what it really thinks of the Vancouver Island communities in which it operates. The company had a smart idea on reducing its costs of shipping chemicals and pulp products by shifting its business to trucks and away from the E and N railway on Vancouver Island. Not only did it almost destroy the railway company and the VIA passenger service between Victoria and Courtney as a side effect of its "business decision," it also effectively dumped a good portion of its transportation costs onto the backs of the taxpayers of BC. Where once a private railway company hauled heavy and dangerous cargoes from mill to mill and to rail barges that connected them to railways on the mainland, now trucks haul these loads on our highways and ferries. Huge trucks lumber around the dangerous curves of Highway 4 and through Cathedral Grove risking the lives and limbs of travellers on that road, busting up the pavement and dumping 5 times the pollution into the air as compared to using the train. I wrote to both officials several weeks ago asking how this business decision squared with the goals stated on their website. I quess it isn't surprising that I have yet to hear back. While I can understand that business and jobs are a necessary part of modern society, I still cannot stomach that so many people think that those goals supersede all others even the health and well being of the general populace. Now companies like Norske feel confident that, with the help of big business toadies in Victoria, they can safely run roughshod over people and country, ignoring even their own lofty principles. But there really is only one principle important to these people-the acquisition of money-and to hell with everything else.

It is becoming more apparent each day. The pulp mills and the BC Liberals have the same goals-increase profits. And not for you and I.

Kit: You keep quoting Carr out of context and what she said back then does not really apply here. Although I strongly support unions and the right to breathe clean air, I get significantly disturbed when I see unions vs environmentalists issues raise their ugly head. Surely we have learned from the wars of the 90's that unions and environmentalist actually want the same thing - sustainable industries that minimise the cost to the environment and at the same time keep jobs. The old war of union worker vs environmentalist is perpetrated by the corporate elite and them alone. This distraction is to shift focus away from the actual problem ie clean air and refocus on the struggle between union members and environmentalists - without one word of suggestion on how the issues can be mutally resolved to the satisfaction of both parties. Union leaders and environmentalist see the same long term issues, it is the owners of the companies that perpetrate the conflict and distraction and of course the media love the simple 2 sided confrontational issue.

It seems to me that First Dollar is but the latest incarnation of the "Share" groups set up by the industry in the late 80s - early 90s. The unity of interest between industry and the grassroots was impossible to maintain then, as it will be this time.

First Dollar is similar to SHARE. Keep in mind that the SHARE groups were opposed by the Forest Industry executives. The Forest Alliance was set up by industry to remove the focus from the SHARE groups. There is still one SHARE group in operation. First Dollar, like SHARE, are very much grassroots small town people looking to protect their lifestyle. These are the sort of people that built the credit unions and the CCF/NDP in BC. These are often the people that voted NDP federally in 1988 and Reform 1993.

Note to the Tyee Editor!!!!!! Your website is so unreliable, why are you still running on IIS? Why have you not found someone else to host the site? Why did they not backup the metabase and the content when they did the upgrade? Disaster recovery plans are useless if you don't test the backup, I hope you have these people on a short leash. Seek a second and third opinion, do us all a favour.

Scratch that, your website is sooooooo unreliable.

Kit should validate his sources before he sticks his foot back in his mouth. That foot is in there so much it actually thinks Kit's mouth is a shoe. Kit, you get so Carr-ied away.

I live just a few miles from Crofton and have lived here for twenty four years.In that time not only has the mill changed hand it has been constantly upgraded to the tune of millions of dollars. There have been environmental problems but they do seem to be addressed by the machinations of protest and react process.Duncan, Crofton and Chemauinus benefit enormously from the mill. As a nurse I hear about peoples health issues daily and I believe that most people here are very aware of and concerned about anything deleteriously affecting their health. Norske or anyone else is not going to get away with anything here....they're obviously watched too closely. Thanks for the article, it well reported the events here

Just a note to correct the assumption that "First Dollar Alliance" (or "Dollars First Alliance" as I like to refer to them)is a small town grassroots group. The president of Timberwest has strongly recommended that each of his employees join this alliance, and sign their names on the website. Every keener in the industrial sectors of forestry, fish farming and mining has signed up. I'd like to hear their stance on raw log exports, the 200+ millworkers in Youbou who were left unemployed when Timberwest took their opportunity to close the sawmill there. When Don McKendrick of NorskeCanada Crofton threatened in 2003 to shut their pulp mill down if they couldn’t reduce municipal taxes and burn their tires and coal, we never heard about this group, even though that was the most substantial threat to close the mill. Where was ‘first dollar’ when softwood lumber disputes with US cut so many jobs for the mill workers and shut down locally owned and operated sawmills, and where are they when it comes to raw log exports, aren’t they worried about lost jobs there? Will we see them protesting gov’t and industries decisions to export those jobs with the logs? No, they’re not because they are industries response to fight community groups that threaten their self-imposed image. Resource industry’s executive actually got together back in April and promoted this alliance to their employees throughout their organizations.