We have several small

We have several small privately owned sawmills in this area, including our friend's next door, that cost only a few thou. where the operators cut and process their own logs and lumber and make a decent living.

We only buy locally processed lumber for own projects and buildings.

This is called "self sufficiency", where people are permitted to live like human beings, and not as wound up toys for the pleasure of "foreign investors".

The whole world's criminal economic system is planned for the depopulation of rural areas, and the jamming of people into mega cities, where they're forced to buy every breath of air from the multinational corporate mafia, and "create growth of the GDP" for braindead economists.

Ed Deak.

Creating Hope

The other story here are the people who are creating hope despite the neglect and disfunction of government policies. The Learning Shop, Storyteller's Foundation, Upper Skeena Development Centre and Senden Farm (http://www.usdc.bc.ca/senden/index.html) amongst many initiatives have a track record of supporting the kind of learning, community development and collaboration needed for young people and others in the community to unite around solutions that fit their circumstances. The people involved in these initiatives are our new pioneers in northern and remote sustainability that we need for Canada to thrive. If only they had an enabling policy environment to scale up their work, as communities do in countries like Norway and Finland where northern and rural community support is seen as a governmental imperative, and resource rents are directed to supporting investment in that imperative.

"A Lump On the Log"

BC Forest Minister makes a deal with China. One the "First Families" find hard to forget.
Why would the Minister do such a thing? What was he thinking? Sending out whole logs and cheating the "First Families" out of their jobs?

This is an interesting read.

If the government doesn't come up with an oldgrowth strategy acceptable to the Ancient Forest Alliance, the group plans to target vulnerable Liberal MLAs -not a war in the woods, but a war in the swing ridings.

Maybe that would bring back the cameras, the media always being drawn by war.

Read more: http://www.timescolonist.com/Jack+Knox+ancient+forests+draw+Jazeera+gaze/4382707/story.html#ixzz1FgK1esMw

Not that greedy chiefs are justified but.....

Someone asked me about 20 years back if I really believed natives were ready to govern themselves.

I returned his serve by asking him whether, considering Brian Mulroney was our Prime Minister and Bill Van der Zalm our premier, there was any evidence that Canadians or British Columbians were ready for self government.
Prime Minister for Life Harper and the erratic, self obsessed and unfocused Christy Clark simply update my point.

Williams Lake next?

I read this story and think how things could better with the band approving industry (mining, etc) in areas. Giving the band jobs and royalties, and the local town becoming boom town. This is totally like the Tsilhqot'in tribe that is going to destroy Williams Lake economy with saying NO to the proposed mine.

Williams Lake

How can they destroy the Williams Lake economy by saying no to a mine that hasn't been started?

Doesn't that imply that there is no economy now in Williams Lake? Or is it about to die unless a mine gets started? If so, what's destroying it now?

Anyway, the answer I'm told is to have everyone in Williams Lake that wants a better life to move away.

We need a rethink

We really need a rethink.

What is Government supposed to do?

I understand the macroeconomic picture. Compete or die. The gov of BC needs to set policies that will make us competitive with the rest of the world. My issue is with how you deal with the consequences. I think gov focuses too much on the big picture and forgets that people are the biggest resource any country has.

From a theoretical standpoint, you export your strength and import your weakness. We have moved into a time that should value our people more than the simple resources we readily access. We need to spend on people. Especially those that have been dislocated by this change.

I have spent a good deal of time in Hazelton. The industry they relied on is gone. The camps up the Nass are abandoned relics. The mill is gone; nothing but concrete footings left. The once happening Garage is dead. I have at least, some strong memories of the place. I want more for them.

And that more is for the rest of us to think a bit. Things change. Avoid the disfunctional partisan bs. Move up the curve by investing the needed resources into dislocated communities to help them. Help them become the next big thing.

JWW

The Williams lake economy

The Williams lake economy survived very nicely without the so called Prosperity mine,-what a stupid, propaganda name- that will destroy the ecology for a large area, and put a long line of large, overloaded Diesel trucks on the road for about 800 km each way, taking the ore to the ports and China, so the Chinese commies can come back and buy the country from under the citizens' feet.

Meanwhile the road maintenance and accidents alone cancel out all the benefits.

We have the Polley Mtn. mine up the Likely road.It employs some locals. Their trucks are on the road during breakup, when logging trucks are banned, breaking up the roads. Only patchy repairs, lines are not painted till Aug-Sept, ready for the snow.

The trucks are bringing back some concentrated sewage from the Lower Mainland, to be buried in the open pit.

What will be the result of these idiotic, destructive schemes in future years, for future generations?

The mine was opened under the NDP and closed down for years under the Libs, on account of poor prices, badly damaging the local communities, by forcing people to sell out and move.

Mines are like shots of drugs with the euphoria lasting short terms and definitely not of any economic solution, on account of market prices and depletion forcing people to move all the time, never knowing what will next year bring.

Economies should be based on local production for local use, as they have been for thousands of years, and much easier and more efficient now with better technologies.

Globalization is nothing more than a fraud for the collectivization of the world's economies in the hands of a new politbureau of gangster corporations

I've spent a lifetime, as owner/manager in small scale manufacturing and know what and how permanent economies can be set up and operate indefinitely in eco and human friendly ways.

But not under the yoke of the NAFTA and the WTO and banks permitted to "create" capital from the air for the gangsters to be used as weapons of colonization and achieve total control.

Ed Deak.

temporary foreign workers

This also is the result of temporary foreign workers. We are bringing people in from the philipines to wait tables at denny's when we have a massively unemployed workforce right here in BC. 150,000 temporary foreign workers were brought into canada last year, a year of recession to work on farms and wait tables and pour concrete. Are these residents of hazelton too good for these jobs? Why do we allow employers to bring in foreigners to fill these jobs when there are obviously thousands of willing workers here in Canada. Also, live in care givers. This would be an excellent job for young native women to work at rather than bring in foreigners. We have to use the resources at hand first.

Raw Log Exports

http://rabble.ca/babble/western-provinces/bc-raw-log-exports

Non timber and value added

As I've outlined in comments on the 1st part of this article, there are vast untapped non timber forest resources, and value added opportunities, in most of the province, with markets having sprung up or grown from the tiny seeds of past enterprises.

Check out the herbal tea section of Save On next time you are there - if you don't have an aversion to buying from Jimmy P!

Pattison hasn't given metres of shelf space to these products because he was on a mission to save the planet but because they bring in great revenues.

Creativity, enterprise, imagination and positive energy is all that is required to turn resources into community supporting economic success stories. It does not always require huge investment up front. High value products can be sold online and shipped anywhere in the world if the markets are accessed and/or created. I have ordered stuff from Australia, Germany, the US, England and Scotland as well as Canada the past year or two, including old vinyl LPs and paperback books coming from sellers who operate from their homes. One LP for which I paid $10 had a .25 price sticker from Value Village or some such place. If one does the research, easy to do online, almost anyone could start a tiny business with the potential to be much larger, by selling almost anything with a relatively high value/bulk ratio. Hundreds of dollars worth of medicinal products in a small box so distance and freight costs have little impact, and the lower cost for space, taxes, license fees etc in rural areas compensates for much of the added cost.

cont'd

There is a little company out near Bella Coola pressing cedar greens for oil and finding a market bigger than they can supply - so they can sell as much as they can produce. There is research being done elsewhere on the coast into similar products, with portable equipment which can be used wherever the resources are found

We are not just talking about mom and pop businesses selling hippy remedies. Googling "Pine oil" a few years back I found sites documenting some of the latest research into the products which can be produced from coniferous waste including limbs, needles, chips etc. There are hundreds of chemicals usable in a wide variety of ways in industry, processed from these raw materials which are normally burned or left to rot.

Last summer's firestorms demonstrate the sense of removing some of the fuel supply, so power production from dead pine has more than one benefit - most of it is going to burn one way or another, better it should be under some control. Producing commercial chemicals (using portable equipment on site) represents a higher potential value.

Our "Forest Industry" sees only lumber and pulp as valuable products and will leave our communities high and dry once the trees are gone - leaving the land to be poisoned with the fungicides and herbicides with which plantation trees are drenched and repeatedly treated in the travesty known to the ignorant and the conventional experts as "Reforestation"

Last year's fires, especially if we have a moist spring, will result in a huge crop of morel mushrooms this year. Fireweed, berry bushes, willow, and alder are a few of the valuable early succession species which build up the soil, fix nitrogen and prepare the ground for healthy conifers, and which also have uses as medicines and foods.

I have been running these ideas, (none of which were my own, but picked up over time) by everyone from foresters and timber executives to Paul George of WCWC and several Environment and Forest Ministers and one Premier, and found they all have agendas which blind them to the truth.
Those who are actually developing this new economy are becoming greater in numbers and finding broader markets, but without mainstream recognition and support it is a slow process - and other jurisdictions are getting ahead of us as we diddle!

If First Nations don't access these opportunities others may, and some will likely use an aboriginal theme to sell the products because it is smart marketing!
The people who form the target market for herbal remedies, for example, will most often choose the package with the totem pole or other aboriginal art over the same product in a plain package!

That is why Lakota had such success with their ad campaign featuring the late Red Crow Westerman selling their arthritis remedy - along with the fact he looked old enough to have been there when Custer was dusted, and was still looking healthy and vigorous, helped suggest the medicine was working.

Temporary foreign workers

"We are bringing people in from the philipines to wait tables at denny's"

Unemployed Canadians will not take low-paying service jobs. Restaurants in Fort St. John have had to reduce opening hours because of staff shortages.

FAMILY FIRST PLAN TOTALLY DEFICIENT!

What aboriginals (and everybody else) also need is good, nearby family planning services, including contraceptives, abortion providers and teaching home economics.

Families First plan is deficient because NO mention of family planning, contraception or abortion.

Why not??

Clark includes all sorts of irrelevant non-family stuff like climate change and crime, but not the MOST important things like family planning, abortion and contraception.

Over the last 30 years, Canadian families have benefited hugely from family planning, contraceptives and free legal abortion. With abortion alone, three million births have been terminated successfully. Thats a lot of resources saved and family formation delayed until the parents are ready.

reallife

Isn't the real story that Canadians don't want to pay more for their services so that those workers can afford a decent standard of living?

Besides, its very difficult to collect welfare if the government believes there's an employer willing to hire you.

jnewcomb

Family planning services are certainly helpful but they're a temporary solution. It assumes that an extra few years of not having children will cure the problem.

The thing is we have lots of childless poor too.

So sure, have the government go in and provide family planning services but they better also provide more than that such as education and job training and then actual jobs that provide a good income. Otherwise the family planning resources will be wasted.

Frank

"Besides, its very difficult to collect welfare if the government believes there's an employer willing to hire you."

Are you suggesting that people would rather collect welfare than accept a job? I believe people prefer the dignity that comes with earning a living over the demeaning acceptance of handouts.

reallife

"Are you suggesting that people would rather collect welfare than accept a job?"

No. I'm saying I doubt there are many people on welfare who have refused jobs.

Re: Foreign Workers

Interestingly, while the area between Dease Lake and Hazelton probably has the highest unemployment rate in Canada the Federal Government has issued a few work permits to bring workers from the Philippines under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to work in this area.

The Filipino workers are employed in a small number of service industry jobs in the area. The businesses that requested the Filipino workers did not want to hire local workers, for the usual reasons. There is certainly no shortage of unemployed Canadian workers in the area but Filipino workers can be paid less than minimum-wage, with no benefits and no possibility of escape from employers who wish to use Filipino workers as slaves. Filipino workers are an employers dream. They work like dogs, they always smile, you can treat them worse than Canadians and that's why the Temporary Foreign Worker Program is so popular and there are over 300,000 foreign workers in the program.

The main purpose of the Temporary Foreign Worker program is not to fulfill worker "shortages" but to undermine the possibility of a living wage for service workers in Canada. There would be no problem attracting Canadians to work in service industry jobs in Fort St John if the wages were actually high enough to cover the cost of living in Fort St John.

Tim Horton's does most of its employee recruiting in Manila.

Democracy, the Economy and Sustainability I...

First whenever one comes into any comment thread where the subject is Natives in part or whole, you are going to run into this type.

Vancurber, "...not feeling sorry for them."

Which is the only mention this guy deserves to get, for he has nothing else of any import to offer.

I agree much with many of the other contributors here, especially Stewart MacKenzie's observations on the economic opportunities that really do still abound out there, with a little imagination.

But I especially tip my hat to his reply to the above predictable vancurber... left at the curb, re in light of the fairly recent history of this country and the province, both with a pretty sad boot-lick history and present, asking the question whether immigrant stock Canadians and BCers are ready for self-governance. Touche indeed. :-)

But also I take special note of morechatter's link re raw log exports. A practise which should make any serious citizen of both the above want to tear heads off in rage.

But what needs to get spoken to here, I think, in addition... to as well some of the excellent observations of Ed, is this issue of "economic democracy". Into which I am especially plugged. For whatever the many truths of others such as these guys here, there is still in place a skewed "ruling notion" of the relationship between nature, people and the economy... that is screaming out to be corrected, in Hazleton and everywhere.

And that is this notion embedded in the power relationships of the economy that "the economy" is prime, and of course unsaid but implicit, the social class that rules it is likewise prime, and that everything, nature and people, the wage slaves in particular, are here only to serve that incorrectly presumed "objective" interest. A view, which to my contrarian view, is the foundation of everything that is wrong in the relationship between man/woman and nature AND, Man/Woman and man/woman.

Nature is the Mother, and we the fruit of her womb. I accept that ancient precept. The economy per se, grows out of our interaction with the Mother to secure Her sustenance-, that we might live and thrive. (Sucking the tit.) My view and, I think, obvious enough, the essential fact.

What is, is the view of the first eaglet born that seeks to kill the other and eat it, or toss it out of the nest. Beyond which I think there is a need to finally evolve. :-)

continued next post...

Democracy, the Economy and Sustainability II...

From previous post...

And for "the relationship" to evolve, what it is going to take to put it in more correct balance is "democracy" finally being brought into and finally allowed to govern the relationships in the economy of humans, not only to improve the imbalances and tensions there, but to likewise be the best hope we have of ever getting to a more sustainable relationships between ourselves and our economic activity, AND nature. (And I understand that there is always the potential for The Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds. But less so in a rational "democratic" relationship order.:-) lol

Without this element of democracy finally being brought into our economic relationship, for sure, the poverty that results from unequal share distribution, tensions between the sexes and the classes, and the continued primacy of an unchecked privileged class greed interest will continue as our essential and determining interface with nature. We wage slaves will continue to be but followers over the lemming cliffs. :-) Which to my mind, is the essence of the unsustainability.

If there is ever going to be viable sustainability for our families and nature, it can only arise out of a democratic consensus, especially within the economy. My humble view. :-)

authentic industry

Wow, Stewart MacKenzie I'm impressed with your ideas and what you know about forest environment - tree health and culture. You are absolutely right about the health and wisdom available from ancient wise remedies and how it could be shared, developed and market shared in value added ways, ie) Dakota Herbals. Inuit art, through Inuit cooperatives have shared a culture perspective and developed economic benefits from such ideas as this.
I think back a few years to when I was annually invited to take my Gr. 4/5 classes over to the Sto:lo education/Longhouse here in Chilliwack, for a day's visit to hear see and do the skills/games/language and hear about the special qualities of all the plants in the natural garden. All district #33 Gr. 4 classes were invited as First Nations is on the Gr.4 curriculum in B.C.
This was a great discovery learning activity set up by Gwen Point(our Lieutenant Governor's wife who is an educator)and the elders of our region.This gave my students a wonderful understanding from how the wise elders hosted us!
What a good way to learn about a culture different from mine, that has perfected the ability to live with respect for and in harmony with our living NATURAL WORLD over millenniums.

I'm so sorry to hear about this continuing situation, of how badly neglected the young people in the northern half of this province are by our provincial government.A nurturing of our environment and the people who live upon the planet is a smart way to start developing authentic, sustainable local industry.

Gas pipelines and power dams and power corridors...not so much.

economic democracy, or some such...

As I write this, it is still true that the majority of jobs in BC are created by small business (SMEs defined as having less than 50 employees total.) This bears repeating - the majority of people in BC are not employed by forestry or fish farm or mining giants...which begs the question why the government continues to subsidize these large corporations. It is perfectly feasible and logical to make a good living from a small business, and the reasons there are not more of them are related to the same problem: lack of modest start-up capital. This is not an area that the banks care to do much lending in, and there are few programs to provide loan guarantees or such.It is not just first nations that lack access to borrowing money on house equity: it is all those who do not own a home, those who have no equity. All around the world there are micro-finance programs that average a 95% repayment rate - much better than any Canadian bank's repayment record! - yet we are stuck in the stone age of lending based on land and equipment, in an age where this is not the financing required.

Some loan guarantee programs to lend funds in the area where the banks say they cannot make a profit - up to about $250,000 say - could work magic in the small towns of BC that have been virtually destroyed. These programs pay for themselves, they are not a handout, they have phenomenal repayment rates - why aren't they in favour here?

Of course, this is only one aspect of improving life in Hazelton and elsewhere, and increasing the welfare rates immediately could do much to help get things working. Welfare recipients spend virtually every penny they receive in the places where they live.We are willing to subsidize bad corporate citizens such as Dennys, but not our own people? It shames me to acknowledge the reality of this, and to try to accept that I share my province with citizens who believe this is okay. I look around my little town and see one business after another close its doors, while thousands are without work, and thousands more work at part-time or temporary jobs, and hundreds of homeless wander the streets.This is a downward spiral without end, it seems, unless more citizens gain a sense of urgency.