Inside the Fight to Save Forestry Jobs

Across the Fraser River from downtown Prince George, two look-alike mills sit next to one another. They’ve been there for over half a century, devouring the rising and falling mountains of wood chips piled at their sides.

But now, one of those piles has disappeared.

Last year, the oldest of the mills, Prince George Pulp and Paper, shut its pulp machines down permanently. To keep its last paper machine running, a small silver pipe held aloft by scaffolding appeared, linking it like an umbilical cord with its next-door twin. Both mills used to turn wood chips into a slurry of pulp and chemicals, but only the older of the two made paper. Now, the pipe is a life support system, carrying slurry produced in the younger mill to keep the older mill’s paper factory running — for now.

A 10-minute drive away, Greg Petersen leans forward on his elbows as if bracing for what’s to come. He’s spent over a decade working in the twin mills, and this year he became president of Public and Private Workers of Canada Local 9 — the Prince George arm of one of the biggest forestry unions in the province. Having just moved in, his office is plain and utilitarian, save for a tumbler and some sticky notes on his computer screen.

Today he’s got a visitor. This is the first time Jonathan Blacker, Local 603 president for Unifor, another forestry union in B.C., has sat in Petersen’s office. B.C.’s forest unions have historically tended to feud. But Blacker and Petersen wave this off as someone else’s battle. And anyway, uncommon times have led to new alliances.

Petersen, a carpenter at the twin mills, faced Prince George Pulp and Paper’s pulp line closure last year. Blacker’s mill, Northwood, stopped running one of its production lines this spring. Together, they recount the waiting game as companies decided whether employees would work the next month. As union reps, they were tasked with delivering the bad news.

“We got so fed up we said, ‘You know what? We’re done doing your dirty work,’” said Petersen. “‘You go tell these workers whether they have a job or not tomorrow.’”

“I honestly have zero sympathy for this company anymore,” Blacker said.

Forestry, once one of B.C.’s biggest industries, is in free fall.

Over the last two decades, forestry jobs have fallen roughly by half as mills have closed across the province, dropping from around 79,000 in 2001 to 44,000 in 2023.

For a brief period during the early COVID-19 pandemic, a surge in lumber prices kept the closures at bay, but now that prices have dropped again, the job losses have been steady and devastating. At least 17 mills have announced closures and curtailments in the last year and a half.

After decades of intensive forestry in B.C., major companies like Canfor, Interfor and West Fraser have moved the lion’s share of their operations to the southeast United States. In two decades, for example, Interfor went from having 100 per cent of its operations in B.C. to just 15 per cent.

This sudden collapse wasn’t inevitable, Petersen and Blacker say. Instead, it’s a product of decades of decisions — including overharvesting and lax forest policy — aimed at boosting those companies’ returns.

Forestry in B.C. currently represents just two per cent of the province’s total economy, but for resource-dependent towns and cities like Prince George, mill closures can have a tidal wave effect, triggering relocations and ruptures in the social fabric that communities have long relied on.

Jobs in forestry are also among the province’s higher-earning, particularly in rural communities. Pulp mill employees last year made an average of $1,646 per week, more than twice what retail workers earned and over three times what workers in accommodations and restaurants earned. In forestry towns, these lower-paid jobs are often economically linked to the forestry industry, via the demand created by forestry workers and their families. And when mills close, property taxes often spike in small towns.

As the majors retreat, Blacker and Petersen are among a growing movement of workers and unions calling for a forest industry that lasts. But they face a formidable challenge: the province’s planted forests are often too young, too burned, too beetle-infested or too far away to log.

From boom to bust

When Prince George Pulp and Paper — the first of the twin mills — officially opened its doors in 1966, local companies placed congratulatory ads in the newspaper, and then-premier W.A.C. Bennett praised Prince George as the epicentre of B.C.’s economic development.

B.C.’s major forest companies were riding high. A decade earlier, the province had granted them long-term, renewable forest licences to log in exchange for companies paying the government stumpage fees for the trees they cut down.

Companies crunched the numbers: if the wood was coming cheap and the labour relatively expensive, they’d gorge on the former and scrimp on the latter. Over the years, they invested in technologies that processed maximum amounts of wood with minimal working hours.

“Those were the cards that the companies were dealt, and those were the rules. So they played to it,” said Chris Gaston, associate professor in the department of wood science at the University of British Columbia.

The industry went all in on products such as two-by-fours, pulp and plywood — the building blocks that are generally referred to as “primary” products.

“Secondary” products, such as cabinets, floorboards, modular housing and other products, take more human hands and eyes to produce.

Increasingly, B.C. companies doubled down on the building blocks and the manufacturing happened elsewhere.

“We've been badly criticized by economists for decades,” said Gaston. “We take advantage of the gifts of Mother Nature, and we don't use our brains enough.”

In the early 2000s, when the province increased companies’ quotas in response to the pine beetle epidemic, logging rates soared. When lumber prices rose during the pandemic, companies made their own shareholders and executives the beneficiaries of the windfall, buying their own stocks to boost their share value and delivering hefty dividends to shareholders.

When Petersen and Blacker started their careers in Prince George over a decade ago, there was still enough wealth to go around. “It was like the Willy Wonka factory,” said Blacker. “It was the golden ticket.”

Canfor hosted employee and Halloween parties. Every Christmas, mill retirees made wooden toys — things like logging trucks and boats — to give out at the annual Canfor kids’ Christmas party.

Then things started to change. Regular maintenance tasks began going ignored, Petersen says. Canfor stopped hiring new positions to fill vacated ones. Employee barbecues disappeared and the Christmas party, cancelled because of COVID, never came back.

Over time, the mood became less convivial. “You come in, you clock in, you get ’er done and you go home,” said Petersen.

Petersen says he always knew rough times were ahead. “But it would never concern me enough that I would say, ‘Hey, we need to smarten up,’” he said.

The last decade has altered that.

“If we want to work and have jobs for our kids, then something's got to change.”

The unions get together

Three months before meeting in Petersen’s office, the two union leaders had occupied different tables in the downstairs conference room of the Coast Hotel in Victoria’s Inner Harbour. It was a warm day in March, and the room was packed with over 100 people, mostly men, clad in flannel shirts, baseball caps and the occasional suit.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say we’re literally fighting for our future,” Scott Lunny, director of United Steelworkers District 3, told the room.

This was the first time B.C.’s three biggest forestry unions had come together, presenting themselves as a unified front, separate from their employers.

“Too often, we're lumped in with the companies, and what’s good for the companies is good for the workers,” said Lunny from the wooden podium. “Lots of times that’s true. It’s not always true.”

Next to bowls of cellophane-wrapped candies, the round banquet tables were strewn with colour copies of a 50-page pitch on how to keep the forest industry, and the jobs it supports, going: “A Better Future for B.C. Forestry.”

Jim Stanford, the report’s co-author and director of the Centre for Future Work, described the strategy as a departure from B.C.’s laissez-faire approach to forest policy, which often handed the reins to industry.

The major players in B.C.’s forestry industry, Stanford said, “make their own private decisions based on their own private cost and benefit judgment.”

“We certainly have forestry policy,” he said, “but I don’t think we’ve organized that into an internally coherent and ambitious plan to stop the bleeding in this industry.”

The unions’ strategy calls on the government to take a more interventionist approach. That includes overhauled retraining and early retirement programs that go beyond what Gavin McGarrigle, Unifor’s western regional director, called B.C.’s current “alphabet soup” of “piecemeal” support programs.

The strategy also calls on B.C. to transform the industry from one famous for its high volume of trees and low amount of labour to the opposite: an industry that uses less wood for more jobs.

To accomplish this, the strategy calls for investments into forest manufacturing facilities and research money to develop new wood products, including funds to co-invest with private companies and First Nations. It also calls for regulatory “sticks” to discourage raw log exports and ensure those investment carrots lead to unionized jobs.

This impetus to change the status quo has been fashionable for decades.

“Value-added” was the “theme” in the 1980s, the Council of Forest Industries’ current president, Linda Coady, said at a lecture at the University of Northern British Columbia in 2000. It got attention in the ’90s, too, when the B.C. government invested millions to fund research into new forest products and industries.

Ultimately, though, these initiatives failed to buck the trend: since 2001, roughly 35,000 forestry workers have lost their jobs.

Meanwhile, the provincial government scrapped “appurtenancy” rules requiring companies to manufacture wood near the places it was logged. Mills in small towns closed as the industry consolidated around the mills that remained.

“The value-added companies started disappearing,” said John Brink, president and CEO of Brink Forest Products. The company specializes in a value-added product known as finger-jointed lumber, which rebuilds lumber out of imperfect and odd-shaped pieces from sawmills.

Brink noticed some other changes around the 2000s that further set value-added companies on the back foot: B.C. scrapped its Small Business Forest Enterprise Program, which had reserved a share of the province’s tenure for small operators. Government also got rid of legislative tools allowing it to consider things like value-added manufacturing or more environmental harvesting standards when granting timber tenures.

Today, 56 per cent of B.C.’s allowable annual cut is held by five major forest companies that mostly produce primary products like two-by-fours and pulp.

B.C. has made some recent moves to reinvigorate B.C.’s lagging value-added sector. In his keynote speech to the unions that morning, B.C. Premier David Eby highlighted his government’s $180-million manufacturing jobs fund, which is aimed at triggering investment in new high-labour mills and facilities.

In an email, the Ministry of Forests said the program has partnered with 60 forest product manufacturers ranging from major employers like Tolko Industries, which is investing in a new engineered wood plant in Heffley, to smaller operators like Massive Canada, which is building a facility that will create modular housing in Williams Lake. So far, the ministry said, the program has led “to the direct creation and protection of over 3,000 forest sector jobs.”

‘How many days of fibre do we have?’

Even if B.C. manages to transform its industry into one that gets more jobs from the trees it cuts down, it still needs enough trees to sustain the endeavour. That’s a problem because the volume of wood flowing to mills today is declining fast.

“When we talk to the general managers at the mill, one of the first questions I ask is ‘How many days of fibre do we have?’” said Geoff Dawe, president of Public and Private Workers of Canada, during a break in the foyer of the union summit. “It used to be ‘how many months.’”

Summit attendees and presenters floated different reasons for the decline. Some said governments and companies were hoarding forestry permits. Others suggested that increased First Nations jurisdiction over logging, combined with government’s failure to commit to adequate revenue sharing on trees taken from their territories, had contributed to the slowdown in permits getting approved. Forest fires and the post-pine-beetle overharvest also got mentions, as did the movement to protect old growth.

Less referenced was another reason: B.C.’s forests have finally run low on the trees industry wants. Until now, B.C.’s forest industry has been dependent on the province’s vast, unlogged forests, including old growth, because of their high-quality wood. And with the exception of the coast, where second-growth and third-growth trees have been logged, cutting down unlogged primary forests is still the only game in town.

As the cost of transporting high-value, primary and old-growth wood rises, companies sometimes decide the effort isn’t worth it. The unions say B.C. has the power to change that equation by helping to fund companies’ transportation costs to get wood to the mills.

That plan would increase pressure on the unlogged forests that remain. But bigger-treed primary forests, which industry tends to favour, are dwindling — and some say what remains may need to be conserved.

According to conservation science, ecosystems that lose more than 70 per cent of what was there before are at risk of ecological collapse. Many of B.C.’s primary forests have fallen below that threshold already.

B.C. and Canada have signalled that a hard line on biodiversity loss might be coming: last year, the governments and First Nations signed a tripartite agreement to protect 30 per cent of the province’s lands and waters. If B.C. adopted that commitment throughout its forest ecosystems, particularly in the most productive ones that grow bigger trees, the result would likely mean many of B.C.’s unlogged ecosystems would be off limits.

Forestry’s labour movement in B.C. has maintained a tenuous relationship with those calling for forest protections over the years. The Public and Private Workers of Canada notably called for better old-growth protections, advocated for scrapping raw log exports and took a vocal stand against water pollution caused by pulp mills.

But the relationship has also been acrimonious. Fifteen thousand workers rallied at the lawn of the legislature in 1994 to protest the NDP government’s new park protections and ecologically focused forest laws. At the time, industry and labour presented themselves as a united front against the threats of environmental activism.

Arnold Bercov, former president of Public and Private Workers of Canada and a longtime advocate for environmental issues in forestry, remembers his employers' warnings against conspiring with environmental movements. “There was a lot of pressure from the industry that if you work with these people, they’re gonna cost jobs,” he said.

But now, with the industry and forestry jobs in retreat, the unions' sector strategy presented a different approach.

“This report is not anti-environmental-movement,” said Stanford, referring to “A Better Future for B.C. Forestry.”

“I think the assumption that a sustainable forestry industry in B.C. is somehow incompatible with environmental objectives is wrong,” he added.

During his presentation, Stanford acknowledged that the next iteration of B.C.’s forest industry will be smaller than it was during its apex in the 2000s. It might require more careful selective logging, and a more expeditious use of waste products, such as the logged trees currently left on cutblocks. But Stanford still thinks companies should be able to aspire to the province’s allowable cut levels as a reasonable guide for what they can sustainably log.

During a speech later in the afternoon, Andrew Mercier, B.C.’s minister of state for sustainable forestry innovation, spoke about a new partial fix to the province’s timber supply shortage: salvage logging, to take place in areas burned by wildfires. Though the province has sold this logging as a practice that will “support land recovery,” its own research appears to indicate that the practice can come with an ecological cost if it targets forests that burned only lightly. B.C.’s rules allow major licensees to salvage log in lightly burned areas. (In an email to The Tyee, the Ministry of Forests said that “when carefully planned and implemented,” salvage logging “can contribute to regenerating new forests.”)

As the afternoon drew to a close, the long-term solution to industry's gnarliest, most existential problem — finding enough wood to keep going — remained unanswered.

“How are you going to get a steady flow to our mills to keep them running?” asked Jeff Bromley, chair of the United Steelworkers Wood Council. “That's the million-dollar question.”

It’s an impasse that Petersen also struggles with. On his flights back to Prince George, he sees the expansive checkerboard of forest cutblocks below him.

“On one hand you're like, ‘Well, we should probably stop,’” he said. “On the other hand, you can't just turn it off, right? You have to phase it out or come up with more creative ideas.”

In the months following the conference, Canfor announced three more mill closures in B.C., this time in Bear Lake, Houston and Vanderhoof.

Colleen Erickson, Chief of the Nak’azdli Whut’en First Nation, said the Vanderhoof closure will be deeply felt. “Locally I think probably every family has somebody who works in the forest sector,” she said.

For Erickson, the root cause of the crash comes from years of overharvest, including the response to the pine beetle. “We can't cut it down to the last tree,” she said. “We're almost there.”

If there is a supply of trees that can be cut within nature’s limits, Erickson wants the industry and its mills to make the most out of it. “We need to use it right down to the last toothpick.”

Surfing an uncertain future

Back at Intercontinental Pulp Mill, the twin mills’ remaining pulp factory, mechanic Kimberley Kenyon checks the sensors on a tank of chemicals. Satisfied, she heads to the next task on the long list of systems and instruments she looks after on a daily basis.

Kenyon has worked hundreds of overtime hours so far this year — her team is perpetually short-staffed. “Nobody wants to get a job right now in a pulp mill,” she said. “They don’t trust the forest industry anymore.”

Like the mills’ temporary life support system, Kenyon is stretched thin. She keeps her phone on during her days off and avoids turning down overtime shifts for fear that the mill won’t run.

For ticketed tradespeople like Kenyon, mill jobs offer a rare opportunity to live and work in the same place, rather than living in camp and being away from family. If she lost this job, she’d most likely need to move to Alberta to work in oil and gas, or another remote industry like mining, to find another job in her trade. But leaving isn’t an option: Kenyon’s mom, who has cancer, lives with Kenyon in her house in Prince George.

“If I lose my job and I lose my house, it's not just me, it's also my mom,” Kenyon said.

Forests in B.C. — how much of them we log and how — have long been an issue of debate. Now, with her job on the line, Kenyon is searching for clarity. “I don't know what percentage we can cut, because it keeps changing,” she said. She’s wary of the yo-yo effect of four-year election cycles.

“When it comes to forestry, we need to look super long term,” she said.

So, like Blacker and Petersen, Kenyon has started to organize. She’s training to become a shop steward with her union.

Petersen hopes the unions’ recent burst of united advocacy can last long enough to make fundamental change.

“The big companies had their run of the province for a while, without consequences. They can just wipe their hands and move away,” Petersen said.

“I can’t. I live here.”