British Columbians paid a significant economic price when United States housing prices began their death spiral in 2007.
As American home construction plummeted, so did lumber shipments from the province to its most important trading partner.
So it may come as a surprise that with lumber prices and new home construction inching up in the U.S., trouble lies ahead for B.C.’s forest-dependent communities, 100 Mile House included.
After a decade-long mountain pine beetle attack, we face an unprecedented “timber supply crisis” – a crisis that, according to some analysts, could result in eight to 12 sawmills closing at a loss of thousands of jobs.
So now, let’s return to the U.S. When housing starts in that county went down last decade, B.C. forest companies responded by increasing their lumber sales to China.
But now the U.S. market is coming back. And its lumber buyers are not enamoured of the lumber sold to China – lumber manufactured from dead pine trees. U.S. buyers want lumber produced from green trees, instead.
The upshot is that we could soon see a sharp increase in the logging of healthy trees to satisfy U.S. customers, as well as more logging of dead pine trees to meet demand in China. It’s easy to see how this would further deepen our already daunting timber supply challenges.
With only so much forest to go around, we are already seeing signs in B.C. of companies from one region reaching into the forests of another region to make up shortfalls. Logs in increasing number, for example, are now being transported to Quesnel from Mackenzie, a distance of 307 kilometres.
It doesn’t take much to see that robbing Peter to pay Paul eventually means that both Peter and Paul do without. In the short-term, it may be politically expedient to do this. But in the long term, it spells disaster for numerous communities.
As a provincial election looms, it’s time we asked where our would-be leaders plan to take us in in the next four years: down the road of accelerated resource depletion, or down a new road that restores our forests, diversifies our forest economy and strengthens rural communities?
Two years ago, I proposed a suite of policies to encourage a long overdue discussion. We could, if we chose, generate 2,630 more jobs in B.C. by processing raw logs that are currently exported into lumber.
We could, if we chose, generate another 2,400 jobs turning logs left to waste at logging sites into usable products. We could, if we chose, emulate other Canadian provinces and generate 10,000-plus more jobs in B.C. in secondary wood product manufacturing.
And we could, if we chose, employ 5,200 more young people each summer planting nearly 100 million more trees.
It’s time we had a conversation. Before our trees and our options run out.
Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and author of Making the Case for a Carbon Focus and Green Jobs in BC’s Forest Industry.