Loggers, environmentalists bury axe

An unlikely coalition of loggers and tree-huggers has formed to campaign against B.C. government forest policy.

The Wilderness Committee and forest workers first cooperated at the B.C. legislature in February to protest the closure of TimberWest's Elk Falls sawmill at Campbell River. Ken Wu, the Wilderness Committee's campaign director for Vancouver Island, lent his voice and public address system to a group of Communication Energy and Paperworkers employees who had just found out their jobs were ending in May.

Last week Wu joined members of the United Steelworkers in a demonstration at Forests Minister Rich Coleman's constituency office in Fort Langley. Their roadside confrontations over old-growth coastal forests a fading memory with the establishment of new rules and conservation areas, environmentalists and forest workers are joining forces to focus on restoring B.C.'s historic links between timber harvesting and local jobs.

The Wilderness Committee and Steelworkers issued a joint statement calling on the province to establish a "forest land reserve" to protect B.C.'s forests from residential development, similar in concept to the agricultural land reserve.

Wu says with three quarters of B.C.'s south coastal forests now second-growth, B.C. should be ensuring investment in mills and manufacturing from private and public forest lands.

"Conservation and sustainability of jobs go hand in hand," Wu said at the Fort Langley demonstration. "The government needs to be proactive, with retooling and investment, otherwise when there is recovery we will be logging but without the milling jobs."

Steelworkers representative Scott Lunny welcomed the environmental group's help to push for requiring local manufacturing as a condition of all forest licences. The combined effort is planned to continue up the May 2009 provincial election.

"Any support we can get for our efforts to protect B.C. jobs is welcomed in these desperate times," Lunny said.

After ending the requirement for local milling, the B.C. Liberal government began releasing private forest lands from tree farm licences at the request of companies on Vancouver Island. The licences required the private lands to be managed for forest use, in exchange for cutting rights on Crown land. Their release allows key water access and log sort locations to be considered for waterfront development.

Another forest land release in the Kootenay region is pending, and is a condition of land sales organized under bankruptcy proceedings for U.S.-based forest company Pope & Talbot.

B.C. Auditor General John Doyle is examining whether the government should require compensation from timber companies for releasing private lands.

Coleman was recovering from surgery and unavailable to comment on the demonstration in his home town. He has previously said the wave of mill closures and curtailments and the loss of more than 10,000 jobs is due to the collapse of house construction in the U.S., combined with the sharp rise of the Canadian dollar, rather than B.C. government policy.

The Steelworkers are also calling for the B.C. and federal governments to "reform or abrogate" the latest Canada-U.S. softwood lumber agreement, which places a tax of up to 15 per cent on Canadian lumber exports, and to tax raw log exports instead.