‘We’re Dying up Here.’ Inside British Columbia’s Forest Industry Crisis

By Ben Parfitt
The Tyee
October 3, 2024
Category: Business & Politics
Region: Canada, Canada West

Few communities in BC have been hit as hard by the declining fortunes of the forest industry as Mackenzie. At the height of the boom it was home to two pulp mills, a paper mill, a handful of sawmills and a specialty mill that processed rejected lumber pieces from sawmills into higher-value products. …All that remains is a lone sawmill limping along on one shift and the value-added mill that remains in business only because of imports of rejected lumber pieces from Alberta. Mike Morris, MLA for Prince George-Mackenzie, says he is shocked that so few people comprehend the scale of the crisis unfolding in the province’s forests and forest industry — a crisis, he says, brought on by logging rates that even the provincial Ministry of Forests knew were unsustainable. …Mackenzie Mayor Joan Atkinson would like to see the government “taking back 10 per cent to 20 per cent of [Canfor’s] wood and reallocating it.”

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