The provincial election isn’t until October but Nechako Lakes riding B.C. United candidate Shane Brienen is already staking out his ground.
In a Jan. 22, 2024 release, Brienen, who is also the mayor of Houston, said John Rustad, the current Member of the Legislative Assembly for the riding and the leader of the B.C. Conservative Party, has “shown a lack of leadership from an elected official for nearly two decades.”
The accusation was spurred on by West Fraser’s announcement last week that a lack of affordable fibre is causing it to close its Fraser Lake sawmill, a move that means the loss of 170 jobs.
“Real leaders take ownership for situations — they don’t hide behind others,” added Brienen who said Rustad has been “missing in action for years now.”
Brienen’s statements relate to Rustad’s chairmanship more than a decade ago of a legislative committee which examined fibre supply at a time when the mountain pine beetle was infecting thousands of hectares of timber.
Rustad was then a B.C. Liberal MLA and the B.C. Liberal government of the day gave him and a group of other MLAs the job of looking at ways to increase logging to compensate for the loss of beetle-killed timber.
Following a series of hearings, the committee released 22 recommendations, including the need for the province to spend more money on roads and bridges so that logging companies could more easily get to the trees they want to log.
The report also called on the province to spend more money on replanting and to provide local land and resource management boards with more a say on where logging should take place.
“Our report aims to strengthen future timber supply and forestry-dependent communities throughout the Central Interior,” said Rustad when the report was released in mid-2012.
But now, in his own release following West Fraser’s Fraser Lake sawmill closure announcement, Rustad said the report’s recommendations were never implemented.
“It is tragic that neither the NDP nor the B.C. Liberals (now called the B.C. United Party) implemented the unanimously-supported recommendations,” he said in a Facebook post.
“This is what happens when you have a government with policies that have made B.C. the highest cost producer and who continues to restrict access to fibre,” he said.
Rustad served for several years as the aboriginal relations and reconciliation minister in Premier Christy Clark’s B.C. Liberal government from 2013 to 2017.
Clark added forestry to Rustad’s cabinet responsibilities following the May 2017 election. That lasted until July when the B.C. Liberals were ousted by an alliance between the NDP and the Green party.
Kevin Falcon, who replaced Clark as the B.C. Liberal leader, removed Rustad from the party in 2022 when he questioned whether carbon dioxide emissions were responsible for climate change.
He joined the B.C. Conservative party in early 2023 and is now its leader.
Brienen has been the Houston mayor since 2014, a period in which first West Fraser in 2014 and then Canfor in 2023 closed their sawmills. Canfor has since announced plans to spend $200 million on a new facility.