The sawmill at Fraser Lake isn’t set to close until May, but the town’s residents were already looking for solutions to that economic problem.
West Fraser Timber announced on Jan. 22 that they were permanently closing their operation in Fraser Lake, two hours west of Prince George. On Feb. 29, the Fraser Lake community held a town hall meeting to discuss the realities and possibilities of their largest employer shutting down.
The meeting was chaired by Fraser Lake’s chief administrative officer Ethan Fredeen and kicked off by mayor Sarrah Storey. All members of the town’s council table were at the meeting’s front table, and alongside them were elected officials from around the region. Their collective message was, we’ve all been in this position, too, so we definitely know your pain and we might know how to help.
“It is definitely not an unprecedented situation,” said Storey. “We have gone through this before; we have seen industry loss here before. And now we have a deliberate and strategic approach to rebuild - one that ideally progresses with momentum rather than a sluggish pace.”
Nonetheless, she choked up when discussing how this was going to impact individual families, how some would not be able to transition from a mill job to some other form of local employment and would have to move away. This would impact the local tax base, the school district’s student population, and take people out of the activities of the daily community.
“We’re looking at other sources of employment,” said Mark Parker, Fraser Lake’s rural director of the Regional District of Bulkley Nechako. “We know people can go get camp jobs, and that’s great, to know they can go out and get a paycheque, but that’s not what’s best for a community. Any of us involved in hockey or in soccer knows it’s hard to get coaches…,” as one example of how pulling a resident out of local circulation has impacts.
Parker said local government was looking to other industries for even a few new jobs here and there, like in agriculture or tourism, and pushing for better broadband communication to allow for home-based employment, plus other options to offset this loss of about 175 employees in a town with only about 965 people (Statistics Canada, 2021 figure).
Northern Development Initiative Trust had already stepped up to help, said Storey, and representatives from the Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation were in the room with employment service information.
Vanderhoof councillor Brian Frenkel said his town was losing mill jobs, too, and it was a condition across the northern region.
“Sarrah is passionate about her community, and that’s what makes her upset, and we feel like we’re not being listened to (by Victoria), as local governments,” Frenkel said. “It has been that way for as long as I can remember, and it’s time for rural communities to create their own solutions, for our residents and our economies.”
Burns Lake mayor Henry Wiebe said his town, too, had been dealt crippling blows as another community dependent on the forest sector. When Babine Forest Products exploded in 2012, it was a dire time. That mill got rebuilt, and in the interim, initiatives like the construction of a new hospital and new recreation facility helped people have work. Many communities rallied to help, he said, and that rally is happening now for Fraser Lake.
“This community is hurting right now, I know you are, we feel your pain, and we’re here to support you,” said Wiebe. “I’m sure you’re going to find something that is going to fill this void…We are here. We’re your neighbours. We are here with whatever we can do to help the process along.”
In what became the main theme of the public discussion, Wiebe urged West Fraser to “donate the land and the assets to the community, so the community can build something to the size of the fiber basket that’s left,” and likewise urged the provincial government to disallow West Fraser from retaining any harvesting rights in the Fraser Lake area.
Many speakers brought up the systemic problem throughout B.C. of a provincial government forest policy allowing major licensees to cut trees down in one community and truck them to some other community’s sawmill. No speaker expressed being in favour of this idea.
“The chief forester told me that unless you can get a whole lot of communities to raise the issue together, that’s not going to change,” said Frankel, who had been inquiring on that issue. “The wood isn’t West Fraser’s, it’s not Nechako’s, it’s not Canfor’s, it’s yours and it’s mine. The wood should stay where it needs to stay, and we should have a voice in that.”
Even Houston, a community that housed a so-called supermill at which milling was concentrated, was suffering from closures of that service. Mayor Shane Brienen was at the meeting to share the pain and remind Fraser Lake what their town had already been through, with past forestry downturns and the closure of the nearby molybdenum mine in 2015. A similar town hall meeting happened in the Fraser Lake Elementary Secondary School gym, then, too, and he was there.
“Honestly, I sense a different feeling in this room, tonight. I know there is some resilience built in, and you know there are tough times ahead but you’re going to get through,” he said. “We are all going to have to reinvent ourselves. There is potential here, and we are always looking for new things.”
What their municipality should struggle against, Brienen said, was the urge to cut back on elemental services like the local library, arena, and other amenities. Some families will inevitably have to move, due to the mill closure, but if you stop providing civic services, then other families will move away as well, plus many will decide to never move there because it won’t have basic features of family life. And small towns already have a hard enough time competing with big towns, he said.
One of the public speakers, West Fraser retiree Ross Johnson, also fought back tears as he talked about the way the forest industry used to be more locally based, how milling community wood in community mills needed to be the way it was done again.
He suggested striking a committee of local residents with experience in forestry and economic development to come up with some new ideas.
Fraser Lake is a municipality bookended by the Stellat’en and Nadleh Whut’en First Nations. It was frequently brought up that tripartite solutions were preferable, and Stellat’en member David Luggi rose to the microphone to point out that sectors such as healthcare and education were regionalized; so too should forestry be regionalized.
Nechako Lakes MLA John Rustad offered some possible opportunities that would take some provincial government fast-tracking, like accelerating some mining and pipeline proposals in the area, opening a plastics recycling plant, and pursuing a data centre, just as some options to get the discussions rolling.
Some of the speakers from the public had questions. The one with the biggest general sentiment was when resident Kim Watt-Senner asked if there was any truth to the rumour that Moon River Capital Ltd. (working with Sojitz Moly Resources Inc.) had facilitated the purchase of 25 per cent of the Endako Mine’s stock in order to reopen the operation again at nearby Endako?
Storey responded that she had indeed had a conversation with Moon River within the previous 24 hours and they couldn’t tell her, due to being a publicly traded company in need of protecting share pricing, if the purchase meant immanent re-opening. The price of molybdenum has indubitably been rising, in the past year, but it is a famously volatile commodity. The company would make its intentions known soon.
Another question was if the rumours were true of a doubling of the pipeline that was just finished construction through the region. Parker clarified that no, that was a misinterpretation of the situation. Production was being perhaps doubled due to improvements to pressure stations along the pipeline route.
Fraser Lake community development leader Shellie Gleave said, at the urging of Storey, that the economic cooperative organization she started when the mine shut down was now needed all the more, and would be looking for next development steps.
Gleave also suggested looking into developing the hemp industry in lands affected by the wildfire and pine beetle fibre slaughter, to which Parker replied some trials were underway and this could indeed be a helpful new industry.
The town’s forestry consultant (with experience as well with Nadleh and Stellat’en governments) Jason Regnier said, “There are trees everywhere,” out in the nearby forests, “but they are too small to mill. In my personal opinion it’s going to take about 40 years before you see an uptick in the available volume. You’re going to have a bright (future) economy as long as we don’t keep having fire events.”
There is enough wood out in the bush of the correct age to allow a small mill to operate, he said, but that would take careful business planning to set up and get operating. But would it dependably employ at least some people and get the 100-year rotational forestry cycle flowing again (where each year you mill and replant one per cent of your local forest-base, allowing for a perpetual 100-year rotation to balance jobs and nature)? Yes, in his view.
To end the meeting Storey concluded that, “I came up here today not to say how mad I was or how upset things were, I came up here looking for the positives and trying to share the positives. We can be mad all we want at government and West Fraser, but that’s not right. That’s not going to work. If government is the problem, and we have the solutions, then that’s what we’re going to bring. Complaining doesn’t do a whole lot if you don’t have a solution. That’s what we’re focused on. We need those.”