Canfor closing Fort Nelson operations

Wow! I worked as a S.P. Forester (FIT) for this operation when it was still owned by Slocan Forest Products (I worked there from 96 – 99). My job was to make sure that the PolarBoard (OSB) plant and Tackama (plywood and dimensional lumber) had siliviculture permits and logging permits prepared, so the company could bring in wood during the winter.

The Canfor sign leading into Fort Nelson reads “Our roots are in this community,” but all was uprooted early this morning.

Mayor Chris Morey called the effects “catastrophic” after Canfor’s announcement to indefinitely shutdown the town’s two mills. Employees were alerted of the closure Thursday.

More than 400 employees at the PolarBoard OSB plant and Tackama plywood mill will lose their jobs once existing inventories are utilized, but the effects are expected to also ripple out to contractors and those indirectly employed by the mills. The town’s population is just below 5,000 people.

“The news is devastating and the effects of this are catastrophic,” Morey said in an interview. “We already had our sawmill closed two years ago, and now to have the two mills down is something that this community has never had to fathom – this is big.”

I worked there when they shut down the chopsticks mill — the company logged aspen to produce the disposable chopsticks that you get with your Chinese food orders. When that plant closed, they laid off about 200 people and the town was reeling for years. I went through one downsizing in the town right after that, when lumber prices were dropping and demand was down in 98. That, matched with the often unfriendly nature of industry and government relations in the area, encouraged me to head south to Calgary to do my Masters degree in late 99. That downsizing and the Chopsticks closure convinced me that far northern towns were a bit too risky to get too heavily invested in.

Now I am thanking my lucky stars I did move along when I did because this notice by Canfor could be a town killer. Fort Nellie would still have the gas industry and the railroad, but when a town of 5000 loses as many as 600 jobs (if you add the few hundred that would have been lost when the dimensional mill closed earlier), I don’t know how the local economy gets past that.

The ripple effects from this mean that the several hundred contractors (and their employees) who worked with the mills and the forestry divisions (woodlands dept) will all go under or have their businesses on life support, the schools are hit, the small businesses lose many of their customers. I would hate to think what the real estate market is like in town right now. On top of that, the major industries, like the railroad and trucking companies, lose much of the business that made it worthwhile to keep running up the highway to Fort Nelson.

Since the city is so isolated, it will not be worth it to ship products up — it is literally a four hour drive through black spruce, sphagnum moss swamp from the nearest “city” of Fort St. John with about 15,000 people, six hours from Grande Prairie (50,000), nine hours from Prince George, and ten hours from Edmonton. There’s almost nothing beyond Fort Nelson until you get to Yellowknife or Alaska, so justifying the trip will become difficult for anyone in business.

This is definitely the “bust” end in the boom and bust nature of far north resource towns and industry.