John Horgan.

The next Premier

Of British Columbia

Questions Put to John Horgan the British Columbia NDP Leader.

The Tyee News Reporter Andrew Macleod

Andrew Macleod

You’ve talked in the past about bringing the minimum wage up to $15 an hour and child care down to $10 a day. How far would those policies go to help?

John Horgan

Certainly when our lowest cost workers have more money in their pockets to spend that leads to them spending that money in local communities. Very few people on the minimum wage are socking money away in tax havens offshore. They usually spend the money they have on their day-to-day needs and that creates economic opportunity for small businesses and others in the community. The child care question is one everyone agrees with but this government’s not prepared to tackle. As far as they were prepared to go was to create an interactive map so families could realize just how few spaces there are and just how long the waitlist would be.I think we need to put in place government programs that will be promoted aggressively to make life easier for families. It’s not just about bumper stickers. Christy Clark was all about “Families First.” She seems to have dropped that this time around. What families want to see is some tangible evidence that government is on their side, or at least working to make life a little less difficult than this government has, and child care is a great way to do that. It also creates economic opportunities... child care is an economic stimulus; it’s not a drag on the economy as the Liberals would have people believe.

Andrew Macleod

What about forestry? Do you see opportunity?

John Horgan

Huge. I’ve been meeting with industry leaders, I’ve been meeting with unions, I’ve been meeting with truck loggers, and I am extremely concerned the potential consequences of the lack of success on the softwood file will lead to significant disruption in the industry and loss of jobs. I’m also concerned about our managing of the resources over the past number of years. It seems to me the BC Liberals have done everything they can to make sure that those who provide political contributions are getting what they need on a quarterly basis in terms of their profit margins, but that’s not benefiting the sustainability of our public forests over the long term. Raw log exports is the symbol of that.... Now there are more logs leaving Vancouver Island than ever before, going by shuttered mills. Shuttered mills mean no dust, no chips, which means an impact on the pulp sector, so places like Harmac, a co-operative, an employee-owned company, can’t get access to a raw material to keep the company going. That is a result of BC Liberal policies, and we need to change that. Our forest sector is our past and it can be our future, and I want to make sure that’s the case.

*** By Ben Parfitt 27 Feb 2017 | TheTyee.ca

Since 2013, the year Premier Christy Clark led her government to re-election, almost 26 million cubic metres of raw logs were shipped from the province, with a combined sales value of more than $3.02 billion. No government in B.C. history has sanctioned such a high level of valuable raw log exports on its watch, or been so silent about the consequences.

Last year nearly 6.3 million cubic metres of raw logs left the province. Had those unprocessed logs been milled in B.C. instead, an estimated 3,650 more men and women could have been working in the province’s neglected forest sector. Moving up the value chain and making even higher value forest products would have added even more jobs to the tally.

Raw logs are, strictly speaking, forest products, but they are the most rudimentary and lowest value of all products derived from trees. Depending on age and quality, real value-added would mean transforming those logs into the studs and joists that frame our houses, the floors we walk on or the guitars and pianos we play.

Cubic metres are a rather abstract measurement and don’t convey what is actually at stake. Consider this: if the raw logs that left B.C. last year had been used just to make the lumber and other wood products commonly used in house construction, enough wood would have been milled to build approximately 134,000 homes, or roughly half of Vancouver’s standing detached housing stock.

Follow the links to The Tyee

https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2017/02/27/Raw-Logs-Lost-Jobs/