James Steidle: 'If there's demand, we can build it,' says forests minister — but can we?

The current system cuts smaller companies right out

A version of this article was originally published September 26th in the Prince George Citizen.

Our Forest Minister Ravi Parmar was seen recently at a trade show in Whistler with Premier Eby sitting in large pieces of solid spruce and western red cedar furniture, designed and produced by designer Brent Comber.

“Now there’s an image of value-added,” his twitter account states. “If there’s demand for it, BC can build it.”

But can we?

As a value added wood products producer myself, I’ve spent years trying to chase down logs to cut up on my woodmizer and make my end-grain cutting boards right here in Prince George.

The little guys like me are welcome to spend a fortune buying lumber at the stores. But I’m not welcome to the cheap unprocessed logs like the majors.

Not easily, anyway.

In prior years I made a trade with a log home builder down in Williams Lake for off-cuts from the log-home logs that were already scaled and paid for. But it still cost me, and it’s a six hour drive, there and back, and there’s cedar closer to home.

If only I could get some right out of the bush.

The cedar out east of town is generally seen as lower quality than coastal cedar. A lot of it has the inside rotted out. But the shells are still good. I’ve pulled some out of burn piles out by Dome Creek for firewood. The wood the mills called junk was in fact phenomenal, with some of the tightest grain I’ve seen. It would make excellent cutting boards.

Now how would a guy like myself get a couple junk logs, legally, like what Minister Parmar seems to think is easily possible? If our forests are for the small value added manufacturers and artisans, and not just the billionaires and the megacorps, it must be straight forward, right?

According to an excellent investigation by Ben Parfitt for the Tyee, a lot of the cedar I need is currently being sent to the pulp mill.

According to public records, Parfitt told me Canfor recently bought 899 cubic meters of cedar from Valemount Community forest, about 20 logging truck loads worth, and paid $400 in stumpage, about 44 cents per cubic meter. That’s $20 a logging truck load.

So we practically give it away to the big guys, but we don’t even let the little guys pull a couple rotten logs out of the burn piles.

I recently talked with the ministry office here in Prince George about my problem. They said the best approach is to deal with the licensees and see if they will sell me some of these logs.

I tried that about 7 years ago when I called up one of the large licensees to see about buying some of their cedar.

If I remember correctly they wanted $250 a cubic meter. I called around again last week and now nobody would sell me any logs, at any price.

I understand logging costs money. I also understand it’s a huge headache to sell logs to the public when your business model is mass producing 2x4’s or trainloads of pulp or pellets.

At the end of the day, the Ministry’s suggestion was a dead-end.

Previously there was the small scale salvage program, which has since been rolled into a program called a “Fibre Forestry License to Cut”.

This program requires “professional” oversight meaning you have to hire a forester and is for a small scale logger, at best, not a woodworker looking for a few cedar logs.

At the end of the day there is no legal way for an artisan to get the logs from the bush needed to make things like Comber’s log furniture pieces.

I wrote to Brent Comber and he agreed it was no easy feat. It sounded like a lot of his wood was from private land or from larger companies with harvesting licenses selling him off-cuts. It sounded like he wasn’t able to get logs directly from public land either.

In other words Ravi Parmar and the BC Government’s policies can’t lay claim to the value added work of the Brent Combers of the world. Anyone without tenure trying to do value added wood manufacturing in this province does so at the mercy of private landowners and the major licensees. They have no regulatory right to a scrap of wood, if the private sector so determines.

Ravi Parmar may claim otherwise, from his wooden throne, but the emperor has no clothes.

Programs like the Small Business Forest Enterprise Program, which allowed producers without tenure to access fibre, are a thing of the past, thanks to the BC Liberals and the ongoing NDP failure to fix it.

We have a tragic situation where our forests are monopolized by megacorporations who are impediments to entrepreneurs, small business, and value-added wood production.

This of course suits our government just fine. When you understand the career trajectory from the upper echelons of the Ministry of Forests is to the corporate board rooms of the megacorps or their lobbying firms, and back again, you realize helping the small guys is not just a logistical problem. It is a professional and political problem.

The last thing our corporate-captured forest ministry leadership envisions is working in some dusty shop sanding cutting boards. That’s not the nest they want to feather. They’d rather prime the pump of monopoly corporate power, and all the glitz, glamour, wine and cheese and 6-7 figure salaries that flows from that.

What would our so-called public servants get out of helping actual people build useful things that could reduce our imports, add value to our forests, and democratize the forest economy?