Dec. 17, 2005. 12:50 AM
DAVID OLIVE | Toronto Star
The holiday spirit isn't much in evidence in a dozen or so mill towns across the country.
The past week alone has brought distressing news to more than 1,700 forest products workers at five mills, spanning Stephenville, Nfld., to Squamish, B.C., who have been notified their jobs will soon be terminated.
On Wednesday, newsprint giant Abitibi-Consolidated Inc. dropped the axe on more than 600 jobs at mills it will close in Stephenville and Kenora, Ont. A day later, it was the turn of Western Forest Products Inc., which said it will begin shutting down its Squamish pulp mill the week of Jan. 23 — election day, as it happens — with a resulting loss of 323 jobs.
Later the same day, Weyerhaeuser Co. said production at its Prince Albert, Sask., pulp and paper facility will end this month, affecting 690 employees. And one of the firm's paper machines at Dryden, Ont., will be shut down in April, with the loss of another 80 jobs in that one-industry town.
The cruelly timed announcements follow hard on decisions by Domtar Inc., Cascades Inc. and Tembec Inc. last month to close or streamline mills, with a loss of more than 2,000 jobs.
That brings the total number of jobs eliminated in the industry to more than 42,000 over the past five years — or about 15 per cent of the total workforce. The damage is more widespread than those numbers suggest, given that an estimated two indirect jobs are supported by each mill worker.
As employees at General Motors of Canada Ltd. learned with the recent announcement of major job cuts in Oshawa at one of the company's most efficient plants worldwide, worker ingenuity in boosting a facility's competitive prowess means little if markets are weak, a strong loonie conspires in favour of offshore producers, or management miscalculates the product mix best matching customer demand.
"We have broken production records as well as improved the quality of the papers over the past few months," Ron Bucks, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union local at Weyerhaeuser's Prince Albert mill, told Canadian Press last week. "These machines are world class and profitable and this announcement makes no sense at all."
There is worse to come.
Tembec, a sizeable lumber producer based in Montreal, warns of bigger cuts down the road as it copes with weak demand and rising energy costs.
And Weyerhaeuser, a $23 billion (U.S.) behemoth headquartered in Washington state, says the market for paper products is so poor that the "urgent changes" necessary "to improve the competitiveness and lagging performance of this business" are not over. "We anticipate future changes," CEO Stephen Rogel said Thursday — a euphemism for more cutbacks in the absence of a miracle turnaround in the industry's fortunes.
Somehow, the crisis in one of Canada's iconic industries is not an issue in the current federal election campaign. Indeed, the entire economy is a non-issue, as parties dwell on the long-ago sponsorship scandal, the exposure and resolution of which are draining the federal treasury but creating jobs only among a passel of big-city lawyers.
The Liberal platform makes commitments to R&D spending and specialized job training. But the Martin government has not developed either a national industrial strategy or comprehensive plans for reviving selected troubled sectors.
The NDP decries a 12-year Grit legacy of "no national strategy to help jobs-rich industries adapt to changing markets and rising costs — like steel, aerospace, shipbuilding, forestry and agriculture." Alas, the NDP's own turnaround strategies for those sectors is a well-kept secret in a poll-driven campaign that identifies Liberal corruption, healthcare and tax breaks as the vote-getting issues.
The Tories correctly note that "this election is a chance for working families to send Ottawa a wake-up call on job losses in sectors such as manufacturing, natural resources and agriculture."
But the Tories also offer no specific plans for rescuing towns and regions dependent on those ailing sectors.
It's not like the solutions require more than the usual brainstorming. The response of Queen's Park to a similar forestry crisis a decade ago was to bail out troubled mills, modernize them and usher them into the hands of new private-sector owners.
Once again, it's Ontario and Quebec that have responded to a forestry crisis, with a combined $780 million in proposed industry funding. But that money isn't enough to finance an overdue renaissance for an industry that needs to replace obsolete plants — some dating from the 1920s — with state-of-the-art technology by which European producers have continued to thrive in the current downturn by developing innovative products and manufacturing processes.
To the residents of Dryden, Thunder Bay, Stephenville and Squamish, the electoral contest must seem surreal indeed.
Elsewhere in the country, many voters are sanguine about an economy with a 6.4 per cent jobless rate, the lowest in three decades; and debate on how best to treat ourselves to the $80 billion in projected federal surpluses over the next decade or so — a reward, many would understandably see it, for the sacrifices in high taxes and social-services cuts of the 1990s.
But the dynamic economic recovery of recent years bypassed many parts of the country, which appear to be alone in thinking that an obvious use of a modest portion of that surplus would be a nation-building exercise in restoring prosperity to troubled communities.
The spirit of the season is lost on Dave Coles, a CEP union vice-president, whose negotiations with Weyerhaeuser and the Saskatchewan government were abruptly short-circuited by the company's "horrific" announcement last week.
"To string our members along for more than two months and then slam them with this news 10 days before Christmas is simply unconscionable," Coles said. It's not easy to find gentler words for the political leaders whose campaign-trail priorities so far betray a similar insensitivity. (*)
