' Loggers in 195-year-old B.C. lumber town hit hard by U.S. softwood duties
By DIRK MEISSNER
FORT ST. JAMES, B.C. (CP) - The moment Chilean immigrant Alfredo Espinoza arrived at the gates of this pioneering British Columbia town's sawmill he had a job.
He didn't have a lunch, a hard hat or the required steel-toed safety boots, but that didn't matter. "The foreman says, 'You see those boots over there, you try them.'" They fit. "OK, you start today."
Almost 30 years later, Espinoza, 62, shakes his head at how easy it was to find work in Fort St. James, a forest dependent community of about 4,000 people where everybody has sawdust in their boots or logging truck grease on their jeans.
Today, he's one of the few people working.
Espinoza, a first-aid attendant, is part of a small maintenance crew keeping the shut-down Canfor Corp. sawmill ready for start up. About 200 of his colleagues are laid off.
Two of the town's three sawmills - employing about 600 people - are shut down and the area's loggers and truckers who supply the mills with timber for the United States market are out of work, too.
U.S. softwood lumber duties of 32 per cent on Canadian timber exports have rocked Fort St. James, Canada's oldest community west of the Rockies.
The forest industry has fuelled Fort St. James ever since explorer Simon Fraser set up a Hudson's Bay trading post here in 1806, but locals say the last two years have been the toughest.
Market forces and government regulations have most people working only 60 per cent of the year, and now the U.S. softwood duties are bringing the community to its knees, they say.
"It just stinks what they (Americans) are doing to us," Espinoza said as he sips coffee with colleagues at the Timbermen's Restaurant.
"We are very sorry with what happened with the Sept. 11 terrorist attack," he said. "But now the American government and companies are putting tariffs on our lumber. They are putting 15,000 people out of work in B.C. What they are doing to us is nothing but economic terrorism. It amounts to that."
As many as 30,000 workers in B.C.'s lumber industry could be unemployed by Christmas if the trade dispute is not settled, the industry estimates.
American producers say Canadian softwood exports are subsidized through low provincial stumpage fees - the royalty charged for logging Crown timber.
Canada exported $10 billion worth of softwood to the U.S. last year, and more than half came from B.C.
The U.S. Commerce Department imposed an anti-subsidy duty of 19.3 per cent against Canadian softwood exports last August. Recently, the Americans added a 13 per cent anti-dumping duty.
B.C. producers favour a negotiated settlement over a protracted litigation through the World Trade Organization, launched by the federal government.
B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, Forests Minister Mike de Jong and representatives from B.C. forestry communities met this week with Marc Racicot, the envoy hand-picked for the file by U.S. President George Bush.
Fort St. James, located about 1,000 kilometres northwest of Vancouver, is ranked as B.C.'s second most forest dependent community, and everybody here is hurting, Espinoza said.
Only MacKenzie, about two hours north of Prince George, is considered more forest dependent.
It's mid November, the sun is shining, and the temperature is abnormally well above freezing, but a chill is running through Fort St. James, says Carrie Beck, a laid-off sawmill janitor.
School children, seemingly oblivious to the economic despair gripping the town, play soccer in a field that overlooks scenic Stuart Lake and Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Church, built by Oblate Missionaries and area aboriginals in 1873.
"There's a quietness and that bothers me," Beck said. "People are resigning to the fact that perhaps they are going to have to change their lives."
Business at the fitness gym and health food store Beck operates with her husband and daughter is down 25 per cent, she said. Other merchants in town are cutting staff and reducing hours.
Realtor Barb Eriksson said the next six months will be angst-ridden for Fort St. James as everybody hopes for a resolution to the softwood dispute and a market turnaround.
People are used to good wages and many young families with mortgage, truck and recreational toy payments will suffer if the work dries up, she said.
Mayor Jim Togyi says he's seen too many up-and-down industry cycles in Fort St. James to predict the demise of the community.
But he's not about to sit back and let his town die without a fight.
Togyi, a retired timber salesman who came to British Columbia after fleeing Soviet tanks during the Hungarian Revolution, has been fighting for his community's share of the forest resource for years.
Fort St. James sends about $100 million annually to B.C. government coffers in stumpage royalties and receives $330,000 back in provincial grants, he said.
That's not fair, especially when the community can't even afford to repair its sinking city hall, Togyi said.
Last summer, he started writing to forest-dependent communities across Canada urging them to let everybody know that U.S. duties threaten their livelihoods.
"Like all other communities in our country we would like to grow and prosper, but we are being held back because of the softwood lumber agreement," say the bilingual letters.
"If we all work together, I believe we will have a much better chance at negotiating with the Americans, and be successful in our efforts."
Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Pierre Pettigrew, international trade minister, have received similar letters.
Togyi said he's drafting a more personalized letter to President Bush.
He said he'll remind Bush that high-quality, fairly-priced timber from Fort St. James built millions of American homes and he'll ask Bush to personally intervene.
"That's the story we have to tell the Americans: We provided you with the best-quality wood in the world at probably the best price," Togyi said.
"You built millions of homes with that wood," he said. "This is the best wood. You want it. You need it and you can't live without it. Why are you being stupid and letting some timber barons try to blindfold you and say we cheated you?"
Keith Playfair, 48, one of the major logging contractors in Fort St. James, leans against one of his more than two dozen idle logging trucks and contemplates the economic uncertainty he faces.
"In the past we could live with all these different seasons, different adjustments, we could plan," he said. "Since countervail came in, it's been impossible to plan anything in the business future."
Usually, at this time of year his trucks are hauling timber to the mills and about 100 people are working, Playfair said. Business is currently at a stand-still.
"As you look at a community like Fort St. James, it's not just the loggers, it's not just the mill workers," said Playfair, brother of former National Hockey League players Larry and Jim Playfair.
"When the mill workers aren't working, it's the person working over at the store who's not working. In a community like Fort St. James it only has the forest to depend upon. We are at the mercy of the forest. That's tough."
Playfair's brother, Jeff, 46, is an independent log hauler who says he starts his days at 1 a.m. and quits at 5 p.m. - when he's working.
He's currently not working. The motto on his red $250,000 logging truck - Playfair But Win - seems ironic as he waits for the work call to arrive.
"If we're working we'll do fine, but if we're not working, all our eggs are in the same basket pretty much," he said.
Kris Nielsen, 42, said her husband Jeff is trying to shrug off a serious situation.
"It's very scary," she said.
"I've gone to the bank already and said what are our options if we're unemployed, because we carry a logging truck loan, a loan with our business partners on a shop ...that houses logging trucks through the season.
"We have a pickup truck so we have a loan on that. We have a couple of other things because we are normal people. So, what are our options if we can't work? What are our options? What is the bank going to do?
"Are they going to take away our house? Are they going to take away our equipment? Those are real questions to ask at this point. Because we don't know. You feel like you are at the mercy of the U.S."
Independent contractor Rick Klassen bristles at the suggestion logging could disappear as a way of life like fishing is doing on Canada's East Coast.
"The only difference is there's still fish in our ocean," he said.
"If the Grand Banks were full of fish they could still go and fish. Our resource hasn't dried up. We just can't go cut it." '
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