Vaughn Palmer: Brickbats from premier instead of deserved accolades
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2019 22:55:07 +0000
VICTORIA — Surrey-based Teal-Jones seems like the sort of homegrown forest company that should get accolades from Premier John Horgan.
Horgan hates log exports. “We do not export logs ever,” says Teal-Jones Group president Dick Jones. “Every log is processed fully here.”
The premier wants to add value to B.C. timber. Teal-Jones does a lot of that. As an ex-rock music critic, I note that the company is the world’s leading producer of tops for acoustic guitars.
The New Democrats are pushing to reduce waste in the from the timber harvest. Teal-Jones got there before them. A company specialty is taking over decrepit mills and mining the scrap pile for usable wood. In one instance, two crews were kept busy for two years retrieving usable logs from the waste pile.
Horgan favours partnerships with First Nations.
“Teal has built a dozen shake and shingle mills on the B.C. coast and operates with various First Nations groups,” says Jones. The company is working on other partnerships, not always with the full support of the province.
Decades after its founding, Teal remains a family-owned business. Dick Jones is president, older brother Tom is CEO. Their late father Jack started the company, buying his first mill for $100 down.
“Despite unbelievable obstacles we have built Teal from a four-man shingle mill to over 1,000 workers in B.C.”
If all that isn’t sufficiently inspiring to an NDP premier, Dick says the Jones family goes way back in its support for the governing party, starting with its predecessor, the Cooperative-Commonwealth Federation.
Last time the New Democrats were in office, relations were good. “Glen Clark was our friend,” Jones told me. “I had his cellphone number.”
I mention all this by way of background to a phone call I fielded the other day from the Jones brothers, who were upset that Horgan had taken a swipe at their company.
“It hard for me to listen to companies say they’re in distress when they’re making multi-million dollar investments in the U.S. and Europe and around the world,” Horgan told delegates to the annual convention of the Union of B.C. Municipalities.
Later in the same speech he praised a B.C. company for investing in a mass timber mill at a site near Castlegar — “not in Virginia, not in Alabama, not in Sweden, but in the Kootenays.”
The not-in-Virginia bit was an obvious reference to Teal-Jones. The day before Horgan spoke, the company announced it was investing more than $40 million Canadian in two mills in the U.S. state of Virginia.
Two weeks earlier, Teal-Jones had suspended logging operations here in B.C. at a cost of 300 jobs — with the added prospect of more job losses when inventories run out at its milling operations in Surrey.
I’d written about the premier’s speech and made the obvious connection to Teal-Jones, which is why the brothers phoned me.
First and foremost they disputed the insinuation that they were taking the profits from their B.C. operations and investing them south of the border.
“We don’t take money from here and put it in the U.S.” Dick Jones told me. “Our U.S. operations are 100 per cent financed there.”
What the company does do is takeover distressed operations in the U.S., make them profitable and bring some of that money back to Canada.
They also wanted to make clear why they had reduced their operations in B.C. The main concern was unaffordable increases in stumpage, the charge that government levies on the timber harvest.
“Stumpage is not the only concern on the Coast,” the company statement concedes, “but there is no way Teal can pay current rate.”
Like other players in the industry — including the union representing forest workers — Teal argues for a reduction in stumpage.
To date, the New Democrats have been reluctant to tamper with the formula, fearing it would lead to trade action in the U.S.
But as Dick Jones noted, stumpage is much lower in Alberta. Softwood exports from that province are subject to the same scrutiny south of the border as those from B.C.
“In the last 30 years, 77 sawmills have disappeared from the B.C. Coast. Teal will not join their ranks,” says the statement. “We are committed to our employees, our companies and our industry — in that order. Maybe, for once, someone will listen to Teal.”
Jones said he would like to show the premier himself around their operations in Surrey and make the case for lower stumpage.
Somewhat sheepishly, he admits that one attempt to set up a face-to-face meeting ended when brother Tom hung up the phone on the premier’s chief of staff, Geoff Meggs, not recognizing who he was.
What about it? I asked the premier’s office last week. The answer was guarded.
No comment on the insinuation that Teal-Jones was investing its B.C. profits it south of the border. A vague prediction that stumpage relief will be on the way toward the end of the year.
As for a tour of Teal-Jones operations, I was told Forests Minister Doug Donaldson toured the Surrey facility in January, his parliamentary secretary Ravi Kahlon met with Dick Jones last month “and the premier has not ruled out touring the facility himself.”
Sounds like it would be worth his time. Whatever Horgan’s frustrations with the major forest companies, I can’t see any basis for him lashing out at an independent operator like Teal-Jones.