Vaughn Palmer: Frustrated forestry workers vent on Trevena, NDP's lack of a lifeline
Credit to Author: Gord Kurenoff| Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2019 02:54:39 +0000
VICTORIA — Cabinet minister Claire Trevena returned from the capital to her riding this week and walked into a buzz saw of anger over NDP neglect of the troubled forest industry.
It happened Tuesday in Campbell River in the North Island constituency Trevena has represented since 2005.
She sat down with logging contractors, small operators and others. They described being pushed to the brink financially along with their workers by the combination of a months-long strike and too-high stumpage charges on harvested timber.
Paycheques gone. Loans and mortgages in arrears. Vehicles and equipment being repossessed. Creditors and bankers circling in the darkness.
They wanted to know why the NDP government was doing nothing for them. Where had Trevena been all these months while things were spinning out of control? What would she do for them now?
Her answers were anything but reassuring to a community needing a lifeline.
She had been in Victoria, doing her job as minister of transportation and infrastructure. Those duties precluded her from spending as much time in the riding as she liked.
But now she was there to listen. She wasn’t going to pretend that she had short-term fixes up her sleeve. She would take their views back to her colleagues at the cabinet table and see what could be done.
She was greeted with a combination of dismay and disbelief. Was that really the best she could do — listen and report back to the cabinet?
Did the government have no plan, after all these months, to help them? Where was the premier in all this? The forest minister? The labour minister? There was understandable frustration in the room — and at one point overuse of the F-word.
But what struck me most was the sense of disappointment, that a self-styled government of working people had nothing to offer to a community with deep roots in a forest industry that was dying on its feet.
It’s all there on a video posted this week on YouTube, documenting some 30 minutes of the exchange. You can hear the laments from a community pushed to the brink.
From a falling contractor with 38 employees: “Our average is 2.4 children on our crew, a lot of kids and wives. I’m third generation, and have a son and daughter and would love to have an opportunity for them to join me in the industry.
“There’s people in this room who have employees who are like extended family to them. They are losing their homes, possessions and some of them are losing their marriages. I want you to have a clear picture, that’s how devastating things are for us.”
One of the few women in the audience: “It’s so sad to see what’s going on in these communities. We have over 100 people who aren’t working, some of them are behind me, I’ve got contractors not working, and these are damn good people and their voices deserve to be heard. And they do a lot for our communities and they are respectable people in their communities and we need to get them back to work.”
On Forests Minister Doug Donaldson: “I’ve heard him say he feels bad for all the people suffering but after that he says this is a long-term fix. There’s no time for long-term fixes here. It’s got to be fixed now, there’s got to be some kind of damage control done right away or half the people in this room won’t be here when it is fixed.”
On Premier John Horgan’s reluctance to intervene in the strike at Western Forest Products: “He doesn’t want to step in and do it, but I can tell you right now if that bus strike was in Vancouver he’d have (intervened) in two minutes and everybody is back to work.”
On the NDP revitalization plan for the coast forest industry, launched back in 2018: “You are ramming down new forestry polices that are increasing our costs, and making it less economic for us to operate out there.
“We used to on the island employ 700 loggers, today we are employing about 400, and it’s because your forest policies are driving the cost structure up. So I hear you saying you’re going to listen to us. You haven’t listened to us for a year. What’s different today?”
On the difficulty of getting the message through to the distant, smug provincial capital: “Victoria is its own economy. They don’t even feel what’s happening here but the accountants, lawyers and politicians are all getting paid full time, full bore, on the backs of all of us. Victoria doesn’t feel this.”
In answer to all this was Trevena, vowing again and again to take those messages back to the cabinet when it meets next week.
“Do you have any power?” she was asked at one point. “We work as a team in cabinet and caucus,” she replied weakly.
More than once, she reminded folks how she’d been their MLA through 14 years and four elections and hopes to remain so.
If she doesn’t make it next time, the post-mortem could begin with a screening of this week’s YouTube video.
Indeed, when the cabinet convenes next week, the New Democrats could install a big-screen TV and watch Trevena’s experience for themselves. It might get her cabinet colleagues reflecting on their own chances of becoming a one-term government.
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