Harald Mischke admits forestry is a complicated business and that he doesn’t have all the answers, but some are just common sense.
Mischke owns Cedarland Forest Products, at the north end of 256th Street in Maple Ridge. With just a few companies now harvesting, he has to rely on one to supply the huge western red cedar slabs that the mill turns into high-end decking, siding and panelling, which it sells around the world.
It’s a precarious existence. If his supplier decides to no longer sell him the raw cedar, he’s out of business.
“This is the line we are facing and will continue to face unless some changes are made.”
Mischke made the comments Wednesday to visiting NDP candidates Mike Bocking and Elizabeth Rosenau.
“Break down the monopoly of timber ownership on the coast. There is too much timber power in too few hands,” he told them.
B.C. also needs to go back to the old rules, of forest companies only being able to harvest in areas where they have sawmills, ensuring local jobs.
That system, known as appurtenance, was removed by the Liberal government in 2003, allowing companies to close mills and encouraging export of logs.
“No mills … no quota,” he said.
“The status quo is not the way to go,” he told the guests, which included Abbotsford-Mission candidate Preet Rai and former NDP forests minister Dennis Streifel.
“We seem to be missing the boat for some reason.”
Neither does it make sense for B.C. to allow exports of large cedar slabs to China, where they’re turned into the same products Cedarland makes. Those products are then sold abroad, competing in the same markets as Cedarland, using B.C.’s wood processed with cheaper Chinese labour.
“Even our customers can’t understand our logic. They think we are nuts.”
About 20 people work at Cedarland, which has been in business since 1975 and exports 85 per cent of its niche wood products, mainly to Europe, including Russia, Scandinavia and Turkey.
“There’s hardly a country in Europe that doesn’t get Cedarland wood,” Mischke said.
Some exports of raw logs may be necessary, he added, as long as they don’t impact the timber supply. But log exports shouldn’t become an industry in itself, he said.
After the presentation, Rosenau repeated the NDP emphasis on skills training to provide workers for forestry, while Bocking said his party wants to find ways to encourage more processing of wood before it’s exported. That requires consulting with the industry to figure out how to do that.
“That way, we can make businesses like this thrive,” Bocking said.
The NDP also wants to increase spending on forestry by $100 million over the course of five years.
Doubling of replanting on Crown land, improved forestry research, and a marketing program for lumber exports are part of the strategy. Raw log exports would be limited to only those that are surplus to manufacturing and community needs.
Mischke told the politicians that the Ministry of Forests has been gutted. “It’s been slashed and burned, that organization.”
Liberal candidate Marc Dalton toured the mill earlier and said that while the NDP says it opposes raw log exports, those increased every year the NDP was in power in the 1990s.
B.C.’s lumber sales to China have doubled in recent years, he added, while Chinese cedar products aren’t as good as Canadian.
Streifel, who was forestry minister in 1996, said exports of cedar slabs, squared so they fit into ships better, never would have been allowed under NDP policy. Any raw log exports had to go on the market first, and if there were no buyers, logs could be exported.
Mischke said that Category 2 timber sales ensured a supply of timber for small businesses, such as his, that created value-added products.
“Without these sales … there would be no Cedarland as you see it today.”
Streifel said those types of sales are gone from the system now. “The Liberals got rid of it in 2001, as soon as they got in the door.
“That’s why we need to send the Chinese the oil … so they can have the energy to mill our wood products to produce the products that we used to produce.”
Photo inset: Adrian Dix greets supporters outside the Kingfisher Pub in Maple Ridge on Sunday, where he watched the hockey game. (Photo Courtesy Silvester Law)