I listened to the news last night, as a reporter interviewed community and Union leaders to get their reactions to Canfor’s announced closures of sawmill operations in Vanderhoof and Fort St John. More than one expressed their hope that “when the price of lumber rebounds” the mills will surely start back up again. Even Bruce Ralston, the BC Forest Minister, pointed to the low price of lumber in a Sep 4 interview with CBC.

Let’s check.

As of Sep 6 – the price of lumber was $ 487.50 USD per thousand board feet. (Commonly expressed in news reports as “$487.50 per thousand”). This is less than half what lumber was selling for in 2021. In fact in May 2021, it was selling for close to 3.5x more at $ 1,670 per thousand!

But wait.

If we ‘pull back’ and look at the last 20 years, a different story unfolds. Ignoring Jun 2020 – Sep 2022, the price of lumber only jumps above $ 400 USD per thousand a handful of times. In fact, if you go back further you’ll find that, for the most part, the price of lumber since 1973 has oscillated between $ 200 and $ 400 USD.

It’s not about prices.

For years, we’ve allowed our Provincial Government to mis-manage public forests. They let industry write our forest practices code and process wood at speeds that would have been hard to imagine 50 years ago. It made our province wealthy. As we celebrated, those same industry players grew to become powerful companies who found it was more economical to do business in other countries. All the while, our governments were slow to realize that industry was now running the table.

There are some who believe that these closures are little more than a negotiation tactic by Canfor. I don’t know about that – after closing mills in Houston, Fraser Lake, Chetwynd, Prince George (Clear Lake, Isle Pierre, Polar and PG Pulp), Vavenby, Mackenzie, and now Vanderhoof and Fort St John I’d argue that there is more to this than a corporate game of chicken.

I’d argue that it’s about fibre supply, the software lumber agreement with the US, the tenure system, licensing, logging practices, labor and labor relations, international trade / competition, wildfire management and climate change and it’s about First Nations relations. None of these topics are easy to resolve.

As we work through another election cycle, listen to your candidates. What ideas do they have for reviving our forest sector? If they tell you it’s merely about lumber prices, tell them they need to try harder.