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Brink offers a solution to closure
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By Ken MacInnis
Free Press staff writer
Calling it a sad day, Brink Forest Products owner John Brink announced Monday the company would shut down its remanufacturing plant indefinitely at the end of the month, after 30 years of operation.
The reason, he said, was Canfor's decision to stop sending low-grade lumber to the mill, effective last Friday.
About 100 jobs will be impacted by the closure, but Brink said those workers will be absorbed into three new finger-jointing operations. Two have opened in the last year, and another is set to open in the next 30 days.
"It's a real sad day for this company, for the community, the region, and the province," Brink said. "We had hoped to create new additional jobs (in the finger-jointing plant)," he said. "Those jobs are now pretty well gone forever."
He said it was not a good situation to have so much of the province's timber -a public resource - owned by very few companies.
"There's no real competition," he said. "I think we will see more supermills eventually graduate to megamills, and then have only six mills north of 100 Mile House."
He said he feels that neither the primary industry nor the B.C. government has taken remanufacturing seriously, and that the government's forestry policy changes have been detrimental; to remanufacturers.
He said the majority in the increase in the annual allowable cut to combat the spread of the mountain pine beetle has so far been directed away from operators like Brink, leaving little or nothing for remanners, despite the fact they specialize in the recovery of value-added products from low grades and damaged lumber.
"Our only hope is that we may be able to gain access to timber so that we can replace the reman program with lumber from a sawmill of our own," he said. "It would be a perfect fit for our reman plant and we would create jobs right here in Prince George. The low grades would be remanufactured here and not sent to the U.S.
"That is what I call a winning solution for local communities."
© Copyright 2005 Prince George Free Press
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