Interior communities make the case for local fibre
Six mills have closed in three years. The towns around them want the logs that remain processed where they fall.
The delegation that met the forests minister this week carried a one-page ask from eleven Interior communities: when the annual cut shrinks, let the remaining logs be processed close to where they fall, rather than trucked to whichever surviving supermill bid highest.
The context is three years of closures — six mills, four of them the only major employer in their town — driven by a fibre supply that fire, beetle and old-growth deferrals have cut faster than anyone's business plan assumed. The logs that remain are the object of a quiet bidding war, and the communities losing it are the small ones.
The policy on the table is fibre-proximity weighting in timber sales: points, not mandates, for bids that process within a defined radius. Its supporters call it keeping public wood connected to public benefit. Its critics — including, carefully, the major licensees — call it a subsidy for inefficiency dressed as regional policy.
Both descriptions are accurate, which is why the file is hard. The minister promised an answer before the spring sales. The eleven towns, whose mills cannot wait through many more sales cycles, heard the timeline and asked, politely, for a faster one.
