Ear Falls workers have waited long enough.
For more than a year, Interfor’s sawmill has sat idle. 160 workers have been left without their regular jobs, and families have been left wondering whether the paycheques they built their lives around are ever coming back.
In Ear Falls, one-quarter of the community works at the mill. When those jobs disappear, the damage spreads to truckers, contractors, suppliers, stores and the municipal tax base.
These are good, unionized jobs. They pay mortgages, buy groceries and put kids in hockey. They allow people to raise families in northern Ontario instead of having to leave it.
At some point, waiting stops being a plan.
If Interfor has a credible plan to reopen Ear Falls, let’s hear it.
But actions speak louder than words.
While the Ear Falls mill has sat idle, Interfor has invested south of the border, including completing a $145-million reconstruction of its sawmill in Georgia.
It has moved its corporate headquarters from Canada to the United States.
And since its decision to shutter the Ear Falls Sawmill, its share price has soared 62 per cent.
There is nothing mysterious about what is happening.
A private corporation makes decisions based on what is best for its business and shareholders. With trade barriers hurting Canadian producers and American production offering advantages, shifting investment and production south makes sense on a corporate balance sheet.
Interfor will make the decisions that are best for Interfor.
But government should make the decisions that are best for the people of northern Ontario.
What’s good for the next quarterly earnings report isn’t necessarily what’s good for Ear Falls, northern Ontario or the forestry industry writ large.
That’s where public ownership comes in.
A publicly owned mill can play the long game. It still has to operate sensibly and compete. But it can measure the return differently.
A private balance sheet counts the profitability of the mill.
A public balance sheet must also count 160 paycheques. It must count the truckers and contractors those jobs support, the businesses where those workers spend their money, the municipal tax base they sustain and the cost of losing another generation from a northern town.
And it must count something harder to put on a spreadsheet: the value of still having a forestry industry when the next boom arrives.
There will always be good years and bad years in a resource industry. The danger is allowing a temporary downturn to permanently destroy the productive capacity we will need when conditions improve.
Industrial capacity is easy to lose and brutally difficult to rebuild.
Once a mill closes machinery depreciates or becomes obsolete. Skilled workers leave. Contractors find other work. Families move. Supply chains disappear.
Then lumber prices recover or new markets emerge, and we discover we cannot simply flip a switch and recreate what was lost.
A publicly owned Ear Falls mill could instead use a downturn to retool and modernise, pursue higher-value products and new markets, and work with First Nations, workers and surrounding communities to keep more of the value of Ontario’s forests in northern Ontario.
It can weather difficult years because preserving industrial capacity today gives us the ability to prosper tomorrow.
Our forests, after all, are a public resource.
Northern workers harvest them. Northern truckers haul them. Northern mills turn them into products the world needs.
Yet northern communities too often have the least control over what happens next. A boardroom can decide a mill no longer fits its corporate strategy, shift production across the border, and leave an entire community to absorb the consequences.
That isn’t an industrial strategy. It’s managed decline.
Ear Falls is part of a much bigger crisis facing northern Ontario forestry. Trade barriers are squeezing Canadian producers. Mills have closed or curtailed production, while families who have spent generations working in the industry are suddenly out of a job.
Governments should fight for a resolution to the softwood lumber dispute. We should diversify export markets.
But none of that answers the question facing Ear Falls today: What happens to the workers and community while we wait?
There is no guarantee a softwood lumber agreement will arrive in time to save Ear Falls. There is no guarantee markets will rebound next year. And there is no guarantee Interfor will decide reopening Ear Falls is in its best interests.
But we can decide that a reckless trade war shouldn’t become a death sentence for a northern town.
We can decide that public forests should produce lasting public benefits.
And we can decide that preserving skilled workers, functioning mills and industrial capacity is worth investing in, even when the quarterly numbers say it would be more profitable to move production somewhere else.
Ear Falls workers have done enough waiting.
If Interfor won’t reopen the mill, it’s time for government to step in, take the long view and put Ear Falls back to work.
Buy the mill. Get logs moving. Get truckers hauling. Get paycheques flowing again.
Luke Hildebrand is an Aboriginal law lawyer, partner at Headwaters LLP and the president of the NDP riding association for Kenora-Rainy River in Northwestern Ontario.
