Barwick mill changes name Interim manager also named

Voyageur Panel, the oriented strandboard (OSB) manufacturing plant in Barwick, is now known as Ainsworth Barwick.
As well, there has been a change of management at the mill.
“We’ll have a new manager coming in shortly and we have an interim manager, whose name is Mark Cunningham,” Catherine Ainsworth, COO of Ainsworth Lumber Co. Ltd., a Vancouver-based forestry products company which bought the mill from Boise Cascade and its partners last month for more than $190 million, noted last week.
Percy Champagne previously had been the mill manager.
Ainsworth added although there are other changes being made at the top, it will be business as usual at the mill otherwise, which currently employs about 135 people.
“There will be very minor changes in staff,” she stressed.
The Barwick plant represents Ainsworth’s first foray into eastern Canada. The company has six other operations in western Canada—three in British Columbia and three in Alberta.
Ainsworth Lumber Co. Ltd. has been in the forest products industry for 50 years.
In addition to oriented strandboard, it also manufactures concrete forming plywood, specialty plywood panels, finger-jointed stud lumber, Durastrand flooring, and Durastrand rimboard.
With the completion of its acquisition of the Barwick mill, Ainsworth has an annual OSB capacity of two billion square feet.
“[Voyageur Panel] is an excellent fit with our engineered wood marketing strategy,” Brian Ainsworth, chair and CEO of the company, had said in a statement in April when news first broke that Ainsworth was buying the Barwick mill.