Are we but mere hewers of wood and drawers of water?

Two separate news accounts this weekend seem to be conspiring to send Northwestern BC back to the early days of exploration, far from the modern manufacturing world that we seemed to have had in place a mere five or six years ago.

The first story came out just before New Year’s as the BCUC turned down Aclan’s bid to siphon off a good portion of the water produced from Kemano to be resold to BC Hydro and sent into the provincial electricity grid. The plan that Alcan and BC Hydro cooked up over the summer found quite a bit of opposition, as critics contended that the power generated should be returned into the Kitimat plant for the manufacturing of aluminum, rather than as a profit centre for the Aluminum giant.

With the announcement on the weekend, Alcan has now taken to reconsidering their 1.8 billion dollar modernization at Kitimat. Where that would leave all that power that is currently generated remains to be seen, but a pull out of Kitimat would certainly have an impact on the entire northwest corner of the province.

As if that thought isn’t a worrisome enough trend, comes word that Harmac mill in Nanaimo is in a temporary shutdown due to a lack of fibre supply. A situation that they hope to solve by doubling the amount of imports of fibre from the Northwest, they hope to sign contracts to guarantee a steady supply of fibre from our local woods to feed their Nanaimo operations.

Where that would leave any future start up of the former Skeena mill on Watson Island is another good question. One would assume that if the fibre supply here is guaranteed for mills on Vancouver Island, then the prospect of starting up the local pulp mill gets further and further from the operational mode, after all as the folks in Nanaimo are pointing out, you need fibre to operate a pulp mill.

So our water may or may not result in lost jobs in Kitimat, while our lumber gets sent away to keep jobs alive in Nanaimo.

You just have to wonder if anyone’s thinking about the folks living here in the always popular “heartland” (remember when that term was all the rage?) , funny how the resources are on our doorstep, but all the profits and more than a few of the jobs are being delivered somewhere else..