Kitimat to the battle stations!

Kitimat’s recent bout with infamy, as the nation’s largest declining population has served to help the town circle the wagons a bit.

A couple of local residents in the Aluminum City have posted a You Tube rebuttal to a recent Canadian Press video piece that painted the situation in Kitimat as rather dire, complete with vast swaths of Kitimat appearing in boarded up and abandoned buildings.

The lightning rod of Kitimat’s distress was an article from Dirk Meissner, a CP reporter and a former Kitimat resident who returned home after a thirty year absence to examine the streets he used to walk in his youth. (article is reprinted at the bottom of this piece)

He also was featured in an accompanying video which has sent the folks in Kitimat to the battle lines.

To be fair to the Kitimat side of the argument, Meissner’s piece is a tad ill informed, he might have wished to have perhaps better researched a few of his more controversial statements, such as the Dairy Queen had been closed for years and the Mall is only half full (hmmm, maybe he was in Rupert and got his geography wrong!). But he does capsulize the debate between Alcan and Kitimat, which if not resolved will no doubt contribute to an even more dire fate for the town.

The video put together by Megan Leach of CP (which you can watch here) features Meissner as he narrates a rather bleak impression of the place and certainly won’t be featured on the Kitimat Chamber of Commerce links.

It did however provide an opportunity for some Kitimat boosters to pull out the video camera and take their own tour of the city, doing a kind of counter point to the original video. (watch it here) They wander the streets of Kitimat finding positives and fast food restaurants that Meissner never saw apparently, the only thing they didn’t do was drive by Meisner’s child hood home, showing where the heretic spawned from.

It makes for an interesting angle on census interpretation, though the debate over the story even caught up the local media from Terrace in their spin. All afternoon Tuesday, Standard Broadcasting was stressing on their afternoon newscasts, that their company had nothing to do with the original Canadian Press story, no doubt just in case anyone had thoughts of canceling their advertising.

Canadian Press is apparently contemplating a follow up story over the controversy, a few folks in Kitimat are probably preparing the barricades, rockets and video cameras at the Hirsch Creek bridge in response to that news.


Kitimat crumbles
By DIRK MEISSNER
March 13, 2007
Canadian Press via Canoe

KITIMAT, B.C. (CP) — Pinto Tavares points at an empty concrete hull of a building and with a straight face he says it symbolizes a bright future for Kitimat.

Snow crunching under his feet as he walks round the long vacant store, the construction contractor says Kitimat is bleeding but the community will heal and good times will return, along with the hundreds who have left.

Empty buildings, like this former Shop Easy grocery, can’t stay this way forever, says Tavares, 66, who came to Kitimat in 1968 after serving in Angola with the Portuguese Army.

“I think Kitimat is just a matter of time,” he said brightly. “Kitimat is going to be good, not for me, but Kitimat is going to be good in the next 10 years.”

But today things don’t look good for the company town located two days’ drive northwest of Vancouver at the end of the fjord-like Douglas Channel. Figures from the 2006 census released Tuesday show it leads the country in declining population. Kitimat’s population dropped 12.6 per cent — 10,285 in 2001 to 8,987 in 2006 — following a 12.1 per cent reduction from 1996 to 2001.

The town was developed around Alcan’s giant aluminum-smelting operation. Carved out of British Columbia’s northern wilderness in the 1950s, it is still 75 kilometres from its nearest neighbour. It was built with plans of one day boasting a population of 50,000.

People earn good money at the town’s largest employer — between $80,000 and $100,000 a year — but Kitimat doesn’t even have a tow truck and the only movie theatre is for sale.

It’s a cruel irony.

The Dairy Queen — the only ice cream and burger joint in town — sits empty and locked tight, looking like it hasn’t served an Oreo Blizzard in years.

Bailiff notices cover boarded-up storefronts of a once vibrant shopping area where Portuguese, Italian, Greek and German immigrant workers would meet for coffee after night shifts at the Alcan aluminum smelter.

The mall downtown has more empty stores than open ones.

With the highest vacancy rate in the province, entire apartment buildings sit empty, a jarring reminder of dreams turned bad.

“Being here 22 years, I’ve seen Kitimat do full circle basically,” said realtor Michele Forbes. “I’m hoping it will come back.”

Numbers from the Chamber of Commerce and B.C. Stats, which monitors provincial trends, suggest Kitimat reached its population peak in 1982 at 13,422 people. It now has about 10,000.
The District of Kitimat’s most recent statistics confirm rental and apartment vacancy rates are currently the highest of 27 British Columbia urban centres surveyed by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

Kitimat’s 2006 housing statistics put the vacancy rate in 2005 at 44.5 per cent. Neighbouring communities Terrace and Prince Rupert post similarly high rates.

“You can see it in the way the streets are no longer as clean and shiny as they used to be,” said Angela Eastman, who was born here and is raising four children in the crumbling community that was once a model studied by planning experts.

“I thought it was a real feat this year when I managed to do nearly all my Christmas shopping here.”

Colin Hansen, B.C.’s minister of economic development, said Kitimat’s future is tied to Alcan remaining a modern and competitive company and the community being open to new economic opportunities.

“Kitimat has some huge potentials for a very promising future,” Hansen said Tuesday after the release of the census data. “It takes a concerted effort by their local leadership to actually start to work in a positive way to seize those opportunities.”

Alcan employs about 1,600 people today. In 1974, its work force peaked at 2,730.
In the mid 1980s Alcan started cutting workers, citing changing technology and market forces, and by 1990 it was down to 1,900 people.

“A lot of our young people, they go to Fort McMurray to make their money. Fort St. John, places like that,” Eastman said.

Outsiders are shocked at the dereliction but the locals hardly notice the decay right before their eyes.

For one thing, residents spend more time debating the rocky relationship between the town council and Alcan than finding ways to bring the town back from the economic brink, said Eastman.

After at least six years of mounting tensions that include divisive court cases, stalled development plans and municipal elections fought on Alcan issues, residents are seeking some form of resolution.

Many say the community has never achieved certainty in its relationship with Alcan, and that pervades almost every issue, including economic development.

At least three proposed Alcan expansion projects have been stopped or put on hold over the years, effectively strangling the community’s vision of the future.

“Where are my loyalties supposed to lie?” said Eastman, whose husband works at Alcan. “I feel like my loyalties should lie with the community because (we’re) the ones who are suffering.
“My kids go to school on a four-day school week because the school board doesn’t have enough money to run the school district as a five-day school week.”

At Tony’s Grocery Store, locals gather for coffee and lottery tickets at one of the few surviving businesses in the rundown Nechako Centre. Talk always ends up about Alcan.

“The community is tired and unless we make a correction we won’t be able to survive,” said Tony Deni, a lifelong Kitimat resident. He used to have 20 employees. Now it’s seven.
Deni said businesspeople in Kitimat are holding onto their aging assets with hopes that Alcan and Kitimat will work together to bring new economic opportunities to town.

“Every time Alcan’s on hold, we’re on hold,” says Ron Wakita, whose family runs one of the few surviving hardware stores in town.

Wakita, another lifelong resident who runs his own fishing charter business, said there was a jump in real estate prices and business interest when Alcan announced plans to upgrade its aluminum smelter.

But Alcan’s proposal to spend $2 billion to upgrade the 1953 Kitimat smelter is on hold after the B.C. Utilities Commission said a deal that would have permitted Alcan to sell power to the public grid was not in the public interest.

Many in town favoured the deal, though the company’s smelter proposal meant a potential loss of up to 500 jobs at Alcan, cutting the workforce to 1,000.

It’s difficult to understand why a potential loss of 500 jobs would create a positive buzz, but locals say a firm decision to upgrade the smelter gives the town a solid foundation on which to build.

Opponents to the smelter and power proposal said it did not ensure the company would ever upgrade the smelter. But the deal allowed the company to use public water resources, potentially worth billions to Alcan.

Alcan and B.C. Hydro are appealing the utilities commission decision. Alcan is also part of a lawsuit launched by the District of Kitimat against the B.C. government.

Kitimat argues a 1950 contract between Alcan and the province states that the company should use its hydro power to smelt aluminum and create jobs.

A ruling is expected this year.

District manager Trafford Hall says town council’s fight is about forcing the government to enforce a contract that has survival implications for Kitimat and long-term public resource ownership issues for the province.

“The only thing that keeps this smelter going is our screaming and yelling,” he said.
Hall knows the dispute with Alcan has split the community.

“It’s torn us asunder,” he said. “It’s attacked the social fabric of this town.

“Guess what happens when you sell (power)? This town disappears.”

Hall said layoffs at Alcan, the company’s grip on the community, which includes owning all the coastal access in Kitimat, and the fall of resource communities across Canada are the major reasons for Kitimat’s decline.

“This town was supposed to be 50,000 people,” he said. “It was written up in National Geographic. Kitimat was the model for the world to follow.”

Alcan spokeswoman Colleen Nyce said power sales have always been part of Alcan’s presence in Kitimat, but they are 10 per cent of Alcan’s business.

Nyce said Alcan generates more power than it needs to run the plant and it needs a power agreement.

She sees the painful irony of a crumbling town full of people earning good union wages. Alcan paid $7 million in property taxes last year and Alcan workers make more than $90,000 a year.
“Kitimat is not a poor town. The average income in this town is probably higher than any community in Canada of this size.”