With the Americans attempting to undermine our sovereignty with a trade war, it turns out our biggest forestry companies are helping them.

Even before Trump uttered his threat of 25 percent tariffs, rumours began to circulate that Vancouver-based logging giant Canfor was going to dismantle its recently closed Polar sawmill at Bear Lake, north of Prince George, and send it to Alabama for rebuilding and operation there—yet another British Columbia mill destined for rebirth in the southern United States.

If the move happens, Order of BC recipient Brian Fehr almost certainly will have a hand in it. He has made a career out of automating BC sawmills before cannibalizing them to build up our American competition.

Fehr now owns Comact Equipment USA and Peak Renewables, two corporate vehicles in his billion dollar empire that have been used to systematically buy up and move Canadian facilities south of the border. This has included moving the Canfor Mackenzie sawmill to Plain Dealing, Louisiana, to help out Teal-Jones, shipping the old Pacific Bioenergy Plant in Prince George (co-owned by Canfor) to Dotham, Alabama, and dismantling Canfor’s OSB mill in Fort Nelson where it will find a new home in Enterprise, Alabama.

Maybe Fehr is hoping that his Order of BC medallion, with its shiny dogwood insignia, will ward off the critics and deflect the public eye. But under the present circumstances, to ship Polar and its big bandsaw headrig down south would sure take some nerve.

Canada currently fulfills around 25 percent of American lumber demand, a drop from 35 percent in the 1990s. That number shrinks every time a Canadian sawmill gets dismantled and shipped to the US. It gets smaller every time a Canadian company transfers its made-in-Canada technology, financial earnings, and supermill know-how down south, too.

And with every betrayal of our market position, so too does our very own industry betray all Canadians.

We may be up here suffering, but rest assured that Jim Pattison, a billionaire and major investor in Canfor and West Fraser Timber, will find a silver lining in those 18 American sawmills he owns the majority share in, pumping out tariff-free lumber south of the border. West Fraser operates 22 American sawmills, which now out-produce their Canadian counterparts. Other Canadian firms, like Tolko, Interfor, and Teal-Jones, now run mills in the American South as well. Thanks in no small part to likely billions of dollars in Canadian investment, the American South will soon be producing more softwood lumber than all of Canada.

The chattering classes might say that this is our fault. As Vaughn Palmer argued in the Vancouver Sun, Canadian governments are the ones that scared off “investment.” Apparently, we aren’t listening to Canfor’s demands.

The reality is there was nothing that could have been done other than some good old-fashioned nationalist regulation.

Let us not forget that these big corporations have profited off publicly-owned timber for decades. We could have ensured our forestry operations stayed in the hands of Canadians in Canada, and nowhere else. Not China, not the US, and not Europe.

Nor should our Canadian companies have been allowed to transfer wealth abroad. We should have made it a rule that our resource riches are reinvested in Canada, not siphoned out of our country. The billions earned off of Canadian timber shouldn’t be used to create a parallel industry cradled in a competitor’s bosom.

Now the pundits will call that socialism. They will call this a threat to the so-called free market neoliberal global capitalism.

It is ridiculous that we have allowed private mega-corporations to feast at the table of our natural resources, put our name in their corporate identity, accept the highest awards of the land, then turn around and expand lumber production in foreign markets—to our collective detriment.

And to think one of Canfor’s board members is Glen Clark, the former premier of British Columbia who once famously led the charge against the Americans in the Pacific Salmon War of 1997.

It becomes difficult to escape the view that the fragility of Canada’s economic sovereignty is directly linked to the infidelity and opportunism of our corporate leadership.

If the horse of repatriating our lumber industry is already out of the barn, it is only fair we make these two-timing corporations pay some other way.

The first thing we can do is claw back their tenures to publicly-owned timber in Canada. After all, those public forests are for the benefit of all Canadians. If a corporation is using our resources to leapfrog into the American market to undermine our industry and our bargaining power, they should lose an equivalent share of timber harvesting privileges on this side of the 49th parallel.

Frankly, we should have done that the moment they closed down their mills.

Of course, none of this will happen. On February 5, BC Forest Minister Ravi Parmar invited the Council of Forest Industries (COFI), whose key members have so detrimentally undermined our interests, to join his “team” on the BC Softwood Lumber Advisory Council. You would think a tendency to score own-goals would disqualify certain players, but that’s not how this game works. There will be no consequences. Parmar will almost certainly allow Canfor to ship the Polar sawmill to Alabama or some other state, to help build up the other team, if that’s what Canfor or Brian Fehr decide.

At the same time, our Ministry of Forests will continue to deny and limit small producers and woodworkers easy access to public timber, thereby protecting the stranglehold large corporations maintain over our forest industry.

And that’s for a very simple reason that is increasingly difficult to deny.

Our government institutions, at almost all levels, are mostly assets of global capital. The Ministry of Forests isn’t really a public service for Canadians or British Columbians. The Minister of Forests does not serve the people, and hasn’t probably since David Zirnhelt, the NDP Forest Minister from 1996 to 2000. It’s a corporate service. It’s here to serve the investor elite, a racket to protect the borderless world of global megacorporatism and billionaires, not us.

Certainly not our nation.

We will be in for a rude awakening when our beloved, highly decorated billionaires pull the rug out from under not only our communities and economy, but the very existence of our nationhood.

James Steidle was born and raised in Prince George and runs the woodworking company Steidle Woodworking. He advocates for forestry reform through Stop the Spray BC. Twenty years ago he briefly worked for the NDP as a researcher in the BC Legislature and worked for a consortium of labour unions covering Metro Vancouver. He ran for the BC Green Party in the recent provincial election in Prince George Mackenzie and writes a regular column in the Prince George Citizen.