A recent call by a senior forestry executive to relax the rules on raw log exports in British Columbia does not go down well with NDP forestry critic Norm Macdonald.

But Kootenay East MLA Bill Bennett claims in some locations, including the East Kootenay, raw log exports are appropriate and save jobs.

At the Truck Loggers convention in Victoria last week, BC Truck Loggers Executive director Dave Lewis said it’s time to rethink the rules surrounding exports of raw logs.

“Any logs deemed surplus to the domestic industry should be offered to foreign buyers,” Lewis said at the convention according to a CBC report. “A lot of the mills that are shut down have timber rights. They’re choosing not to harvest their own timber because they lose money at it.”

But increasing the export of raw logs is not the answer to the woes of the industry,” says Macdonald. “Sending raw logs to another jurisdiction for processing is an admission of failure. Most British Columbians would expect us to extract as much value as we can from this important resource.”

Macdonald says he appreciates the difficult straits the forest industry finds itself in now, but still feels raw log exports are not the way out. “I understand that they are simply trying to survive and it’s absolutely legitimate for them to look to measures like exporting raw logs to keep them going, but this won’t work in the long run.”

Exporting raw logs is a historic issue in the forest industry and one that the government has tried to duck, Macdonald says. When Premier Gordon Campbell addressed the Truck Loggers Convention last week he completely avoided the subject.

“The B.C. Liberal government needs to take responsibility for the policy decisions they’ve made over the past eight years and the fact that we’re now getting less value from the forest resource. They have not promoted the value added sector the way they should have,” Macdonald says. Exporting raw logs is tantamount to exporting forestry jobs, he adds.

But this is not always the case, says Bennett. In much of northwest B.C. where most of the mills have closed, no one would be working in the bush if it weren’t for the exporting of raw lots, he says.

And in the East Kootenay, low quality Yellow Pine (Ponderosa Pine) and Douglas Fir are exported south to Idaho to create more jobs locally, he says.

As a result, a balanced approach has to be taken to the issue of raw log exports, he says. “It’s certainly a mistake to be opposed to raw log exports on some sort of an ideological basis. It’s not wrong in all cases. It’s actually right in some cases.

“It’s a matter of making sure we utilize our natural resources in ways that support the provincial economy and our local economy. That’s the balance we try to strike and I think we’re fine. In the East Kootenay I think we’ve hit the balance.”

Bennett says the issue is more acute on the Coast where mills are further from markets and the export of raw logs is nothing new. “They’ve been exporting logs from the northwest for a long, long time. For us to say we’re not going to do that anymore puts as lot of families out of work.”

Meanwhile Lewis says industry attitudes have got to change. People against the export of raw logs are “wrong-headed,” he said.

“They are people that have been in the industry for 40 years and they wish the industry was the way it was 40 years ago and the reality is it’s not and it’s never going to be.”

Until 2007, there was no tax on exporting raw logs from B.C., but sawmills had to offer their unprocessed logs to other mills for processing before they could be deemed “surplus” and exported. Reacting to criticism from many sources, the B.C. government imposed a raw log export tax of 15 per cent, which was tied to the Softwood Lumber Agreement tax imposed on B.C. by the U.S.

Former Forests Minister Rich Coleman predicted at the time the tax it would cut raw log exports by 50 per cent. Despite this, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada claimed in a recent “fact sheet” that one out of every three logs cut in Coastal forests was either being exported or wasted through poor cutting practices.