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In 2023, how devastating of a blow is a mill closure to Prince George's future?

Plus a senior ski legend, if Prince George had Coachella and, hey, why not some crime stats?

January 12, 2023

In yesterday’s newsletter I wrote about how Prince George has grown beyond the point where the opening of a big box store would really alter its future — a change since the late 90s, early 2000s. That’s because the city has diversified economically past the point of being too dependant on any one employer.

Which makes it difficult to gauge how to react to news that Canfor is permanently eliminating the pulp production line at its Prince George Pulp and Paper Mill. Obviously, this is bad news, both for the roughly 300 people who will be losing their jobs, as well as the wider community. But when it comes to the wider community - how bad is this?

For people from outside the city, I think it’s easy to imagine that this is a devastating blow, because they are used to the idea of the small, resource-dependant town that relies heavily on one or two major mills or mines to keep things going. And while I’m not going to deny that Prince George is a resource-based economy, those eggs aren’t all in one basket. This isn’t the only mill in the city — heck, it’s not the only mill run by Canfor in the city — and there’s mining, pipeline, power, etc operations for which we act as a hub and service centre. Beyond that, there’s the university, college, our role as a regional healthcare and governance hub, expanding trade and logistics operations thanks to the expansion of the Port of Prince Rupert, not to mention the aforementioned presence of big box stores. In the latest census data, of the 48,395 people in the labour force, 1,580, or just over three percent, are listed as being in the natural resources industry, which includes agriculture. There are another 9,570 in trades/transport/equipment operations and 1,190 in manufacturing and utilities. All of that combined is about 25 percent of the working population, which is itself roughly the same as the 11,380 who are in sales and service (including retail) or the amount of folks working in health, education, law, social services and government.

None of this is to minimize the impact this will have on the people who are losing the jobs — that is undeniably terrible. I’m also not going to argue all jobs are created equal — a permanent, unionized position at a mill cannot be easily replaced by working minimum-wage retail (insert your own politics about how retail workers should be valued here) — or that things would hum along just fine if every mill in the city were to go under. Nor am I trying to ignore the spinoff effects that this can and probably will have. It may not be fatal, but it’s definitely a flesh wound. The real question is whether this is where it stops, and the losses can hopefully be absorbed by the expansion of other industries, or if it’s the first in a series of cuts that could add up to something worse. Much of the work of the last thirty years has been about trying to minimize the impact these sorts of industry losses could have, now we find out how well they pay off.

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