Laid off/Unemployed

[Wayne Maybury]

Scott
Sorry to hear about your situation. I wish you and your men the best and I hope that you can hang in there. Several of the mills we are closing for a couple of weeks are on the west coast as the Asian pulp market has tanked from what I have heard. The buyers simple are not buying, probably waiting for the prices to fall even further.

Bobcat
I travel Interstate 87 (the main north-south route between New York City and Montreal) on a very regular basis. Every day I pass dozens and dozens of truckloads of round logs heading north bound. This has been going on for years and is still going on today. Canada and the US are partners, not enemies. There is give and take in this relationship. Our 2 countries are the biggest two-way trading partners in the world. Our problem (for both Canada & the US) is the Pacific rim countries that don't give a damn about the workers health & safety, the environment, patent laws, or anything else.

The company I work for has spent billions of dollars over the past 15 or 20 years on cleaning up our emissions, just like every other forest products company in North America. In the same period, companies in China and other Asian countries continue to spew out millions of tons of every kind of crap you can imagine so that they can manufacture cheap crappy products for Wal Mart.

Wayne

[Bobcat]

Wayne ... I didn`t intend to imply/say that the US and Canada were/are enemies .... or offend you . What I should have clarified was , as I said , it was 10 to 12(?) years ago ... and at that time , there were a host of factors that figured into the equation . One of which was the difference between the value of the US dollar and the Canadian dollar ( about 25% at the time ) and the environmental issues the US producers were starting to face . The people I worked with in our Canadian region told me that at the time , the regs in Canada weren`t as tight as they were here ... but that has since changed . Also , back then, a lot of the timber was being put out of bounds by environmental groups here , a lot of the mills here hadn`t upgraded their equipment as fast as they should have .
We are actually more in agreement than disagreement on these issues , but back then it was a fact that Canadian lumber could be put on a boat in Mobile as cheap or cheaper than the local mills could ... and this is not intended as a slam on anyone .

[Wayne Maybury]

Bobcat
No offense taken. We always hear up here that our costs are much higher than down there. Everyone is jockeying for position and I believe very little that any politician has to say. It is very scary when we hear Scott say that some of his employees may lose their homes.

One thing is for sure, if we (everyone in North America) doesn't smarten up, and learn from our mistakes, there won't be much left here for our grandchildren to inherit except an awful lot of debt. I try to buy products made in Canada or the US but it is getting more and more difficult to do.

Wayne