2016 Upcoming Tour Unique Pro-D experiences for teachers—FREE forestry tours Festival of Forestry tours take teachers to rural and resource-based communities throughout BC. Our three-day tours provide teachers of all levels and subject areas with curriculum-focused, hands-on teaching ideas. There will be opportunities to talk with various resource experts and professionals along the way, including…
“We’re going to have a long dry summer, I mean just look, it’s a fire waiting to happen.” That was how NDP MLA Scott Fraser described what he was seeing as he toured a cut block between Port Alberni and Lake Cowichan Wednesday. It is where massive, valuable logs have been sitting untouched for up to…
The fire came in waves at Howard Ewashko’s family business: once on Tuesday afternoon, again in the evening. Both times, Ewashko, his brother Craig, and a small band of workers at the sawmill north of Fort McMurray saw the “beast” of a wildfire threaten their operations, before it turned back. Today, the Northland Forest Products sawmill is still…
The City of Winnipeg is ramping up efforts to create an inventory of ash trees. Crews are searching backyards and back lanes to count and inspect ask trees, in danger because of a devastating pest, the emerald ash borer beetle. The city says it’s not a matter of if the emerald ash borer beetle will…
When the Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) arrived in Alberta some nine or 10 years ago it hit hard. Whole areas of pine trees were red with dead or dying trees, and people everywhere were losing trees on private property, golf courses were losing trees, towns were losing trees from boulevards as the beetles which had…
LET’S TALK about jobs, good resource sector jobs to be more specific. However, before everyone gasps in disbelief thinking I’ve changed my mind on Ajax… I haven’t. I have nothing against mining and fully appreciate it’s’ tremendous value to the economy but — and this is the big ‘BUT’ — Building an open pit mine in Kamloops…
Blame the low Canadian dollar, or the tumbling price of oil, or the American housing recovery. Whichever the culprit — or whichever combination of all three — the Alberta forestry industry is happy. Alberta’s third largest industry was hit hard by the 2008 recession, clawed its way back and then was hit with a price drop last year. Now, the stars…
Earlier this month, we learned some bad news about the phenomenon of “sudden oak death,” which has killed more than 1 million majestic oak and tanoak trees in coastal California. Researchers writing in the influential Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published results suggesting that although the pandemic, caused by the invasive water mold Phytophthora ramorum, could…
Canfor works with many exceptional contractors across our operations as part of our day to day business. This includes forestry contractors which harvest timber for us on our tenures in BC and Alberta and undertake challenging and extremely important work for us, delivering the fibre to supply our western Canadian operations. These companies play a…
The Kenora Forest Products Mill is one step closer to full production as Unifor says the first shift in the new planer mill started Monday. Local National representative Stephen Boon says there are now almost 70 unionized members working at the mill and that number will grow to about 110 over the summer with another…