West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. reported earnings of $56 million, or $0.67 basic earnings per share on sales of $1,044 million in the 3Q 2015. In the quarter lumber operations generated an operating loss of $9 million (2Q 2015 – operating earnings of $13 million) and Adjusted EBITDA of $26 million (2Q 2015 – $45…
The Canadian forestry industry said on Monday it is seeking a simple roll-over of an expired 2006 softwood lumber export agreement with the United States in hopes of preventing a fresh trade fight over the product. Canada and the United States have a long history of battling over softwood lumber, which in Canada generally comes…
EACOM Timber Corporation is spending $2.8 million on increased automation at its Timmins sawmill. The company is putting in place a new lumber grading dystem, which will determine the grade of each piece of lumber faster and more accurately than human workers. “The job (when done by humans) demands high concentration because the piece goes…
Justin Trudeau is barely off the campaign bus and he’s already facing his first major trade showdown with the United States. And it’s not over the Keystone XL pipeline, the Trans-Pacific Partnership or climate-change policy. The prime-minister-designate is about to get his introduction to the never-ending softwood lumber file. The most intractable trade dispute in…
Premier Christy Clark said her first conversation with Canada’s prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau was about the softwood-lumber agreement. “We want to see the agreement renewed,” she told the Merritt Herald at one of her stops in Merritt on Friday. The premier was in Merritt to open the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology trades building. “Canada gave…
British Columbia’s government has been meeting with the forest industry to develop plans to save endangered caribou, and the province appears to have launched its controversial wolf cull program to avoid putting further restrictions on logging. The wolf kill, which started last January, has drawn international condemnation from environmentalists, but the B.C. government has defended…
An Atikameksheng Anishnawbek band member who says burial grounds and his family’s traditional hunting territory are being jeopardized by logging in the Benny Forest west of Sudbury isn’t giving up his effort to stop cutting and aerial spraying in the area. Clyde McNichol and his supporters say the cutting block closest to his people’s graves…
The building has a name that has to be lived up to, and Emily Carr University is already well on its way to being the innovators of wood design called for in that title. The Vancouver-based university is moving in and setting up its engineering programs that will focus on ways of making wood work…
Generating stations in both Atikokan and Thunder Bay are waving the environmental flag for being leaders in sustaining healthy forests while using its byproducts to produce renewable bioenergy. Wednesday was National Bioenergy Day across North America and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) opened the doors to its Thunder Bay plant for tours. The plant switched to…
Port Hawkesbury Paper may have to jump through an extra hoop if it wants to buy renewable power from an independent producer under the province’s new retail electricity system. The Point Tupper mill can’t be a customer in the retail market for the next four years without approval from the provincial regulator, Nova Scotia Power…