rc PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Interest rates are ruinous to workers by Jack Munro o you know how many ways you and your family are victimized by the monetary policy of the Canadian gov- ernment? First, of course, you have to pay more for your mortgage, either directly or through rent increases. For exam- ple, an increase of 4% on a mortgage of $50,000 costs an additional $2,000.00 per year, or about $1.25 per hour — depending on how much you get. But you can’t pay the additional mortgage cost with pre-tax dollars. So, depending on your tax rate, you will have to devote about $1.65 per hour of your pre-tax earnings to the hike. Second, that is for those who are lucky enough not to get laid off because of the disastrous effects of high interest rates. Many will not be so lucky. About 40% of Canada’s forest industry workers had long lay-offs when monetary authorities last ran amok late in 1981. ) v The layoffs follow from a variety of effects. To begin with, when mortgage rates skyrocket, as they have been doing lately, a lot of people decide not to build houses, so lumber isn’t sold, and forest industry workers get laid off. Then the value of the Canadian dollar in foreign countries rises, and with it, the relative price of Cana- dian lumber. So Cana- dian producers have to pursue what most insidious effects are longer-run and less well-known. For one thing, when the large corporations that dominate our indus- try begin to experi- ence the ‘cash-flow crises” caused by high interest rates (greatly reduced revenues and, simultaneously, great- ly increased costs) they look around for others to carry the load. They find the Canadian forest indus- try worker, and the Canadian forests. And in the longer remains of the lumber market with a double handicap; the lumber of foreign producers becomes cheaper, and at the same time, the Canadian producer has to pay more for his capital — currently about 5% more than his U.S. competitor. And with each of these effects, more Cana- dian forest industry workers are laid off for longer periods. Then consider what is happening on the grand scale. Canadian residential mortgages alone add up to about 180 billion dollars. The 4% increase in rates, if it lasts long enough to affect that total (about 4 years), means that every year an additional $7.2 billion goes from porrowel to lender, from the poorer to the richer. But for the forest industry, perhaps the run, these obscenely high rates make prin- cipled, sustainable forestry impossible. Nec- essary early silvicultural operations (plant- ing, brushing, pre-commercial thinning, early pruning) have to be financed for 50 to 100 years, depending on the rotation period. If you apply a compound interest rate of, say, 14% over periods like that, you will see that present monetary policy is simply incom- patible with sustainable forestry. So get out your pen and paper and write to Prime Minister Mulroney and Finance Minis- ter Michael Wilson (send the letter to the House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, no stamp required). You don’t need to write anything fancy. Just tell them, in your own words, that you are fed up with all this. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPME! Accountability needed in land use decisions by Claire Dansereau TIHE National Union’s efforts at involve- “ment in the sustainable development de- bate have produced encouraging results in some cases and a reminder that we have a | lot of work to do in others. ee On the positive side, Brother Stanyer has been appointed to the B.C. Round-Table. This committee will advise Cabinet directly on most issues related to sustainable development. It will establish a conflict resolution mechanism, advise Cabinet on environmental land use and other economic development issues, and will monitor implementation of National recommendations on sustainable development, among other responsi- bilities. Again on the positive side, I have been asked to continue my participation in the B.C. govern- ment’s Old Growth Strategy Conference. This group of stakeholders is attempting to establish criteria and methodologies for making land-use decisions on old-growth forests. This is not a decision-making body. We are simply attempting to come up with methods for measuring the real impacts of decisions on the people of B.C. On the negative side, important land-use deci- sions have been made all over the country recently by governments that did not consider the impacts of their decisions on working people. The B.C. government has reached a decision on the Carmanah, the Ontario government on the Temagami and the Alberta government is doing all that it can to find someone to come up with its answer on the timber supply of the north. Not one of these decisions has been based on environmen- tal concerns or on the needs of working people. BRITISH COLUMBIA ... For those of you who have not heard, the B.C. government chose to divide up its most contentious valley, the Carmanah, into two unequal parts, the larger of the two is to become a park. In their press release, the government admitted that workers would lose j | | | | their jobs but did not propose to do anything about it. They also stated that further studies were required on the areas designated for log- ging. This last admis- sion on their part indi- cates that they have no idea what area is re- quired to be set aside to protect the giant spruce. ONTARIO. ..The Tem- egami in Northern On- tario is an even worse case of ignoring the needs of workers. The Ontario Federation of Labour, the NDP, the IWA and the Steelworkers of the area were meeting on a regular basis with the Tema- Augama Anishnabai in order to come up with a plan that would help save the community and provide the Native Band with meaningful input into decision-making on that applies across the country so that the compa- nies and the public will know that when they expend energy in one of these events, there will be some accountability by the government for the outcome. Speaking of Manitoba, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Manitoba Federation of Labour Health and Safety conference in April. They wanted to know about sustainable develop- ment and what IWA-CANADA is doing about it. Here are some of the things that I said: ... Sustainable Development: what do these two words mean? Are they meaningless rhetoric or a blueprint for planetary survival? It depends on who uses them. If industry uses them in order to say that our behaviour doesn’t have to change — then the words are simply rhetoric. If they are used by special interest groups to insist that all industrial activity must stop — them they are dangerous words that will create much hardship for working people and their families and the environment will eventually suffer. SUSTAINABLE: In resource-use in the area. It was a plan that might have saved local jobs and it certainly would have mended some of the bad feelings in the community. The Ontario govern- Recent land use decisions have not been based on environmental or worker concerns order for any activity, sustainable it must be politically, socially and ecologically sustainable. DEVELOPMENT: We must talk about ‘appro- priate development’. In ment jumped in at the eleventh hour and signed its own deal with the Native People. Unfortunately, in their autocratic way, the government chose to ignore all the good work that had been done by the other stakehold- ers. We are now trying to ensure that we have a large chunk of the representation on the Steward- ship committee. This committee will oversee the development of the Temegami region and will be comprised of fifty percent Tema-Augama- Anishnabai and fifty percent Ontario government. representatives. ALBERTA AND MANITOBA ... It looks like the governments of Manitoba and Alberta are having a hard time understanding the meaning of public participation. In Manitoba, where a suc- cessful public participation process took place to decide on the Repap conversion process, and where that process established that it was all right for the mill conversion to go ahead, the government wants to start all over again. In Alberta, where the public participation pro- cess produced a report against the Alberta-Pacific mill proposal, the government is looking for other consultants to produce a different report! I guess this tells us that we need a clearly defined process order for it to be appro- priate it must be compatible with the ecosystems in which it takes place and it must suit the culture within which it takes place. The combination of sustainable with develop- ment means development projects which are appropriate to the ecosystem in which they take place, which are acceptable to those people who will be affected by them and which have been agreed upon via a participatory democratic process. THE BASIC PRINCIPLE that flows from this definition is that the environment and the econ- omy must be given equal consideration in decision- making. If we do not ensure that people's basic needs are protetted and that meaningful work with decent lifestyles are assured, the environ- ment will not be protected. On the other hand, if we do not ensure environmental protection, our jobs will disappear, our health will seriously dete- Tiorate, our social structures will disintegrate and many many more of us will end up on bread lines. Claire Dansereau is IWA-CANADAs Forest and Environment Planner. policy or process to be } 4/LUMBERWORKER/MAY, 1990