20° fembec appears to be an up-front and

Local Union rallys to save mill town

KAPUSKASING, ONTARIO —
Along with four other union locals,
concerned community members and
the Ontario government, IWA - CAN-
ADA has been working to stop Spruce
Falls’ Power and Paper company from
laying off 1,200 workers here.

Since early this year the company
has said that it will shutdown 3 of 4
newsprint machines here if it can’t get
rid of a power plant that it owns. That
porential pruulonnevonld devastate

is community of 11,000 people,
825km north of atorentat nee

For over 200 IWA -CANADA mem-
bers the paper machine closures would
mean definite job losses.

Union members have been without
a contract since August of 1990, and
the company won’t move one inch
until it divests its assets in the pulp
and paper mill and power dam.

Spruce Falls is 50.5% owned by
Kimberley-Clark Corp., a U.S. multi-
national, and 49.5% owned by the
New York Times Co. For over 60 years
the operation has produced profits for
the two shareholders, and now their
getting out because the mill needs
modernizing and investments to make
it environmentally acceptable.

“Tf we didn’t decide to act on this
matter, Spruce Falls would have
downsized by now and our members
would be jobless,” says Norman
Rivard, president of IWA-CANADA
Local 1-2995.

At press time, Tembec Inc. is show-
ing interest in getting into a partner-
ship deal with union workers and
community members who are trying
to save the town.

In addition, Ontario premier Bob
Rae is negotiating with Kimberley-
Clark’s chairman and chief executive
officer Darwin Smith over the compa-
ny’s potential sale of the Smokey Falls
hydro dam to Ontario Hydro, a crown

corporation.
Spruce Falls says it will hand over

the mill to the workers and other
rivate interests if it can sell the dam
for $133.8 million.

In a 1989 agreement between the
then Liberal government and Kim-
berley-Clark, the power dam sale was
scheduled to take place once an envi-
ronmental assessment was made.

Now the company is giving the
Ontario government and the entire
town until August 15 to make a deal
for the mill and the power plant.

If the company can’t divest itself it
will only operate the one paper
machine, which is a thermomechanical
pulp system that runs on wood chips
only. The IWA - CANADA bushworkers
and mechanics would lose their jobs
in that process as logging operations
would cease completely.

Spruce Falls operates on over 2,500
square miles of timber lands which
provide an annual allowable cut of 1.2
million cubic meters of coniferous tree
species. In those limits are a potential
cut of 400,000 cubic meters of decidu-
‘ous species such as aspen and poplar.

Officials from Tembec Inc. say there
is a potential for mixing the decidu-
“ous fibre with black spruce for paper

luction.

Five union locals have formed a
coalition to bargain a first agreement
with Tembec and help get a thorough
business plan in place.

The union locals are as follows:
“EWA - CANADA Local 1-2995 with 200
members; CPU Local 89 with 800
members; CPU Local 256 (Paper-

. makers) with 150 members; IBEW
1149 with 75 members; and
beet Local 166 with 175 members.
‘All the unions are pulling in the
e direction in working with
‘Tembec and the Ontario government
* the town.
yo According to Brother Rivard,

pee

© Local 1-2995 members (I. to r.) Roger Migeault, Martin Dinnisson, and Real Papineau, are among the mechanics and shop crew
members to join IWA bushworkers in saving Kapuskasing. Along with four other union locals, the NDP provincial government, and
Tembec Inc., the IWA is trying to prevent permanent job loss in the community. Brother Dinnisson is a member of the negotiating

committee for the IWA.

straight forward employer in other
union operations and “so far, they
have demonstrated the same thing
here.”

On the IWA negotiating committee
are Brother Rivard, Martin Dinisson,
Art Proulx, Gaston Chabot, Andre
Tourigny, and George Dufresne.

“We don’t want to be overly opti-
mistic at this point, because we've
been taken on a roller coaster for some
time,” says Rivard.

As part of the business plan the
New York Times has agreed to pur-

_ chase 50 million tons of newsprint per

year, and the takeover bidders are
trying to get them to commit to pur-
chasing more newsprint.

Also, part of the tentative business
plan depends on the long-term provi-
sion of electricity power credits to
operate the mill. The proceeds from
those power credits would be used to
modernize the mill, which needs about
$300 million of work.

The pulp and paper complex also
needs about $70 million worth of envi-
ronmental control improvements to
bring it up to date with governmental
air and effluent requirements.

If all goes as hoped, the sale of the
Smokey Falls hydro dam, on the
Matagami River about 40km north of
Kapuskasing, will be completed and
Tembec, the community and union
workers will get the mill back on track
again.

Over eleven hundred workers have
edged $8 million and over $5.5 mil-
ion in pledges from the community
are earmarked for the takeover. The
Ontario government’s Minister of
Northern Development, Shelley Mar-
tel, has provided the Employee Own-
ership Group with a $313,000 grant to
help with expenses and help pay for
the study of the cost of a buyout.

One major hurdle will be to get
Ontario Hydro to take responsibility
for a 4 to 5 year environmental assess-
ment on the rebuilding of the Smokey
Falls dam. If this doesn’t happen
Kimberley-Clark will almost certamly
pull the plug on Kapuskasing. _

Problems persist in B.C.
forest practices — AG

by Phillip Legg
Assistant Research Director

The operation of government and
its impact on the forest resource has
long been a major concern of IWA
- CANADA, and for good reason. Most
of the forest resource in Canada is a
public resource managed by govern-
ment. In the western provinces, for
example, upwards of 90% of the forest
land base is owned by provincial gov-
ernments who allocate harvesting
rights to forest companies under vari-
ous license agreements.

Given the important role that a
provincial government can play in
terms of ownership, allocation and
on-going stewardship of the public
forest, any assessment of how a gov-
ernment performs in that role is of
special interest to woodworkers. Such
an assessment was recently com-
pleted by the Auditor General of Brit-
ish Columbia on the province's Minis-
try of Forests.

Unlike most reports by the Auditor
General where government spending
and waste are highlighted, this report
looked at how the objectives of legis-
lation, in this case the Ministry of
Forests Act and the Forest Act, were
being met by a government depart-
ment. Although the ministry’s man-
date covers a broad area, the Auditor
General's focus was concentrated on
assessing how the ministry monitors
forest companies to ensure that they
meet the obligations of their license
agreements when they build roads,

harvest timber and reforest areas that ~
they have logged.
Tn its overall assessment of moni- °

toring in these three areas the report

found some significant problems. By
far the most common was the lack of
well-defined objectives within the
ministry when it came to monitoring.

In the area of road building, for
example, the report concluded that
while most ministry staff believed
that their monitoring priority was the
prevention of problems, inspections
were not frequent enough to catch
problems as they occurred. Given the
immense size of the forest service
road network, about 33,000 km. in
total, and the potential threat that
sub-standard construction practices
could have on erosion, silting and
landslides, it is clear that effective
monitoring in this area has a critical
impact on the forest resource.

Similar problems were detailed in
the area of timber harvesting. Al-
though the ministry has assigned field
technicians to-monitor logging in all
areas of the province, the report found
that there was no systematic process
for directing these technicians toward
higher risk harvest activities.

In some areas, for instance, the
risks to the forest from harvesting
were tied to the physical characteris-
tics of the cutblock (eg. steep slope
vs. flat, dry ground). In other areas,
the risk was connected more to the

area (eg. Si operator with bad
track record). Inboth cases, the report
noted that the ministry had no wel
developed methods for helping techni-
these various risks.
of reforestation also
of well-defined

LUMBERWORKER/AUGUST, 1991/3