JACONVENTIONO1

e Al Plamondon, Local 1-405

The ‘Great Bear
Rainforest’ nixed

It’s time to get rid of the words “Great Bear
Rainforest” when referring to the mid-coast
no ion of the province, said delegates. The so-
called “Great Bear Rainforest” is a term invented
by the environmentalist and has been used
repeatedly by the media as a de facto reference.

Local 1-417 delegate Marty Gibbons from
Salmon Arm said that his community got a
visit from a group of characters promoting
preservation of the mid-coast area.

“They bring a bus around, the “Great Bear
Rainforest” salute, and they have pictures of
loggers slaughtering trees, and basically it
really concerns me that this “Great Bear

Rainforest” is catching on, and it really is. The
press is referring to it,” he said.

Local 2171’s Gary Kobayashi:said his local
has been victimized by mythological and
romantic concepts that the green movement
has been able to sell worldwide.

He said working forest areas have been lost
to spotted owls, marmots and now bears.

“You know they (green groups) are good at
this type of thing and I guess we fall into the
trap of using their terminology sometime,” said
the speaker.

Al Plamondon of Local 1-405 said near Kaslo,
in the B.C. southeastern Interior, greens have
named an area the “Singing Forest.”

He said greens are trying to get a wildlife
corridor extended from Idaho, through
Washington, and up through the East and West
Kootenays. Such a plan, said Plamondon, would
wipe out thousands of jobs, including I.W.A.
forest industry jobs.

“T hate to see what’s gonna happen here in
the next while, because they have already

decimated the guys on the Coast, so now they're
just moving on to greener pastures up to the
East and West Kootenays,” he added.

° Carmen Rocco, Local 1-80

¢ Wayne Munro, Local 1-85

Heli-logging has unfair advantage

The issues of unfair stumpage breaks for heli-
Jogging and the qispprepHiats use of this method
of harvesting were brought up in two resolutions
that were unanimously approved by delegates.

The union will lobby the B.C. government to
put long-line systems on par with heli-logging
stumpage assessments and will also demand
that the province only allow heli-logging when
conventional harvesting methods make them
inaccessible by conventional means and when
environmental sensitivities make conventional
logging impossible.

Local 1-80’s Carmen Rocco told delegates that
there’s about a 65 per cent (stumpage fee) “kick-
back” in the helicopter business.

He said the use of long-lines systems is an
efficient way to log and it employs more people.

“And similar to the helicopter, we don’t have
to build too many roads to do it,” he said.

“Our costs (of harvesting) are around anywhere
from $15 to $30 per cubic meter, depending on
the type of terrain you’re in,” he said.

Brother Rocco said that most helicopter
logging operators employ a bare minimum of
people.

“The helicopters got a grapple now,” he said.
“At one time the helicopters did have quite a
few people on the side hill in Local 2171, but
they switched to grapples, and now they’ve got a
small skeleton ground crew,” he said.

He said there are five long-line machines in
his local and probably five more on the entire
coast - most of which are shut down due to the
stumpage problem.

“You know, (we’ve) been involved on
committees talking about costs all the time,” he
added. “Well, here’s a piece of equipment that
the Forest Service has deemed to be more
sensitive (to the environment), and more or less
the companies get to log for free on it.”

Serge Vaillancourt of Local 2171 said the
union has to realize “the ability that helicopters
give to companies to turn us into market loggers
is a very real threat to sustained employment
and creates problems with sawmilling and other
industries that depend on the traditional logging
methods.”

Vaillancourt said that current legislation does
not prevent logging companies from using
choppers and that “we should be supporting
helicopter logging only in areas that are totally

inaccessible by conventional methods.”

Local 2171 president Darrel Wong said there
used to be 17 long-line harvesting systems in
his local and that has been reduced to about
three.

“Theyre being replaced by helicopter logging.
Canadian AirCrane is probably one of the worst
examples of that, because they don’t even have
ground crew. All they use is grapples, and in
fact, they employ next to no one,” he said.

Wong said helicopter logging has been
expanding into short-haul settings (as close as
400 feet away from the road and landing). A
setting of 100,000 cubic meters that would take
a conventional logging crew four to six months
to log now takes a heli-logging show only four to
six weeks to harvest.

Wong said helicopter loggers can “hit the
market absolutely on target every single time

and leave the existing crews all laid off and ~_

sitting at home.”

“On the other side of it, we also have a hell of
a lot of members who work under helicopters,
and quite frankly, do a good job, and so we don’t
want to get into the argument of one I.W.A.
member against the other,” he added.

Wong said the union is trying to establish
standards that are acceptable to both heli-
logging and conventional crews.

The local president said a balance has to be
reached and that, on the Coast, the whole forest
profile has to be logged.

“It’s the only way that we’re going to be able
to get the volume that we require to be able to
keep people working,” he said.

Local 1-85’s Wayne Munro said in his division
area near Gold River heli-logging has resulted
in damage to the logs and less recovery.

In one setting a steel spar was already set up
to log an area, with one portion being taken by a
grapple yarder and another corner by a hoe
chucker (hydraulic loader). Then it was half
logged by a helicopter.

In another instance a helicopter was used to
take wood from right near the haulback of an
idled yarder that was already set up.

Munro said helicopters don’t create as many
pockets of employment as they did before.

“They’re basically now just running with a
couple of pilots and the people running the
grapples,” he said. @

e Pictured here are delegates from Kamloops, B.C. local 1-405 in the province’s southern interior.

24/LUMBERWORKER/DECEMBER, 2001