Northwood Pulp Mill employees face uncertain future

Canfor announcement strikes severe blow to Prince George economy in wake of recent pulp mill closures

Chuck LeBlanc was not surprised when Canfor announced on Tuesday, July 14 afternoon that it's closing Northwood Pulp Mill. LeBlanc has been through it all before, not long ago. He was the president of Local 9 of the Pulp Paper and Woodworkers of Canada in January 2023 when Canfor decided to shut down one of the two pulp lines at Prince George Pulp and Paper Mill, a move that resulted in the loss of nearly 300 jobs.

LeBlanc also watched the trickle-down effects of the May 2024 curtailment that shut down one of Northwood’s production lines in Prince George which came with a loss of 240 jobs. With BC’s forestry industry continuing to wither under the strain of low demand for pulp on global markets, compounded by the lack of economic fibre for sawmills that provide the chips which feed the pulp industry’s engine, it was only a matter of time before another mill closure was announced. That day came on Tuesday.

“We’ve been hearing that Canfor Pulp has been working hard to keep the mills running and we knew there was pressure on mills in our province and the modelling shows there was a couple more yet to go,” said LeBlanc, now the PPWC national rep. “But any time it’s in your community and people you know, it’s always that surprise. It’s tough for those people.”

The latest Northwood closure, which will take effect late this year, will mean between 244 unionized workers involved in production and operations will lose their positions, with dozens more managers, supervisors and engineers getting chopped, which LeBlanc says will likely push the mill job losses past 300, and it doesn’t stop there. Tradespeople, truck drivers, mechanics, suppliers, restaurants, retail outlets, machine shops, and other service industries depend on the mill and the loss of annual taxes to the city’s tax base will mean everybody in the city will ultimately be affected by the closure.

“Usually it’s two or three jobs (lost) for every pulp mill job, it’s a lot more than just 300,” said LeBlanc. “You always hope that some of them will be able to move down to (Intercontinental Pulp), but I’m not sure if we have any vacancies down there, it’s still pretty early. Our members who work at our pulp mills are highly-skilled people, whether they’re operations or trades.

In the trades, if you’ve got a ticket you’re going to work. It may not be in Prince George.” The demand for tradespeople in the province could be absorbed by job openings in the expanding mining sector or to work on upcoming oil and gas pipelines, but that will take those workers out of the city, either temporarily or permanently, and they won’t have leisure time to spend building the community.

“The sports teams, the sports leagues, the coaches, that’s what these people do,” said LeBlanc. “There isn’t a part of our community that doesn’t get touched one way or another.” To qualify for severance, Northwood employees will have to remain on the job until chip deliveries stop in November and the piles are worked through the system.

That could make for some difficult choices for workers wanting to get started lining up another job before winter hits. LeBlanc plans to speak with BC Labour Minister Jennifer Whiteside to discuss making the Bridging to Retirement Program available again to laid-off mill workers. Until it closed to new applications on Feb. 26, 2025, the provincial program paid forestry workers 55 and older up to $75,000 in retirement funding.

“There’s money out there but they haven’t announced the program yet,” said LeBlanc. “Now’s the time, we’ve got to get these programs out there to absorb some of these people. They’ve earmarked money, they just haven’t announced Bridging to Retirement.

“It’s an incentive (to retire early) and that opens up a spot and hopefully saves another job.” Fingers are pointed at the BC government for not doing enough to extend a lifeline to the forest industry but there’s a lot more to it than that, LeBlanc explained. “They’ve become really good at looking after you after your mill has closed, they’ve got a system set up there, but the reality is we’re still working off of old forest policy that hasn’t caught up to the 2020s and it shows,” said LeBlanc.

“The NDP government keeps talking about Trump tariffs but only a small part of our pulp and paper goes down into the States, a lot of it goes over to Europe and China and that’s where the real problems are.” LeBlanc said advances on technology adopted in countries such as China and their Indo-Pacific neighbours now allow mills in those countries to make high-quality products out of low-quality pulp and that’s resulted in a glut that has caused pulp price to fall on world markets. "We’ve got long, very strong fibres in our pulp, well China can take that cheap pulp from Brazil or their own plantations and through processes they’ve developed now that pulp is almost as strong as ours,” said LeBlanc.

“They need so little of our pulp now. That sustained downward pressure on prices and our costs, from shipping to the chemicals that goes into the pulp mill, are way ahead of that. They’re producing at a dollar but are only getting 80 cents for that tonne of pulp.

“Forest policy is not helping us, but the economics of the world are also against us.”