The streets were empty, dark and blanketed in a crisp dusting of snow as I walked out of the District of Houston’s town hall late last month.
The cold snapped against my face.
Minutes before, I was hunkered down in chambers with town council and staff where we discussed a future with one less sawmill.
It’s not an easy conversation to have – Houston has been a two-sawmill town for as long as anyone can remember.
Although it’s located near the western edge of the pine beetle infestation, Houston has not been able to evade the scourge of the Interior pine.
When West Fraser’s decision to shutter Houston Forest Products made headlines in the Lower Mainland last October, it reverberated through the north like shrapnel, ripping holes in the region’s push for an economic boom.
The closure means an end to 225 direct jobs in a town of 3,100 people, and up to another 800 loggers and truckers will be affected in the bush.
However, there won’t be just one mill closure in the region, but two: Canfor will close its mill in Quesnel, affecting 209 direct employees.
Hundreds of jobs hewn in this latest ebb of our timber industry, and in their wake the storytellers eulogized them with three words: mountain pine beetle.
My co-workers and I are part of an armada of public employees, consultants, union and industry support that has run up alongside the town in recent months and offered additional oars to help steer the local economy away from dangerous shoals.
Nearly every town or city in the north has felt the impact of a downturn at least once.
The north is often chided for its company towns, as though the Lower Mainland were somehow impervious to the rise and fall of corporations.
Yet one needn’t look further than housing bubbles, the exodus of video game companies and Hollywood North’s schizophrenic love affair with the Terminal City to see that every industry rides the wave of boom and bust.
In this regard, the only difference between the Lower Mainland and the rest of the province is that the big city doesn’t remember the jobs it has lost.
No sooner in Vancouver does a tech company turn off the lights and shut its doors than a new venture has signed a lease agreement for the same spot, and the workers who previously filled that space vanish into a crowd of millions.
Yet here, in the north, the spectre of miners, loggers, gas drillers and railway men never really dissipates.
The ghostly edifice of their workplaces remain, these great cyclopean structures of iron and timber – mansions of industry – that have become hollow and rusted mementos for jobs that have moved on.
The north’s memory is long, chiselled into rock and sawed into spruce, pine and fir.
And so it is that each time industry calls it quits – each time the landscape is stripped of industry and left with vast and vacant concrete pads – the call for response from the community grows greater.
By late January, of Houston Forest Products’ 225 employees, more than half will relocate, retire or retrain for other jobs.
The province’s transition team has been working on the ground in Houston since October.
Northwest Community College has increased its hours of operation to ensure the campus is open to shift workers looking for information about training and education.
The town, unions, service organizations and non-profits are communicating and planning for a future with one less sawmill.
And the loggers and truckers in the bush are securing new contracts to serve a burgeoning energy sector.
Change is coming to Houston – and Quesnel – as it has to dozens of towns throughout our province’s history.
This change will not be painless – the unskilled workers will feel it and the local businesses will too.
But change also means opportunity.
Three hundred kilometres west of Houston, a resurrection is underway.
The lights have been switched on in the old mansions of industry as Kitimat’s long-shuttered Eurocan and Methanex sites hum with the promise of liquefied natural gas.
Not so many years ago, we lamented job loss at those facilities, and now the storytellers print their names alongside the words “economic boom.”
B.C.’s Highway 16 corridor, which stretches from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast, is the pathway to that boom – and Houston is halfway there.
The jobs that will be lost in Houston and Quesnel will not be forgotten, but chiselled and sawed into the landscape as yet the latest passing of industry, and on their heels, as has happened in so many towns before, new careers will bloom.
At 10 p.m. on a weekday, Houston’s snow-laden streets are quiet and peaceful.
From afar, a train horn shatters the wintry silence, heralding the coming of several thousand tonnes of diesel-powered iron and grit.
Moments later, industry thunders into town on iron rails that, from Houston, stretch west toward the coast and leave in their wake the rusty beetle-ravaged forests of the Interior. •
Joel McKay ([email protected]) is director of communications at Northern Development Initiative Trust, a non-profit organization that stimulates economic growth throughout northern B.C. The Jack Webster award-winning journalist is also a former Business in Vancouver editor.
