After three decades putting down roots in a city once known as the treeplanting capital of Canada, Dave Wilson is fighting for his entrepreneurial life.
The forest clearcuts that the owner of Celtic Reforestation Services Ltd. used to count on to regenerate profits now seem more like barren wasteland, slashed and burned reminders of how close his homegrown company has been pushed to the edge of financial ruin.
For more than 20 years, Celtic was part of a thriving silviculture industry that turned Prince George into a nationwide mecca for mobs of young workers of both genders, decked out in bandanas, lumberjack shirts and work boots.
The mobile armies that assembled in motel parking lots each spring in anticipation of a full summer planting trees to fill their wallets are now reduced to short-season skeleton crews trying to scratch out a living.
"I've been at this for 30 years and we're going to plant our 300 millionth seedling next spring and these last three years I've worked two or three times as hard as I worked in our busiest year, just to stay afloat, just to try to keep my people," said Wilson.
"We're really not making any money, we're just trying to stay afloat. A lot of the light at the end of the tunnel is outside of the forest industry. The silviculture part is a struggle, there's a lot less work than there was before. The prices are down, the market is down, it's pretty tough to make a living at it."
In all of B.C. there were more than 200 million seedlings planted last year, up 40 million from 2010, but Wilson said it wasn't nearly enough to put the treeplanting industry back on productive ground. It still haven't recovered from the global recession of 2008, which collapsed the U.S. housing market that drives the forest industry. In its peak years of the late 1990s and mid 2000s, Celtic planted an average 16 million to 18 million seedlings in a typical season. Over the past few years, the company's productivity has been halved to seven or eight million trees per year.
Treeplanting season has traditionally attracted university students looking for summer employment. The planting season coincided with the May-to-August summer break and the lure of good money ensured a steady supply of raw recruits and perennial planters. They could count on earning enough money to make a good year's wage in just four months to pay their way through school without student loans. Carrying a 1,000 kilograms of trees on their backs, bending 200 times every hour to plant 4,000 trees in one shift, a highballing planter could pocket $350 or $400 each day.
But now, with reforestation contracts offered by logging companies now scraping the bottom of the barrel, silvicultural companies have had no choice but to scale back the price they pay for each planted tree and fat paycheques are a lot tougher to earn. The pay rate is the same as it was 20 years ago, not even close to keeping pace with inflation.
"The planting season is so short now, the students have a hard time making enough money to go back to school," said Wilson. "There's very little summer work because in [the past] eight to 10 years we've been logging mostly [beetle-killed] pine sites. Those tend to be lower-elevation drier sites so they're all planted from the end of April to mid-June. There's virtually no work after the 20th of June.
"We just can't pay them enough and because the seasons are shorter they can't make it up by working more, so we're losing people. There's a systemic change taking place and I just don't see the forest industry coming back to its glory days."
With prices paid for planting flat or in decline, the work force has scattered. Many workers have dropped their shovels and planting bags and ditched the piecework uncertainty of the forests for guaranteed hours and high wages working in the construction, oil and gas, and mining sectors, where food and lodging is provided in the camps and is not the workers' responsibility. Planters pay an average $50 per day to work in the woods to cover food costs. They also supply their own camping and planting equipment, and pay for days-off transportation.
"The demand [on planters] is so huge," said Cezary Slugocki, owner of Erafor Forestry Ltd., a Prince George-based business for nearly 30 years. "They used to plant 800 to 1,500 trees and get paid $300. Now, they have to plant 3,000 trees to make the same money. Try to bend yourself 3,000 times a day versus 1,200 a day. They come in for a year or two and they get burnt out. Companies are physically wearing the young generation down."
The scarcity of frontline workers is not the only sign of weakening. The same problem exists in the forestry consulting industry. Five years ago, after years of decline in student enrollments, the College of New Caledonia in Prince George and BCIT in Vancouver closed their forestry programs, and that has contributed to the shortage of trained professionals.
"We're trying to get people from all over the world to work here," said Slugocki.
"There were huge changes when Canfor started changing the pricing system and started squeezing the contractors and that also had a significant impact on the consulting industry. We could not compete anymore and we could offer only very little at that time to technicians, so the population started not being attracted to the schools. Mining and oil and gas started looking more lucrative to those guys, so they turned to that, and it's the same thing with planting."
In 1999, treeplanting brought between 4,000 and 5,000 workers through Prince George. Major employers like Nechako Reforestation, which formed in the mid-1990s, and Roots Reforestation, which started in 1977, are now out of business, leaving only a handful of treeplanting companies still operating in the city.
To survive the lean times, companies like Celtic, Folklore Contracting and Spectrum Resource Group Inc., have looked elsewhere in the province and have become operationally involved in other resource industries that require the infrastructure of workcamps and a large labour force prepared to work in remote areas.
"Silviculture is a great place for training a sizable workforce and we're looking at putting those people to work in mining, oil and gas, and the support services that go with all that," said Wilson. "Those of us that are surviving silviculture, we have to have something else to do that brings a return for the company."
Celtic now employs about 225 people during the peak of the season, down from 350 in the early 2000s. Wilson estimates as much as one-third of B.C.'s forest industry workforce has moved on to other occupations.
"One thing about people who work as treeplanters is they are the best workers no matter where they go, and no matter how challenging technically the task is, they're the quickest learners and the easiest to be trained," said Wilson. "People have quite a misunderstanding of who treeplanters are. They think they are lazy, drug-smoking bums, but who they are are some of the best and brightest of our young people. They're students or people who have very specific skills or interests and in 15 or 20 years they are the ones who will be running our country. I have nothing but respect for them."
Spectrum part-owner Crawford Young says his company still derives half its income from treeplanting and brushing newly-planted forests, but with less money available in forestry they've had to diversify and have taken on more profitable contracts to clear sites for hydro lines and oil and gas rigs.
The difficulty retaining longterm employees to work in the bush limits the ability of silviculture companies to expand. There are plenty of green treeplanters but for the past two or three years there's been a scarcity of veterans to show the rookies the ropes and work as supervisors. That has become more of an issue lately because of increased competition from other resource industries.
"Young kids coming out from Vancouver or Ontario who haven't grown up on a farm don't recognize the hazards that are out there and they need a mentor," said Young. "A 25- to 28-year-old who has been in the bush working with me for eight years knows how to do the job safely and efficiently and knows how to train the young workers and keep them safe."
Lifestyle issues also factor into the equation as more longterm workers demand the stability and comforts of home life, such as Internet service and the ability to live with their families.
"It's not just wages, people want to be home at the end of the day and have a normal life and that's what we're working towards and what our [Western Silvicultural Contractors Association] is working towards," said Young. "We're trying to find ways to make it more something somebody would see a future in and want to stick around. It's about improving camp conditions, improving safety conditions, improving the flexibility of work and the longevity of work, and that's why we're diversified."
Saturday: How the mountain pine beetle infestation changed the treeplanting industry
