John Mcinnis opened a building supply business in downtown Prince George in 1920. His lumber yard covered an area of two square blocks. John was a founding member of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, now the New Democratic Party.
He won in the provincial election of 1945 and served until 1949. During this time in 1948, he addressed Canada's unfavorable balance of trade with the United States and called for a stop to the practice of exporting logs.
During my early 20s, I worked for Stolberg Mill Construction where we built sawmills and planner mills throughout B.C. and Alberta. Back then, large-scale portable sawmills were engineered and fabricatedto get closer to the wood supply, saving enormous transportation costs.Like today's fashions, they were used and then put out to the back 40 to rust up. It's a little late for them now, but for Dunkley Lumber and Carrier Lumber, they're experts at building portable sawmills.
One of many reasons they are able to get away with exporting logs is that they harvest the logs from remote areas and in this way they are able to operate under the silence of the remote back country of B.C. These portable sawmills can get to where they're falling these huge diameter trees that are trucked to Stewart then loaded onto specially designed container ships for exporting.
These barges are loaded weekly with 1,000 truck loads of logs. That's 200 logging trucks loads a day, five days a week.With factoring in a two-week break at Christmas, that amounts to 50,000-plus truck loads each year exported from Stewart and thenbound for American and Asian sawmills.This figure is less than half the yearly export of logs at a 125,000 truck loads exported annually.Cross boarder shoppers to the U.S. are lining up behind logs heading south as well.
Miles Thomas
Prince George
