Very sad day for a lot of former employees of the Weyerhaeuser Sawmill. I attended a "Grand Closing Ceremony". I was there to support the employees who have lost their jobs. I was not there to bash the current provincial government and actually felt truly uncomfortable when they air cannoned a picture of Kevin Krueger.
Our partisan political system is sometimes a very strange place for me to be.
I really want to stand in solidarity with workers who are going through a job loss. I hope these folks are supported to transition into comparable paying, satisfying jobs.
Why would you feel bad? Didn't you say it would be a good time for Domtar to close? The unemployed mill workers could sit around with the city workers who's jobs you have outsourced to India and roast hotdogs from the food bank over a nice campfire. That might be fun but you banned that too.
Posted by: Jerry | May 13, 2008 at 11:34 AM
Jerry, I think we have been over this, but once again, I did not say that this would be a good time for Domtar to close. I did say that mill closures in good economic times are better than mill closures in bad economic times. But, losing jobs are not easy anytime, especially for those who lose them.
I do believe that, in this day and age, no job is guaranteed and safe. Look at the tags on your clothes, they probably come from jobs that were once in North America, and are now in China.
I believe in global fair trade. I think the jobs we will have in Kamloops now and in the future should be leading edge jobs in which we have a competitive advantage.
Instead of some relatively repetitive, low knowledge job here, why not retrain people in Kamloops to do more high paying, more knowledge intensive stuff. And allow other countries to get a leg up by doing the stuff we are moving out of?
Posted by: Arjun Singh | May 13, 2008 at 04:01 PM
http://www.yourkamloops.com/2007/07/why-i-voted-aga.html
Check this link out Arjun, this is the post where you say that now or in the near future would be a good time for domtar specifically to close. Just because you struck those words out does not mean you didn't say them.
I agree with you that Domtar is a terrible burden for this community to have to bear. The city seems to be more concerned with the financial health of a very small minority in Kamloops and a large company that operates out of the USA than they are about the physical health of the majority of Kamloops residents. But that's what happens when they have you by the money bags.
It's a sad state of affairs when the municipal, provincial and federal governments couldn't care less about our community but it has been that way here for as long as I can remember, Kamloops seems to be the one city that gets the least respect and for decades we have seen development quietly being redirected to other communities. But that is also a legacy of the pulp mill being here, nobody wants to invest here and nobody wants to move here because of the smoke stack and the unhealthy air that smells terribly most of the year.
That's okay though, because as soon as the pulp mill becomes unprofitable in the next few years Domtar is going to give us the finger and they're going to split anyway, and the city of Kamloops will be stuck with a shut down pulp mill and the costs of both the environmental clean-up and the lasting physical effects of generations of Kamloops residents breathing in the sulphur dioxide and whatever else has been spewing from there for these past few decades.
Posted by: Guy N. Cognito | May 13, 2008 at 05:56 PM