This morning employees at Eurocan Paper Mill in Kitimat were all givne a letter stating (among other things) that Eurocan’s owners West Fraser have decided that the Kitimat mill is “Not financially viable” and will be closing all operations Jan 31 2010,.
Later this morning a major component in the powerhous broke down ,unkknown if Eurocan will spend the money to fix problem
As someone who grew up in Kitimat and has friends and parents of friends who work there, this is going to be a huge blow to a community that had the highest population decline in the country as of the last census. As well, Eurocan picked up a very large chunk of the municipal tax bill and that will be very hard to recoup.
But this is also going to have major ripples throughout the region as a whole given that those 535 jobs were all high-paying union jobs. Should be interesting to see how this unfolds in the coming days, weeks and months, but more bad news for the Northwest.
People should have seen this coming. How many mills are left? not many. Once we stopped processing logs here and started exporting raw logs all of the employees should have taken any training opportunities available to them.
It sucks for the families and its really shitty timing but it was completely foreseeable.
well im not religious but i agree with jesus , not like they arent closing them elsewhere
Oh god help kitimat, the city of Prince Rupert wants to offer advice.
Relax, it could be good advice. They could say heres everything we did… do not do that.
That’s basically what I would say: do the exact opposite of whatever the Rupert council did. Especially the bit about allowing the taxes to go unpaid.
Seems like a lot of people in the Terrace/Kitimat region were dead set against the LNG project that is being proposed for Kitimat. Imagine there is going to be a change of attitude for several people.
While I agree that letting companies get away without paying taxes isn’t particularly good for the long term health of a community, have to wonder if the recent assessment debate in Kitimat and subsequent legal rulings across BC didn’t contribute to the Eurocan decision.
bclocalnews.com/bc_north/nor … 82222.html
A most telling quote from the above story link is:
After paying its annual taxes in full, Eurocan announced in July it was commencing legal proceedings against the District of Kitimat “in order to preserve our right to formally challenge the municipal tax increase that we believe is unreasonable.â€