By Ashley Legassic

USW local president disappointed in planned Merritt mill shutdown

Nov 22, 2018 | 1:52 PM

MERRITT, B.C. — A shortage of lumber in the Merritt area is being blamed for a planned temporary shutdown of the Aspen Planers mill.

United Steelworkers local 1-417 president Marty Gibbons says the union has been in discussions with the company about a planned shutdown that would last at least two weeks.

“We’ve been assured that this is simply an issue due to log supply,” he says. “We recently wrote a letter to the Ministry of Forests regarding a potential log swap between Tolko and Weyerhauser operations.”

Tolko’s Merritt mill shut down around this time in 2016, and Gibbons says the log supply which used to feed the Tolko operation should stay in Merritt to help the local economy. He wants to see this instead of a potential agreement between Weyerhauser and the Ministry which could allow timber in the city to move more easily to other communities.

“So they’re trying to get an agreement to make moving that timber out of Merritt’s area easier and we oppose that,” Gibbons says. “This is precisely why we oppose that. We have a workforce that’s been regularly up and down based on timber supply. We need those logs in the City of Merritt, in the community of Merritt, to provide employment for the community of Merritt.”

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Gibbons says he’s not sure of the exact dates of the shutdown, but it would be around two weeks around the holidays.

“Well it really sucks because this site has been up and down quite a bit. There’s been a lot of issues with log supply and yeah, it’s really hurting the members. It really sucks that they’re going to be down again.”