MARK MACDONALD
NANAIMO – When Coun. Paul Manly tabled a zoning amendment to Bylaw 4500 that could effectively change the heavy industry zoning in Nanaimo on November 17, there was one main target:
Nanaimo Forest Products Ltd. (NFP).
NFP owns Harmac Pacific, the “little pulp mill that did”, which continues to pay around 350 full-time employee-owners handsomely while maintaining consistent profitability, and is a major Vancouver Island success story. They’ve done that thanks to an employee ownership model that sees workers share in its profits, as well as clever leadership which has made several key investments over the years to keep the operation moving forward positively, despite the forestry industry’s continued lack of support from the province.
One of NFP’s key strategic moves was purchasing the 61 hectares adjacent to Harmac, which is industrial land. While politicos and bureaucrats and real estate insiders have decried the lack of developable industrial land in Nanaimo, by far the largest piece sits right beside Harmac. Developing that will benefit NFP and its worker-shareholders, companies that want to set up business in Nanaimo with ocean access, Harmac employees and taxpayers.
Why taxpayers? Because industrial and commercial land and properties pay a much higher level of taxation than do residential homeowners. If a city is wanting to keep residential levies down as it faces the need for growth, one way is to entice more industrial and commercial operations.
Manly’s Anti-Harmac bylaw specifically targets bio-mass/cogeneration, thermal electricity generation from fossil fuels or biomass, liquefied natural gas, petroleum refineries, and anything else that might produce a whiff of emissions. Suspiciously, it outlaws incineration and garbage incineration projects. Why those specifically? Does Manly know something no one else knows?
Not to mention that Harmac uses biomass to supply most of its energy needs and they use 100% biomass to produce all of the electricity it supplies to BC Hydro – enough for about 20,000 homes in Nanaimo. It would make sense that future operations should include similar companies as fuel costs rise.
The original goal of having Harmac where it is – and Duke Point – was to move the industrial land out of town where exhaust wouldn’t impact local residents. Now Manly’s motion aims to curtail that. Bylaw 4500 gives the city an excuse to study each and every applicant for the site, and handcuffs the owners: NFP and its employee-owners.
What would the Bylaw’s restrictions leave as options for NFP’s industrial land? Flower pressing factories? Porches for whittling? Industrial land should be home to well-paying jobs. As one of my favorite writers used to say: “We need to offer our young people more of an economic future than providing coffee for kayakers”.
Despite bouquets presented at the Nanaimo city council meeting about how much “they loved Harmac”, Manly’s push is most certainly Anti-Harmac. Manly was a federal Green party Member of Parliament, and he’s never changed his colours. With allies on council, he’s still pushing the anti-business, down-with-development refrain that Green’s unite under.
Almost every major Green political initiative has proven to be economically destructive. Early on in Justin Trudeau’s government, the former Prime Minister touted Green policies and even installed radical eco-activist Stephen Guilbeault as Minister of Environment and Climate Change, as the Liberals introduced every imaginable legislation to cripple industry in the country. All of Canada has been adversely affected economically by the Trudeau/ Guilbeault and Green agenda, weakening the country to where it is no match for the economic strength of the United States and President Donald Trump’s tariff wars.
Early in Trudeau’s tenure I wrote that it appeared his main goal with his policies was to slow Canada down industrially, and with less production and output, emissions would decline. It seemed too bad to be true, yet it was confirmed at a Fraser Institute seminar I attended a few years ago. That was indeed their real goal, and they succeeded somewhat.
Clearly, this country’s own anti-resource development policies that have crippled it financially.
Manly and other anti-development types have learned the system and worked it to their advantage. While they smile and say words that seem to placate the development community like “I love Harmac”, they introduce bylaws and red tape that strangles any attempt to move forward with any project.
It’s like an NDP MLA used to share with their supporters, that the key strategy to stop most every project is: “Delay, delay, delay”. They recognize most developers do not have unlimited funds, so they string them along with study after study, committee after meeting, and more red tape, all the while running up their financing costs.
One Nanaimo business was forced to sit on land for almost eight years before they obtained the needed development and building permits to construct a building. At a financing rate of just under $30,000 per month, the money costs alone were almost $3 million.
Lest anyone forget, those extra costs are passed on to one group of people: Consumers, as the goods and services they purchase all include the cost of financing as part of the price tag.
It’s time to rip the cover off Manly’s Anti-Harmac bill and expose it for what it is: An ideologically-based, anti-development push against the 350-plus workers who invested their own money to pull Harmac out of bankruptcy in 2008 and keep them working.
NFP has been progressive in its thinking and pro-active in their movements, including purchasing the next door industrial lands, from which these same shareholders will benefit as other companies choose to set up shop there.
Jobs on that site will be good them and for the local economy. An expanded industrial tax base could be expected to keep residential taxes lower.
Let the marketplace decide, not studies and red tape with more than a hint of Green.
Mark MacDonald writes for the Business Examiner News Group.
