Tolko operations in British Columbia will be taking a two-week downtime this holiday season.
Tolko says that it is a result of low prices and high log costs in the province.
“It’s always tough to have downtime,” says First Vice President of United Steelworkers Local 1-2017, Paul French.
“Hopefully it’s only the two weeks. They will be doing some shipping, and my understanding is they’ll still have some logging going on. Hopefully going into the New Year everything will get back as close as we can to normal.”
Tolko Vice President of Solid Wood, Troy Connolly says the downtime will reduce output by approximately 21 million board feet of lumber production and 10 million square feet of panel production.
“We’ll be meeting with the company as I don’t know if it’s known but they’re on workshare right now at Soda Creek, so we need to find out about the EI impacts on that because some people may wish to take it as holidays and then some people is there an opportunity to get an EI claim activated because if it goes further down the road,” French says.
“They did take layoffs earlier in the year, so people have to be prepared that it could be getting worse.”
The downtime is expected to be from December 21 to January 6.
– with files from Rebecca Dyok, My Cariboo Now