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Admittedly, Wilkinson wasn’t premier when the Liberals made a mess of the forest sector but the approach he demands that Premier John Horgan take to solve the current crisis is contradictory, hypocritical and stale. It suggests that the Opposition leader wouldn’t offer forest-dependent communities and workers any respite from the previous Liberal administration’s disastrous forest policies.

Wilkinson’s letter demands that Horgan, alone, solve the softwood lumber dispute — something Wilkinson ought to know is not possible — while simultaneously demanding that the provincial government politically interfere with B.C.’s stumpage system, which the Liberals created, and single out the forest sector for a break on the carbon tax that the Liberals imposed.

If the provincial government reduces stumpage and the carbon tax for the forest sector, it would only prove to the Americans that we can and do subsidize our industry to make it more competitive, negating our ability to resolve the softwood lumber dispute. That’s why the Liberals never gave the forest industry relief from the carbon tax or reduced stumpage in weak markets, and why Wilkinson’s demands are both hypocritical and contradictory.

More telling, the other demands Wilkinson makes in his letter are not innovative, suggesting he has no idea how to address the crisis in the forest sector. The sum of his demands imply that all the province needs to do is get the sector over the current market downturn and all will be well, proving he doesn’t comprehend or want to admit that we’ve run out of commercially available timber and that a significant number of sawmills must be shut down permanently in order to avoid overharvesting our forests.