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VICTORIA — Cabinet minister Claire Trevena returned from the capital to her riding this week and walked into a buzz saw of anger over NDP neglect of the troubled forest industry.

It happened Tuesday in Campbell River in the North Island constituency Trevena has represented since 2005.

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She sat down with logging contractors, small operators and others. They described being pushed to the brink financially along with their workers by the combination of a months-long strike and too-high stumpage charges on harvested timber.

Paycheques gone. Loans and mortgages in arrears. Vehicles and equipment being repossessed. Creditors and bankers circling in the darkness.

They wanted to know why the NDP government was doing nothing for them. Where had Trevena been all these months while things were spinning out of control? What would she do for them now?

Her answers were anything but reassuring to a community needing a lifeline.

She had been in Victoria, doing her job as minister of transportation and infrastructure. Those duties precluded her from spending as much time in the riding as she liked.

But now she was there to listen. She wasn’t going to pretend that she had short-term fixes up her sleeve. She would take their views back to her colleagues at the cabinet table and see what could be done.

She was greeted with a combination of dismay and disbelief. Was that really the best she could do — listen and report back to the cabinet?

Did the government have no plan, after all these months, to help them? Where was the premier in all this? The forest minister? The labour minister? There was understandable frustration in the room — and at one point overuse of the F-word.

But what struck me most was the sense of disappointment, that a self-styled government of working people had nothing to offer to a community with deep roots in a forest industry that was dying on its feet.

It’s all there on a video posted this week on YouTube, documenting some 30 minutes of the exchange. You can hear the laments from a community pushed to the brink.