Flexible Crossroads
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Roger Hayter
Flexible Crossroads: The Restructuring of British Columbia’s Forest Economy
© UBC Press 2000 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 900 - 6 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, ON M5C 1H6. Printed in Canada on acid-free paper ISBN 0-7748-0775-X (hardcover) ISBN 0-7748-0776-8 (paperback) Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Hayter, Roger, 1947Flexible crossroads Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7748-0775-X (bound) ISBN 0-7748-0776-8 (pbk.) 1. Forests and forestry – Economic aspects – British Columbia. 2. Forest policy – British Columbia. I. Title. SD146.B7H39 2000 338.1’749’09711 C00-910103-9 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. UBC Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program, as well as the support of the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has also been published with the help of a grant from Simon Fraser University’s Publication Committee. Set in Stone by Artegraphica Design Co. Ltd. Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens Copy-editor: Maureen Nicholson Proofreader: Deborah Kerr UBC Press University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 (604) 822-5959 Fax: (604) 822-6083 E-mail:
[email protected] www.ubcpress.ubc.ca
For Bucquie
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Contents
Preface / ix Acknowledgments / xv Acronyms / xvii Part 1: Global and Historical Perspective 1 Global Industrial Transformation, Resource Peripheries, and the Canadian Model / 3 2 Life on the Geographic Margin: The Evolution of British Columbia’s Forest Economy from the 1880s to the 1970s / 35 3 Booms, Busts, and Forest Reregulation in an Age of Flexibility / 65 Part 2: The Anatomy of Change 4 MacMillan Bloedel: Corporate Restructuring and the Search for Flexible Mass Production / 107 5 Foreign Direct Investment: Help or Hindrance? / 148 6 Small Firms: Towards Flexible Specialization in BC’s Forest Economy / 185 7 Trade Patterns and Conflicts: Continentalism Challenged by the Pacific / 219 8 Employment and the Contested Shift to Flexibility / 255 9 The Diversification of Forest-Based Communities: Local Development as an Unruly Process / 288 1 0 Environmentalism and the Reregulation of British Columbia’s Forests / 321 1 1 The BC Forest-Product Innovation System and the (Frustrating) Search for a Knowledge-Based Culture / 356 1 2 The BC Forest Economy as a Local Model / 389 References / 405 Index / 421
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Preface
For two decades, perhaps longer, British Columbia’s forest economy has experienced fundamental restructuring of its competitive foundations and global role. Yet the direction of change remains uncertain and volatile, underlined by the severity of the crisis facing the forest industries i