The final demise of Interfor's Squamish Lumber Division sawmill ended "not with a bang, but a whimper" this week.
Had 185 high-paying forest industry jobs disappeared overnight - as happened during the last shutdown of the mill in 1998 - there would have been a massive reaction.
But six years later -the last year of it with the mill completely shut down again - there are few workers left to raise the roof, and the community that five years ago feared its own demise with that of the mill has discovered that it can, in fact, survive.
Coun. Corinne Lonsdale is critical both of the council she sits on and Squamish's Economic Development Officer for not doing more to attract new industry and keep existing industry.
No one can doubt Lonsdale's passion and commitment to this community - but we have to ask if there was honestly anything that council or the EDO could have done in this instance to stop the closure of this mill.
If there's anywhere that this could have been stopped, it was Victoria - years ago. The lack of enforcement of appurtenancy in Tree Farm Licences - the clause that required companies to process at least a portion of the trees they harvested in the area from which they were taken - allowed the initial shutdown of 1998-99 to occur, then to drag on for more than a year.
If the then-NDP government had put its foot down and made it crystal clear to Interfor that shutting down the mill came at the price of its Tree Farm Licence, the company would not have learned just how far it could go.
The complete removal of appurtenancy by the B.C. Liberals was the final nail in the coffin. With no means of enforcement left, mills like Squamish Lumber were left twisting in the wind.
There are other factors, like the softwood lumber dispute as laid out by John French in his column on this page. But Interfor cannot cry poverty as a reason for shutting down a mill at the same time as it invests $25 million in another mill and many more millions in mills in Washington State.
It's fitting that, as a major employer of nearly 50 years in this town finally fades away, that the provincial government and our local MLA - who found out about the closure from The Chief, by the way - had nothing whatsoever to say.
Their lack of response is a more honest indication of their level of interest better than any platitudes they might spout.
