CROFTON MILL -- ANOTHER GOVERNMENT FAILURE?

When a Mill Dies, the Damage Spreads Far Beyond the Gate

First 100 Mile House. Now Crofton.

Two more B.C. mills gone. Two more communities kicked in the gut. And right on cue, some politicians and pundits reach for the same lazy line: “Blame Trump. Blame tariffs. Blame the Americans.”

That’s not what’s actually happening here.

In 100 Mile House, West Fraser was blunt: the mill can no longer access “an adequate volume of economically viable timber.” Duties and tariffs make it worse, but they’re not the root cause. (West Fraser Timber Company)

At Crofton, Domtar’s story is almost identical: poor pricing for pulp and a lack of access to affordable fibre in B.C. That’s why 350 people on the central Island are about to lose their jobs. 

The Council of Forest Industries is saying the same thing: the crisis is being driven by B.C.’s own failure to ensure predictable, economic wood supply and a competitive regulatory environment. Tariffs hurt, yes. But they’re not the main event. 

Crofton is the perfect example of how our leadership has learned to manage optics, not outcomes.

In 2023, Ottawa and Victoria ponied up $18.8 million to “secure the future” of the mill by shifting it into new pulp products to replace single-use plastics. In 2025, B.C. threw in another $6.65 million for emissions upgrades. 

All that public money, and now the doors are closing anyway.

Meanwhile, the Municipality of North Cowichan has quietly confirmed what this really means: Crofton was their single largest taxpayer, paying roughly $5 million a year in property taxes. That revenue doesn’t disappear from the budget. It gets shifted onto homeowners and small businesses. 

So here’s the sequence, and it’s brutal:

1. The mill closes.
   350 good-paying jobs vanish, many of them held by homeowners with mortgages and kids in local schools.

2. The tax base collapses.
   The biggest industrial taxpayer is gone, so council “rebalances” the rates. Translation: the residential and small-business class quietly pick up the slack.

3. The local economy takes a body blow.
   Fewer paycheques means fewer meals out, fewer repairs at the local garage, fewer activities for kids. The hole isn’t just in the tax roll – it’s in the whole main street.

4. The human fallout shows up in hospitals, not spreadsheets.
   When you take stable, identity-forming jobs away from mid-career workers, some of them will cope with the loss by reaching for a bottle, a pill, or a pipe. On an Island already drowning in toxic drug deaths, that’s not an abstract risk – it’s adding fuel to a fire we can’t control.

That’s the four-whammy of a mill closure: taxes up, jobs gone, communities hollowed out, and a quiet increase in despair and addiction that shows up months later as another funeral.

And through it all, our senior governments keep pretending this is mostly about Trump and Washington.

It isn’t.

The companies are telling us, in plain English, that B.C. fibre is too expensive, too uncertain and too tangled in red tape to support the industrial base we used to rely on. The industry association is practically shouting that the province needs to fix stumpage, permits, land-use decisions and the basic economics of harvesting and milling — and needs to do it yesterday. (Vernon Matters)

Instead, we get photo-op subsidies, talking points about “just transitions,” and a tax shift onto homeowners who had no say in any of these decisions.

If our leaders won’t address the real issues — fibre, policy, and the basic competitiveness of B.C.’s forest sector — then Crofton and 100 Mile House won’t be the last communities to learn this lesson the hard way.

When a mill dies in B.C., the echo shows up on your tax bill, in your downtown, and eventually in your obituaries. That’s not Trump’s fault. That’s on us, and on the people we keep electing.