Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Good, Bad, and Ugly News

The Good: The Receiver has found a buyer for Mackenzie Pulp, a numbered Alberta company which already owns several pulp mills. They'll be in court today asking it to approve the sale, and to uphold Canfor's obligation to supply chips.
---from opinion250

The Bad (which is really another good): Terrane has reached an agreement with GoldCorp that allows them to acquire a direct joint interest in the Mt. Milligan project. While this is good in that it secures financial backing for the near $1 billion project, we're naming it 'the bad' only because of a tainted history of Mt Milligan flipping shares and selling from one company to the other over the last 20 years and never actually producing!
---this from PG Citizen

The Ugly: and this one has the potential to become REALLY UGLY! Russia seems to have come to it's senses and will be imposing a significant increase in taxes on raw log exports. This is going to drive the importing countries like China, Finland, etc to seek supply elsewhere and BC companies are already trying to make exporting logs look like a good thing.
The reasoning is going to be the "at least" pitch, at least the loggers can keep working. You know the pitch that's been used over and over to make the people of the 2nd largest resource country on the planet who should be among the world's best off, accept as little as possible.
We'll also get the pitch that only the evil commie-fascist Russians control raw log exports therefore we as good free enterprisers have no right at all to tell companies they can't tear down the forest and ship it out without creating a single job for Canadians. (Gee the same pitch the Yanks have fed us for two decades!)
--read all about it in the Vancouver Sun, with the spin how it could "Boost BC Forestry"