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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/more-than-20-chainsaws-stolen-from-hanwell-business-1.5802539

More than 20 chainsaws stolen from Hanwell business

RCMP investigate late-night break-in on Oct. 19

CBC News· Posted: Nov 14, 2020 5:06 PM AT

RCMP are looking for information after more than 20 chainsaws were stolen from a business in Hanwell, N.B., in October. (Shutterstock / Denis Tabler)

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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/dragons-den-rexton-business-1.5801142 

Pitching small-town New Brunswick to the Dragons

Rexton entrepreneur leverages love of his hometown in six-figure deal with investors

Marie Sutherland· CBC News· Posted: Nov 14, 2020 8:00 AM AT

Sawyer Hannay's Rexton-based business got a $150,000 boost after his successful pitch to the investors on Dragons' Den. (Submitted by Sawyer Hannay)

You don't have to sell the charms of small-town New Brunswick to Sawyer Hannay.

But Hannay, who was born and raised in the tiny village of Rexton, is pretty good at selling the charms of small-town New Brunswick to the world. And on Thursday night, that earned his Rexton-based business, Country Liberty, a $150,000 vote of confidence from the business titans on Dragons' Den.

Hannay, 28, started his business — a line of casual, outdoors-inspired clothing — when he was still in university. He had already travelled extensively, having been drafted to the NHL for the Vancouver Canucks, and the more he travelled, the more he realized what a gem his hometown was.

"I grew really proud of the place I was from," he said. "I wanted to represent that pride somehow, and I knew the easiest way to do that was to wear it."

He started Country Liberty as a "passion project," ordering 12 T-shirts and putting the Country Liberty logo on them.

"All I was hoping for was to make my money back on the shirts," he said. "But it just took off from there."

Sawyer Hannay's Rexton-based business got a $150,000 boost after his successful pitch to the investors on Dragons' Den. (Submitted by Sawyer Hannay)

You don't have to sell the charms of small-town New Brunswick to Sawyer Hannay.

But Hannay, who was born and raised in the tiny village of Rexton, is pretty good at selling the charms of small-town New Brunswick to the world. And on Thursday night, that earned his Rexton-based business, Country Liberty, a $150,000 vote of confidence from the business titans on Dragons' Den.

Hannay, 28, started his business — a line of casual, outdoors-inspired clothing — when he was still in university. He had already travelled extensively, having been drafted to the NHL for the Vancouver Canucks, and the more he travelled, the more he realized what a gem his hometown was.

"I grew really proud of the place I was from," he said. "I wanted to represent that pride somehow, and I knew the easiest way to do that was to wear it."

He started Country Liberty as a "passion project," ordering 12 T-shirts and putting the Country Liberty logo on them.

"All I was hoping for was to make my money back on the shirts," he said. "But it just took off from there."

Sawyer Hannay pitches his Country Liberty business on Dragons' Den. (Submitted by Sawyer Hannay)

Rexton a key ingredient to his success

The Country Liberty brand has since grown to include a line of wine made by a local winery and rustic Liberty Village rental cabins on the Richibucto River, all of it promoted on social media sites that lean heavily on New Brunswick's natural beauty as a backdrop for almost every photo.

It's all part of the expanding lifestyle experience Hannay is pitching, and Rexton, with its sprawling, unspoiled vistas, is a key ingredient to its success.

"People love the vastness and the outdoorsy nature of it," he said. "It's what I grew up with, we grew up barefoot and running wild on tons of land, with beaches and a river nearby … and I know now how fortunate we were."

 

Sometimes Hannay's photo promotions just feature New Brunswick scenes, such as this one of Cap-Pele, captioned: New Brunswick, Canada. Our home and inspiration to represent rural Canadians right accross this wonderful country. Isn’t she beautiful! (Submitted by Sawyer Hannay)

Hannay has been steadily growing the company's market, leveraging social media and websites and strategic collaborations with big-name brands (a recent Coors ad features a group of young adults wearing Country Liberty T-shirts) and says with tools like this, running a business from a village on the outer reaches of the country is completely doable.

There are some cons — operating from a rural location means higher delivery costs, for example  — but basically, he said, "as long  as I have my phone and my laptop, I can run the business from anywhere."

But extra investment funding never hurts.

Earlier this year, he made the trek to Saint John to try for the regional qualifying pitch for Dragons' Den and made the cut.

New Brunswick scenes, such as this covered bridge in Richibucto, feature prominently in Country Liberty's social media campaigns. (Submitted by Sawyer Hannay)

N.B. shoutouts on Dragons' Den

On Thursday, the episode featuring Hannay aired. Wearing one of his own lumberjack-plaid jackets, he sold his rural brand on a Toronto-based film production set, and there were New Brunswick shoutouts aplenty.

"I told them New Brunswick was my inspiration," Hannay said.

Not all the Dragons were on board with his pitch. Some thought it was "too distracted," that he should narrow the scope and just focus on clothes.

But Arlene Dickinson, an eight-season Dragons' veteran and one of Canada's leading entrepreneurs, leaned in.

At first, she said, she too thought it was "too distracted," with clothes, blankets, rental cabins, wines.

"And then I started thinking about small-town New Brunswick," Dickinson said. "And the fact that you said most of your customers are existing customers and repeat customers. I think the community you're building and the way you're building it is incredibly smart. Especially where you're doing it from."

The bottom line? Hannay got the $150,000 backing, and left the show pumping his fist in the air.

A view of the Richibucto River from a rental cabin in Hannay's Liberty Village. (Submitted by Sawyer Hannay)

Sharing accolades with his home province

On Friday, an elated Hannay said he'll meet with his team to decide how best to focus that money, but bolstering his social media reach will be a key part of it.

Representing New Brunswick will be a key part of it as well.

By early Friday afternoon, Hannay was just scratching the surface of the waves of congratulatory messages that have come in, many from New Brunswickers who watched the show and said he "made New Brunswick proud."

For Hannay, sharing the accolades with his home province is only fitting.

"I'm so proud of where I live," he said. "I've travelled so many places, and I learned that this is a very special place. And I'm thrilled to be able to get others to see that it's a special place, too." 

About the Author

Marie Sutherland

Marie Sutherland is a web writer with CBC New Brunswick based in Saint John. You can reach her at marie.sutherland@cbc.ca.

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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/health-reform-new-brunswick-consultations-shephard-march-1.5801548

Promised health-care reform consultations to begin soon, wrap up in March, says minister

Dorothy Shephard wants broad discussion on how to address chronic staffing shortages

Jacques Poitras· CBC News· Posted: Nov 14, 2020 7:00 AM AT

Health Minister Dorothy Shephard says she wants to know what communities fear so she can try to address those fears while still dealing the challenges. (Ed Hunter/CBC)

New Brunswick's health minister says she now has a framework for health reform consultations that she hopes can begin soon and wrap up by the end of March 2021.

Dorothy Shephard said some technical details still have to be worked out but she wants a broad discussion on how the province should address chronic staffing shortages in the system.

"Much of this is probably going have to be done virtually, but we want to make sure we get the biggest possible participation we can get in these COVID times," she said Friday.

This week, three mayors of communities where hospitals were going to see emergency department reductions earlier this year said they were still waiting for the consultations Premier Blaine Higgs promised in February.

The government announced the nighttime closure of six small-hospital ERs as a way of shifting scant resources to the delivery of primary care during the day to benefit more patients.

But large protests prompted Higgs to backtrack within days of the announcement.

He promised to visit the six communities and to convene a health summit in June to look at other ways of addressing the shortages.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended that plan but Shephard said she has now settled on a timeline that would see consultations unfold during the winter and wrap up by March 31.

Protests erupted outside the hospitals at the centre of the now-halted health-care reforms, including the Sussex Health Centre. (Graham Thompson/CBC)

The staffing challenge that the February plan was aimed at addressing led Horizon Health to close seven inpatient acute-care beds last month at the Hôtel-Dieu of St. Joseph hospital in Perth-Andover. It was one of the six hospitals affected by the February plan.

The Progressive Conservatives added $9.2 million to the health budget this year for recruiting doctors to rural areas and for adding nurse practitioners to clinics and emergency departments.

Shephard acknowledged that the consultations won't necessarily lead to a decision that makes everyone happy.

"We are not ever going to please everybody but my hope is that we can come up with a vision that communities will get behind because they see what it can do for their community," she said. "We don't want to leave any community behind."

The mayors of the six communities that would have seen reduced ER hours "understood that changes might have to occur," she said.

"That was the one of the reasons I said I want to know what communities fear. In understanding what those fears are, maybe we can address them along the way. That's why we can't do it in isolation."

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Methinks it ain't too hard to figure out why the devious unionized Fake Left/Fake News CBC wackos blocked so many comments as this little circus unfolded its tent in New Brunswick today N'esy Pas?

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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/new-brunswick-ndp-to-choose-interim-leader-1.5802758

New interim leader resigns shortly after New Brunswick NDP election

Nathan Davis steps down citing a family emergency; position will be vacant until another vote can be held

CBC News· Posted: Nov 15, 2020 10:43 AM AT Last Updated: 17 minutes ago

New Brunswick NDP to choose new interim leader

Party holding virtual meeting to vote on temporary replacement

 The NDP in New Brunswick is currently without a leader (Hadeel Ibrahim/CBC)

The New Brunswick NDP elected a new interim leader Sunday afternoon, but the position was vacated within an hour.

The party elected communications director Nathan Davis.

But Davis, citing a family emergency, stepped down shortly after the party's virtual meeting ended.

Mackenzie Thomason was the interim leader since March 2019.

He resigned to take over as the party's executive director, which sparked the need for another interim leader.

Thomason was surprised to hear that Davis had resigned, but said he supports his decision.

"The family emergency has put him in a different predicament, a different spot, and he is not able to go forward," he said Sunday evening.

Nathan Davis was elected as the new interim leader for New Brunswick's NDP Sunday afternoon. However, he stepped down from the role within an hour of being elected. (Gary Moore/CBC)

Davis defeated Don Paulin for the job Sunday afternoon. Paulin ran for the NDP as Don Durant in the September election.

The interim leadership position will remain vacant until the party can hold another vote.

Thomason doesn't know when that will happen, but said it could be next month.

The party has been without a permanent leader since Jennifer McKenzie stepped down after the 2018 provincial election.

Thomason led the party through the 2020 snap election, where it failed to win any seats for a fifth consecutive election. 

He planned to serve as interim leader for just four months. But he remained after the only leadership candidate was disqualified, and then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

The NDP won just 1.7 per cent of the vote, down from five per cent in 2018. It was the party's worst showing in 50 years.

 

Mackenzie Thomason was the most recent interim leader. (Gary Moore/CBC)

It did not run a full slate of candidates in the September election. Several ridings in francophone New Brunswick did not have NDP candidates.

It plans to select a permanent leader before the next scheduled provincial election.

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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/us-tariffs-crown-royalties-forestry-private-markets-woodlot-owners-marketing-boards-1.5801239

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/us-tariffs-crown-royalties-forestry-private-markets-woodlot-owners-marketing-boards-1.5801239

Woodlot owners say N.B. pricing system keeps them from cashing in on high lumber demand

Allege system hides true price for private wood

Connell Smith· CBC News· Posted: Nov 16, 2020 6:30 AM AT 

Bruce Colpitts on one of his family's woodlots in Shannon. 'Costs have not gone down,' he says. (Graham Thompson, CBC)

About 7,000 vehicles a day pass the billboard on New Brunswick Route 1 at Sussex. 

'We're buying wood!', it announces, with a link to the J.D. Irving Ltd. website and a phone number: 855-WOODLOT.

In the background stands the JDI  sawmill, with long rows of stacked logs.

Dialling that number is one of a handful of ways woodlot owners can get their timber to the province's biggest buyer.

If you sign a contract with the company, you can collect $64.25 a metric tonne for spruce studwood logs used to make two-by-fours.

It's a rate that is maddeningly low for those woodlot owners who are selling logs. And it hasn't budged despite booming lumber sales in North America this year.

These private wood sellers see the price as a symptom of a broken system, where some are quietly paid more for their logs, and an abundance of trees available to mills from Crown land prevents the majority from cashing in when times are good.

J.D. Irving Ltd. sends a message to woodlot owners from a billboard at Sussex. (Graham Thompson/CBC)

About 40 minutes to the west of Sussex, at his family farm in Shannon, one of those private growers, Bruce Colpitts, recalls some wisdom shared 20 years ago by his wife's grandfather, Lawrence McCrea. 

"He said, 'Look after the land and the land will look after you,'" said Colpitts. "Well, 20 years ago the price of studwood was about $80 a tonne. Today that exact same product purchased here is $65 a tonne.

"And I guarantee you our costs have not gone down."

Across the provincial border, Nova Scotia woodlot owners are collecting $75 to $93 a tonne for the same wood at the gates to their mills. 

Not easy to sell in Nova Scotia

Those higher prices, triggered in part by a COVID-related jump in demand for lumber, aren't being realized by New Brunswick tree growers who don't see hauling the wood to Nova Scotia as an easy remedy.

Not only are there added travel costs to reach that province's mills, but U.S. tariffs on New Brunswick's lumber make it more difficult to process that wood.

Nova Scotia is exempt from U.S. lumber tariffs, a status New Brunswick also enjoyed until May 2017, when the U.S. concluded the rising share of Crown wood being consumed in this province was  distorting the market, acting as an unfair subsidy to our mills.

A 20.8 per cent tariff was slapped on lumber originating in New Brunswick. JDI was targeted at a lower rate, 9.9 per cent.

 

Softwood logs await transport on a New Brunswick woods road. Prices for private woodlot owners are considerably lower than they were 20 years ago. (Graham Thompson, CBC)

So while the quality of Nova Scotia logs is no different than those of New Brunswick, they require a completely separate accounting system.

 "They can't run it through the mill with the Nova Scotia wood," said Neil Silliker, general manager of the South East New Brunswick Forest Products Marketing Board, whose members, overwhelmingly family woodlot owners, have the best shot at capitalizing on higher prices across the provincial border. "They've got to clean all the New Brunswick sawdust, chips, lumber out of the mill in order to run Nova Scotia wood again."

As a result mills in that province have a preference for local logs, if they're available.

Cheaper New Brunswick wood has also held down prices at those Maine mills closest to our border, making the trip there less attractive to many sellers, according to the Carlton Victoria Forest Products Marketing Board in Florenceville.

Two-tier system

But groups representing the province's woodlot owners have long claimed the biggest reason prices are being held down at home is that the largest mill owners have access to similar trees in the grandest woodlot of all, the taxpayer-owned Crown forest.

The price paid by those companies for trees taken from Crown land are based on the private market, in other words, on how much woodlot owners can fetch for their trees.

The woodlot groups claim there's a two-tier system. On one side, low prices paid to private landowners keep Crown wood prices in check. On the other, harvesting contractors, who have established relationships with the mills are being paid premium prices for logs.  And those premiums aren't being shared with the landowner and aren't being disclosed to the New Brunswick Forest Products Commission, the arm's-length panel overseeing the private wood market and keeping track of prices. 

"There's a lot of things happening that no one is tracking," said Rick Doucett, president of the New Brunswick Federation of Woodlot Owners. And so it's very difficult to know for sure what's happening out there, and what's fair and not fair."

 

U.S. trade rules mean Nova Scotia mills have to store, saw and account for New Brunswick logs separate from their own. (Nicolas Steinbach, Radio-Canada)

In her October report, Auditor General Kim Adair–MacPherson, said only 20 to 30 per cent of the approximately 200 larger harvesting contractors respond to surveys on stumpage prices sent to them by the Commission. 

There is no enforcement, even though it is required by law.

Her report recommends the province enforce the rule, or find a new way to get a more complete picture of that part of the market.

She also noted the province doesn't have a written definition for what constitutes fair market value for Crown stumpage, and that the province hasn't adjusted Crown timber rates, as required annually by law, since 2015.

Even so, to the dismay of private woodlot owners,  Adair–MacPherson concluded the system for tracking private wood sales to set Crown wood rates is 'statistically sound' and a significant improvement over methods used in the past.

At the commission, executive director Tim Fox said the study on private tree sales examines 18,000 transactions, 60 per cent of which are between contractors and woodlot owners providing an "accurate reflection" of the market overall.

 

Prices for New Brunswick logs remained largely stable despite sharp increases in lumber prices this summer. (Graham Thompson, CBC)

He said it is up to woodlot owners to ensure they are getting a good price for their trees by educating themselves about the market, something the province's woodlot marketing boards should be helping with. 

"There may be certain cases where there may be [harvesting contractors] receiving a premium from a mill and not sharing a proportion (or any) of that premium with the woodlot owner when they could," said Fox. "When, or if that is the case, those wood producers directly contribute to keeping average stumpage rates lower." 

Representatives from the majority of the province's marketing boards disagree with Adair-MacPherson's conclusion that the stumpage study, for the most part, is working.

At the Carlton Victoria Forest Products Marketing Board, Chair Andrew Clark says the Auditor General's team wasn't given the right numbers.

Is the data right?

"There's an old saying about computers, you know, garbage in, garbage out," said Clark. "We dispute entirely the fact that they can establish or pay a royalty rate based on these, on this stumpage data."

Mike Holland, the New Brunswick minister of natural resources and energy says he has confidence in the private wood prices survey. But he is on record saying there's work to be done on the province's forest management system. He's beefed up funding to allow the Forest Products Commission to add more staff to expand and speed up data gathering.

That, he said, will make the system more transparent, reassuring both international trade partners and the province's private woodlot sector.

An organization representing the province's mills says New Brunswick's private wood market is secure and stable, featuring sales between 'willing buyers and willing sellers, free from high price volatility seen elsewhere. 

In the meantime questions are being raised about the whereabouts of a Deloitte study commissioned by the province in 2018. 

Its mandate was to examine the forest products market in New Brunswick and in other comparable markets, and do an analysis of the "process and methodology" used to determine Crown wood rates.

The woodlot groups contributed to the study and have requested, without success, to see the final report.

A spokesperson for the Department of Natural Resources and Energy said the report is being reviewed and will be released in early 2021.

About the Author

Connell Smith

Reporter

Connell Smith is a reporter with CBC in Saint John. He can be reached at 632-7726 Connell.smith@cbc.ca

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