The Prince George
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FRIDAY, AUGUST 15,1986 50 CENTS
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Tighter laws urged after Tamil ruling
TORONTO (CP) — A strong public backlash has greeted the federal government’s decision to allow 155 Sri Lankans to stay in Canada amid conflicting evidence on whether they lied their way into this country, say several Conservative members of Parliament.
Don Blenkam, member for Mississauga South, said his constituents are outraged over the government’s decision to grant the Sri Lankans a special ministerial permit allowing them to remain in Canada — long before it was established whether they are legitimate refugees.
“The laws are too loose,” Blen-karn said, and the immigration system is “absolutely crazy.”
Legitimate applicants wait months or years to gain entry, while a block of people are allowed in right away, he said.
“And even if it is determined they are not legitimate, the appeals process can take years,” he said. “By that time, these people are settled into jobs and families.
“How can you deport them at that point?”
His comments were echoed by other Tory MPs, who cite strong complaints from constituents, particularly those frustrated at the incredible delays in bringing legitimately sponsored relatives from their native countries to Canada.
The Tories, as well as Liberal and New Democrat MPs, say the issue has revealed an urgent need for immigration reform, part of which is already in place for im-plemention this fall.
“I don’t believe anyone objects to our allowing entry into Canada those people who are legitimate refugees fleeing oppression in their homelands,” Blenkarn said. “But I sense very strong objections to allowing people in who cheat the system and break the law.”
Andrew Witer, Tory member for Parkdale-High Park, said he has
had a flood of calls on the issue “and all of them have been negative.
“It’s not racist or bigoted at all, but simply that it seems that we have two different procedures for dealing with immigration applications, and one of them is not fair because it takes so long.”
When his constituents, who have had to tolerate lengthy delays in the applications and hearing process, see people allowed immediate entry in this situation, “they feel angry and frustrated,” he said.
Many legitimate applicants can be rejected “for purely subjective reasons,” Halifax West Tory MP Howard Crosby said, while the Sri Lankans get swift entry “because of one very objective law.
“It has created a lot of confusion — and concern.”
Under the existing system, anyone claiming refugee status is eligible for an initial hearing process. If the application is rejected, the appeal process can span several years.
But under the proposed streamlined system introduced by the government last May, people who have been granted refugee status in other countries won’t even be allowed to enter Canada’s immigration process.
See also pa^e 5
.. .and in tomorrow's Citizen...
David Scott, the lawyer defending Sinclair Stevens in his conflict-of-interest trial, has gone from obscurity to a household name. He’s profiled in the Saturday Forum.
Also planned:
■ A couple which met here celebrates 50 years of marriage.
■ A skateboard wizard visits Prince George.
City gets a new bishop 3
Lead shared in golf 11
NDP's plans in tatters 36
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City, B.C.......... .........2,3 .........15
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Sawmill appeal
British Columbia Forest Products will appeal a labor board decision that allows sawmill pickets to shut down the company pulp mill in Mackenzie.
A strike against three BCFP sawmills has also shut down the company pulp mill on the same site, with 200 pulp workers honoring the picket line.
The B.C. Labor Relations Board rejected an application from the company Thursday to remove Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada pickets to allow pulp mill workers access to the site.
“The board ruled we had a legal picket line and the pulp mill workers could honor it,” said John Goes, president of PPWC, Local 18, which represents the 570 sawmill workers.
“We all depend on each other. It is an integrated mill.”
But Trevor James, manager of labor relations for BCFP, said the pulp and sawmill operations are separate and workers are represented by different unions.
“This is having a significant impact on the community and on our customers. We think it is something the board should have agreed with us on," he said.
“We will appeal it.”
He said the company hopes to have the labor board hear the appeal early next week.
Meanwhile, about 350 workers at Finlay Forest Industries in MacKenzie remain off the job in a dispute over contracting out.
Jack Higgens, first vice-presi-
coming
dent of the International Woodworkers of America, Local 1-424, said the dispute centres around a truck brought in to water the yard for dust.
He said a labor board hearing on the issue is scheduled today.
Voting on pacts reached with mills operated by Balfour Forest Products and those represented by the Council on Northern Interior Forest Employment Relations (CONIFER) continues.
Workers at Lakeland Mills, a member of CONIFER, voted 83 per cent in favor of acceptance.
Netherlands Overseas Mills in Prince George voted 79 per cent in favor of their pact, while Polar Forest Industries in Bear Lake voted 72 per cent for acceptance.
REFUGEE SMUGGLING
Dean Cooke swooshes down the Nechako River cutbanks during a c ... practice run Thursday for this Sunday’s annual Sandblast. Ski fa-
Sandblast natics have been rushing the season with a blast down the steep, warmup sandy banks for the past 15 years. Registration for the event is at 10:30 a.m. and timed, dual slalom runs begin at noon. See story
page 12. Citizen photo by Dave Milne
"I always wear my lucky hat for job interviews."
gov't losing
Freighter named, suspects confess
Low tonight: 2 High Saturday: 20
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lumber turned out, making mill efficiency easy to calculate.
“We fill out a comprehensive report.”
“I tried to refuse and was told in no uncertain terms, ‘You don’t do that in B.C.,’” Killy said.
“That’s right, that’s what I told him,” said MacPherson.
"The government gets so much information from us, they could calculate that very precisely,” said Don Gould, president of The Pas Lumber in Prince George.
Recovery allegedly averages about six board feet of lumber out of every cubic foot of wood processed at mills in this area, according to the Forest Service.
Think of a one-foot cube of wood cut into 12 one-inch slices. Half would be marketable lumber and the rest would be waste, including chips sold to pulp mills. That’s 50 per cent, or a rating of “six” out of 12.
But the one sawmill executive contacted who was willing to go on the record about lumber recovery, John Whitmer of Balfour Forest Products, says his company gets 7.4 board feet of lumber out of every cubic foot of wood processed at its Polar Forest Industries mill in Bear Lake.
The extra 1.4 board feet of lumber isn’t included in stumpage. It’s free wood.
“If you knew what the mill recovery factor was for each mill — the cubic metre volume coming across the weigh scale compared with the lumber tally on the fiat car going out of town — 1 think you’d be surprised,” said Gould.
“There’s no way, with the way the wood is handled today, it would be as high as seven.”
Just considering the ability of a sawmill to turn a pine log into lumber isn’t enough, he adaed. Waste depends on species, with decadant (rotten) balsam causing problems.
Other factors which affect recovery include how the trees are harvested, whether logs are strapped together in bundles in mill yards and problems turning rough lumber into finished, dried, lumber.
Mills which specialize in high-
Sualtiv wood have more waste lan those just pumping out two-by-fours.
HAMBURG, West Germany (CP) — Hamburg’s police chief said today a West German-owned, Honduran-registered coastal freighter he identified as the Aurigal was used by refugee-smugglers to carry 155 Sri Lankan Tamils to Canada from West Germany.
Chief Dieter Heering told a news conference that two Sri Lankans arrested in Hamburg on Thursday had admitted organizing the operation, and that the ship — earlier identified as the Aurigae — left the West German port of Brake on July 28.
Heering, leading a West German inquiry into the affair, also said police raided a brokerage bureau in Hamburg today and arrested a Turk in connection with the affair. Names of those arrested were not disclosed.
Heering disclosed that the Canadian consulate in Hamburg had received an anonymous tip July 25 that Tamils were planning to depart for Canada. Local police began investigating, which led to the arrest of the two Sri Lankans, he said.
The Tamil refugees, members of a minority in violence-torn Sri Lanka, were found drifting off Newfoundland by Canadian fishermen Monday in two open lifeboats. They had insisted after being rescued that they were never in West Germany and had set out from Madras, India.
Heering said the Tamils picked up off Newfoundland were from refugee camps in West Germany rather than from India.
He said the Tamils had paid $2,500 US each and valuables for the trip.
The 425-tonne Aurigal’s captain, a 45-year-old West German, is believed to have received $340,000 for the clandestine voyage, Heering said. The police chief did not identify the captain, who is being sought, and said he was unsure of the spelling of the ship’s name.
An earlier report had said the ship was the Aurigae. In London, Lloyd’s Shipping Intelligence spokesman Roger Lowes said the Aurigae is a 425-tonne motor vessel that left Bremen on May 28 for an unknown destination. The Rhein-Maas company in Duisburg, West Germany, operates the vessel, Lowes said.
Heering confirmed that the ship’s owners recently bought three second-hand lifeboats from a vessel named the Regina Maris, a name still legible on the lifeboats in which the Tamil refugees were found despite obvious efforts to erase it. The Regina Maris had been been sold to a West German company years by the Nova Scotia government.
Port police in Bremerhaven said earlier that the refugee-carrying ship had slipped out of the small River Weser port of Brake, some 30 kilometres northwest of Bremen, in the early hours of July 28 without proper notification and had not been sighted since.
Heering said the Tamil refugees had been brought to Drake from different parts of West Germany for the voyage to Canada.
s
An analysis by KEN BERNSOHN Staff reporter
The Forest Service may be cheating itself out of millions of dollars by using obsolete data in its complex calculations of charges for timber cutting rights — stumpage.
The Forest Service admits it’s using information on mill efficency - how much lumber can be made from each log - which was fresh back when B.C. was still booming, before the forest industry spent more than $2 billion modernizing sawmills.
Forest companies say they’re providing the information needed and the government has discussed increasing mill efficiences for years.
Here in Prince George, modernization at a single mill meant 30 per cent more lumber from every log processed. But the government isn’t taking this into account, although it’s supposed to. Companies are supposed to pay for logs based on the usual amount of boards that can be made from them.
This means the government isn’t collecting as much money as it would if the system worked.
The Forest Service hasn’t done a study of lumber recovery in more than three years, according to Ken
Baker of the valuation branch in Victoria.
Estimates are bound to be low considering the modernization which has gone on in the last three years, said Al MacPherson, deputy minister of forests.
“I know the figures are out of date, but I don’t know how far.” Even worse, the valuation branch says it hasn’t received detailed reports turned in by every forest company to another office in the same building.
According to Emil Horvath, who does the calculations, “We don’t collect information from every mill.”
“I’m astonished,” said Julius Ju-hasz, director of timber management for the Forest Service.
“Every mill tells us what they did last year, including lumber recovery factors,”
“This is for a public publication, but we never had the slightest intent to verify the information, because we don’t use it for anything.
“How can I appraise (the value of timber) unless I have reasonably reliable information on lumber recovery,” said Juhasz.
“It is a most critical factor.” George Killy, managing director of Lakeland Mills in Prince George said mills turn in detailed reports of the number and weight of logs brought to the mill yard, and of tne
An unidentified family of Tamil refugees sits in Toronto church, awaiting processing by immigration officials. Sixty one of the Sri Lankans were assigned housing in Toronto’s Tamil community.