To: Douglas McCarron - General President UBCJA
101 Constitution Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20001
May 29, 2001
Brother Douglas McCarron
We as Members and as Elected Officers of Local 527 have supported the Internationals efforts to keep this brotherhood together in the midst of a lot of turmoil, especially hard to do in the Province of British Columbia, but after reading your editorial in the last issue of the Carpenter magazine we feel we may have been wrong in our efforts.
To send our per capita to the International for the little representation that we receive is one thing but to have you use those funds for petitioning the US Government for duties on the import of Canadian Softwood Lumber is the straw that broke the camels back. We fail to see how shutting down our economy in Canada especially B.C. by imposing excessive duties on our lumber is supporting your Membership. These tariffs will virtually shut down this Province along with the 6,000 UBC Members in British Columbia to say nothing of the thousands of Members in the rest of Canada. The UBC may represent some lumber industry workers in the Pacific Northwest, but by using our common funds to support the effort to place penalties on the industry north of the 49th Parallel has made it very plain to us that you cannot be thinking of our entire Membership, and are prepared to sacrifice the livelihood of our Canadian Brothers to serve those south of the border. We took on executive positions so that We may serve our Membership and contribute what we could to the brotherhood, your actions of late are convincing us that you may serve a different membership and have a different vision of our Brotherhood!
If you can show us in any way how by using our resources and finances to help campaign for the re-imposition of import duties on our Canadian lumber will help our Carpenters, We would like to hear it, if not, We implore you to stop supporting this campaign that will without doubt adversely affect our members. In this case we can not believe that, as you put it, our focus is where it belongs, and that our members are not going to lose jobs because of this decision. Because they are.
Sincerely
Fred Brown
On behalf of the executive of
Local 527 Nanaimo B.C. Canada
