PLYing The Trades at Canoe Forest Products
Nine Grade 10 students from JL Jackson Secondary got an inside look at one of Salmon Arm’s largest employers in operation.
SD 83’s Careers Department, the Council of Forest Industry and Canoe Forest Products sponsored the tour of the plywood plant highlighting the different careers that take place inside and outside of the facility. This is the second time in three years the parties teamed up for the tour. The plant currently employs around 230 staff the mill 24 hours a day, five days a week. The other two days are used as a form of shut down for tradespeople to work on machines to get them ready for the next week’s production run.
Canoe Forest Products Mill Manager Andy Anderson says the mill creates a quarter-million cubic meters of plywood every year, enough to build 11-thousand homes. Despite being regarded as a smaller plywood mill, Canoe creates seven percent of Canada’s plywood annually to which 95 percent of the plywood is sold in Canada.
Students learned that besides the operation staff and management at the facility, there are nearly thirty tradespeople employed full time. They include Heavy Duty Mechanics, Millwrights who have a welding red seal and Electricians. They also have three programmers on staff tasked to maintain the numerous robots that do some repetitive work at the plant. The Grade 10’s learned from Canoe Human Resources Leader Angie Houston that the starting wage for the plant’s clean-up crew is $34.03/hour with trades people starting at nealy $49/hour. Students can start applying for jobs at the mill as soon as they reach 18 years of age.
Anderson says his parent company, Gorman Brothers Lumber, plants over 3.5 million trees a year, well over the number of trees harvested by its five mills in BC. To put that into perspective, Canoe harvests the equivalent 250-thousand tree a year to make its plywood.
If you have any great ideas of potential career tours for our students, don’t hesitate to contact George Richard at grichard@sd83.bc.ca or phone or text 778-824-1188.