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DDAVID BAINES: ALLEGED FRAUD TRAIL WARMS » D2
BUSINESSBCSATURDAY, MARCH 5 | 2011 | EDITOR FIONA ANDERSON 604.605.2520 | [email protected]
ONLINE
Business InsiderRead business editor Fiona Anderson’s take on what’s new and noteworthy in From the Desk of the Editor at vancouversun.com/business
INSIDE | D4
Tech ToysIs it worth lining up for a new iPad 2? For those who held off buying the original iPad, their patience will pay off.
MONDAY
Jonathan Manthorpe’s Asia-Pacific reportNobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is fighting the Bangladesh government’s effort to oust him from the leadership of his Grameen Bank.
BRIEFINGS
Gas spikes againGasoline prices in Metro Vancouver have spiked again after a brief respite earlier this week, data from GasBuddy.com showed Friday.According to the gas price tracking website, Vancouver’s average gasoline price has risen above 130 cents per litre, up from just below 126.6 cents on Wednesday and about 124.4 a week ago.Average prices were as low as 120 cents at the beginning of Febru-ary and 113 cents last September.
Full story at vancouversun.com/business
▶ NUMBERS
Corporate assets under foreign control in Canada in 2008, down from 21.6 per cent in 2007, accord-ing to the most recent data available from Statistics Canada.
▶ TOP STOCK
Eastern Platinum The most active B.C. company on the TXS Friday closed at $1.60, unchanged.
▶ BLOG WATCH
Cellphone biology Am I the only one who thinks this is creepy? You may soon be able to reach out and touch someone, in a more than virtual way, through your mobile phone. Robot-ics researchers in Japan claim they’ve developed a human-shaped mobile phone with a skin-like outer layer that enables users to feel closer to those on the other end.
From Scott Simpson’s blog. Read more at vancouversun.com/innovation
S & P 5001,321.159.82
Nikkei10,693.66166.9
Dollar1.0291 0.05
Gold1,428.6012.20
Oil104.422.51
Natural Gas3.810.03
S & P/TSX14,252.7738.05
Dow Jones12,169.8888.32
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY: 100 YEARS
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Diane Delves of Quantum Properties is developing a housing project in Abbotsford. She says she had to fi ght to reach the top in a male-dominated fi eld. Story, D3.
20.3%
BY GORDON HAMILTONVANCOUVER SUN
An early-season spike in lumber prices prompted by renewed buying from
China has caught recession-strapped forest companies short of trucks and rail cars to get logs out of the bush and their lum-ber to market, several industry sources said Friday.
“Everybody is always touting lumber sales to Asia, which is wonderful — we have mills that have re-started, mills adding a second shift and getting back closer to traditional capacity — but we lost a lot of the work-force during those down years,” said MaryAnne Arcand, of the Central Interior Loggers Asso-ciation. “They have gone to oil or gas or mining, or different things, so we have a massive shortage of trucks. It’s finally dawned on the mills that they have a problem.”
She said the resource sec-tors are “poaching” drivers and equipment operators from each other by offering better wages or working conditions.
“Everybody is poaching from everywhere, trying to get any-one they can get,” she said.
“I have loggers who have wood on the ground and they are not sure they are going to get to a mill before breakup because they can’t get a truck.
“Mackenzie alone is short 60 trucks. Conifex reopened one of the sawmills there, the pulp mill got going again and Canfor got going again. They just don’t have the capacity [in logging trucks.]”
David Livingstone, presi-dent of Lomak, a B.C. bulk car-rier company that hauls wood chips to pulp mills, said Lomak has been able to retain its driv-ers by keeping equipment up to date and ensuring that 90 per cent of the drivers get to sleep at home each night.
“It gives us an edge,” he said.Doug Routledge, forestry vice-
president at the B.C. Council of Forest Industries, said rail car shortages are a chronic prob-lem for the industry.
He confirmed there is a short-age of logging trucks and driv-ers, particularly in regions like Mackenzie, where the recession shut down nearly every mill.
Routledge said the shortages vary from region to region.
The problem is not just a shortage of drivers but of log-ging equipment as well.
Logging equipment has been idle or used very little over the past few years, Arcand said. Getting parts to bring the moth-balled machinery back into operating condition is proving to be difficult, she said.
Keta Kosman, publisher of Madison’s Lumber Reporter, said a six-per-cent spike in lumber prices this week has sharpened the focus on trans-portation issues.
Prices for 1,000 board feet of lumber broke through the $300 level to $306 for the first time in five years, with the exception of a very brief spike last spring, she said.
Railroads are sending rail cars directly from mothballs to shippers to meet the demand for lumber, largely brought on by “massive” buying from China, Madison’s reports in its March 4 issue.
“Rusty cars are arriving in some places with eight feet of snow piled on them, obviously having been sidelined for a couple of years with no main-tenance,” Zara Heartwood reports in Madison’s. Many rail cars had to be taken out of ser-vice, she said in her report.
Madison’s also reports that truckers are being offered bonuses to desert their usual routes, heading east with loads of oriented strand board, to carry lumber west to Vancouver.
“Truckers were offered bonuses of hundreds of dol-lars per load to haul dimensionlumber from central B.C. to thePort of Vancouver for trans-shipment to China.”
Truckers say that the forestindustry cut too much duringthe recession and that there is very little loyalty left.
From driving down contrac-tor rates to cutting back onroad maintenance, the log-ging sector now finds itself ill-equipped to ramp up to meet demand from China.
Contractors who were beingpinched either went out of busi-ness, or switched into other sec-tors. In Williams Lake alone, 18 logging truckers went broke or sold out in a single six-month period. Truckers say they havework elsewhere or in other sec-tors and are not interested ingoing back to an industry that broke them.
FORESTRY | China’s surging demand for lumber straining depleted B.C. forest sector
Heavy cuts during the downturn left the logging sector ill-equipped to ramp up again
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SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 2011 | BREAKING NEWS: VANCOUVERSUN.COM D3BUSINESS ||
BY DARAH HANSENVANCOUVER SUN
Diane Delves doesn’t like to work weekends any more.
At 51, the Abbotsford devel-oper and president of Quantum Properties has tried to slow the mad pace of her regular work week down to a more “manage-able” nine- or 10-hour day, six days a week.
It hasn’t been easy, especially lately. Delves is in the thick of her most ambitious, and con-troversial, project to date — a $100-million luxury condomin-ium building, which, at 26 sto-reys, will be the tallest structure between Surrey and Calgary.
That means, this weekend, as many professional men and women enjoy some down time with family and friends, Delves will be up to her elbows in work at the Mahogany project’s pre-sentation centre, helping to coordinate potential sales and keeping on top of emails.
The week ahead shows no signs of easing up, either. There’s the kickoff for the new Canuck Place in Abbotsford on Monday and a council meeting where the Mahogany is expected to receive fourth reading. There are meetings with lawyers, proj-ect managers, architects, cater-ers and contractors in advance of the project’s grand opening March 26.
As well, she’s in the midst of buying another property, has two more under construction, is working on leasing the last two spaces in an office build-ing, and has just been hired by an Abbotsford dentist to design and build a new three-storey space.
Not that she’s complain-ing. She enjoys working at full throttle.
“I have a low boredom thresh-old,” she said.
That this coming week also marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day (March 8) hasn’t been lost on Delves, despite her busy schedule.
She recognizes and is grateful for the hard-fought advances and achievements of women over the last century, particu-larly because she has also had to scrap and struggle in order to realize her full potential in a field that remains heavily male dominated.
“It’s a pretty tough job. You’ve got to be extremely dedicated,” she said of her success.
Indeed, data from Statistics Canada show that while women have made significant strides in many professions in recent years, their participation rate in a number of other fields contin-ues to lag far behind men.
According to the data, more women than ever are now working as teachers, doctors, and dentists, and in finance and business.
Less encouraging, however, are the numbers of women seeking careers in engineering, natural sciences and mathemat-ics, as well as in senior manage-ment, where participation rates hovered between 22 per cent and 30 per cent in 2009.
Meanwhile, only six per cent of women were involved in the trades, transport and construc-tion industries in 2009, up just one percentage point from 1987.
In the corporate world, the latest Catalyst census numbers measuring women’s advance-ment and leadership in Can-ada also showed room for improvement.
According to that report, released Thursday, the percent-age of women holding senior officer positions increased less than one percentage point in two years, from 16.9 per cent in 2008 to 17.7 per cent in 2010.
It also found women senior officers held a disappointing 6.2 per cent of top-earner posi-tions — up less than one per-centage point from 5.6 per cent in 2008. And, in both 2008 and 2010, more than 30 per cent of companies had zero women senior officers.
The findings prompted Deb-orah Gillis, senior vice-presi-dent of membership and global operations at Catalyst, to blast Canadian businesses in a state-ment for “vastly underutilizing talented women, even though women are the engine of our economies.”
“It’s not perfect, there’s no question,” Rachel Lewis, chief operating officer of the Van-couver Whitecaps football club, agreed when reflecting on the statistics.
And yet the 36-year-old MBA graduate from the University of B.C. and mother of two sees no reason for women to be discour-aged from pursuing whatever career or professional achieve-ments they set their sights on.
All but the most backward of employers these days have woken up to the value of diver-sity, including gender diver-sity, on a team. Since joining the football club seven years ago, for instance, Lewis has seen gender representation in the office — if not yet out on the playing field — shift from a handful of women to about 50 per cent of all workers.
“Soccer is a sport that many, many women play and so we want to demonstrate to them that there is not only an oppor-tunity to play but also, if there is a passion, you can work in it,” said Lewis, who was the first person with the Whitecaps to take maternity leave following the birth of her son two years ago.
Having said that, her own advance into senior manage-ment in the traditionally all-male world of professional sports — which also included a stint with the PGA — has not
been without its difficulties.“I have definitely been con-
fused for someone’s execu-tive assistant or the secretary. I have been called ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie,’” she said of some male associates she’s met out-side the Whitecaps’ club.
“You learn to develop a bit of a thick skin in that, if you are going to enter a male-domi-nated environment and be suc-cessful, you have to move past some of the stereotypes,” she said.
Delves, too, has encountered similar reactions from men and women who meet her for the first time at various business or charity functions.
“You’ll find as a woman that you’ll go to a business gather-ing and everyone assumes that you’re the wife of someone. But,
no, actually I’m there on my own and I’m the president of the company that could prob-ably hire you a couple of times over,” she said.
“It’s a common mistake. I’ve probably done the same thing myself.”
Both women said they’ve experienced no lasting gender barriers to their success, those first impressions aside.
“If you are doing a good job in the industry, you’ll get respect,” said Delves.
For 21-year-old University of B.C. student Cathy Han, the 100th anniversary of Interna-tional Women’s Day and all the progress made by previous gen-erations of women is definitely something to celebrate.
The fourth-year business stu-dent is already well on her way
to entrepreneurial success afterbeing selected from more than1,300 undergraduates fromacross Canada to participate in The Next 36, an elite business program that aims to launch the careers of the country’smost promising students.
Han, who’s developing an innovative mobile application due to launch in August, saidshe and her friends are awaregender barriers remain in the professional world. But there is also plenty of opportunity.
“I feel very privileged,” Han said.
EQUALITY | Women advance in executive ranks, but it hasn’t always been easy
International Women’s Day on Tuesday celebrates hard-fought advances in the workplace
WARD PERRIN/PNG
University of B.C. business student Cathy Han says women her age see opportunity, not barriers in today’s business world.
Total workforce
Nursing, therapy, other health related
43%
46%48%
87%86%
87%
74%75%
76%
55%57%
57%
48%54%
54%
38%49%
51%
32%32%
30%
20%
21%22%
5%
6%
6%
21%28%
32%
43%47%
55%
61%68%
73%
52%62%
66%
Clerical andadministrative
Social sciences,religion
Teaching
Sales andservices
Artistics, literary,recreational
Doctors, dentists,other health
Business andfinance
Processing, manufacturingand utilities
SeniorManagement
Natural sciences,engineering,mathematics
Trades, transportand construction
Women's representation in different occupations, 1987-2009
1987 1999 2009
Source: Statistics Canada VANCOUVER SUN
You’ll find as a woman that you’ll go to a business gathering and everyone assumes that you’re the wife of someone. But, no, actually I’m there on my own and I’m the president of the company that could probably hire you a couple of times over.
DIANE DELVES PRESIDENT, QUANTUM PROPERTIES
RIC ERNST/PNG
SEE VIDEO WITH THIS STORY AT VANCOUVERSUN.COM/BUSINESS
