The man who tried and failed to save the New Skeena Pulp Mill in Prince Rupert from closing, Dan Veniez, made national headlines recently after he sued a rival election candidate for libel.
Veniez, who is running for the Liberal Party, is suing his Conservative opponent, John Westin, for reposting a YouTube video to his Facebook page that claimed Veniez took money from the pension fund during the mill’s collapse, and that he was planning to sell Ridley Terminals to a company he had an interest in.
Westin didn’t create the video, but by posting on his Facebook wall, Veniez contends that his opponent committed libel and violated the Elections Act by adopting the video’s message.
According to Prince Rupert and National representatives of the union, the Pulp, Paper and Woodworker’s of Canada, those who lost their jobs when the mill closed did get all of their entitled pension funds so the idea that Veniez stole any of it is completely untrue according to union vice-president, Frank Robertson.
“The pension plan was actually one of the first things to be made whole (during negotiations) and to this day all the funds from up there are still part of the pulp-paper industry pension plan, so that is totally false,” says Robertson.
On top of that, since Ridley Terminals is a Crown Corporation, it would not have been within Veniez’s power to sell it.
The video that made the claims was originally posted by a still unknown person using the username, Dale5775, but has since been removed from YouTube. According to documents submitted to the BC Supreme Court by Veniez’s lawyers, the video is “an attempt by the defendants (Westin and Dale5775) to damage the character and question the conduct of the plaintiff (Veniez) to affect the result of a federal election by making false allegations”.
Veniez remains an infamous figure in Prince Rupert because of his failure to prevent the New Skeena pulp mill from closing in 2004. Many in the city hold Veniez responsible for the mill’s closure. During the two years that Veniez was in charge of the mill he had not been a quiet public figure, he was known to write letters to the editor, hold public meetings and make public promises and assurances that he ultimately was not able to keep.
According to City’s mayor at the time, Herb Pond, this is one of the reasons why public sentiment towards Veniez can be so hostile.
“In the process of being a believer in his own project, he made a lot of statements and promises like ‘we’re opening in a few weeks, we’ll be open by the end of the month,’ and I think he believed those things. But the end result of that was that over a long period of time people made decisions that really hurt them. I know personally employees who stuck around rather than finding new work because they believed that it was going to open any week,” says Pond.
Pond says the way some people vilify Dan Veniez is unfair, and that he had tried his best to save a business that was in terrible financial straits long before he took it over from the provincial government. Veniez was just not able to bring together the money needed to save the mill while the entire forestry industry was having problems.
“It was not surprising that while every major pulp mill was being challenged and considering closing, and many were closing...That it was hard for Mr. Veniez to find people who wanted to put hundreds of millions at risk,” says Pond.
For his part, Veniez has blamed the municipalities for scaring off investors by demanding back-taxes owed to them from the mill, something Pond believes did not ultimately make a difference on the mill’s fate.
“What the Terrace, Prince Rupert, Hazelton and Port Edward were most concerned with was ‘pay me your taxes. Forget about jobs, forget about survival,” Veniez told the Vancouver Sun in 2004.
The Prince Rupert Northern View called Dan Veniez’s campaign team to get an interview, but did not receive a response.