The shutdown of the Crofton pulp mill is a bad movie that replays endlessly all over B.C., to the point of inducing deja vu.

My own case of that syndrome stretches back a long way.

I was a probationary night shift reporter in the early 1980s when Western Forest Industries announced one afternoon it was shutting down the Honeymoon Bay sawmill on Cowichan Lake. It was one of the first permanent shutdowns in the forest industry as the economic slump of that period took hold.

I caught the assignment and dashed up to the lake, interviewed a bunch of stunned workers and got back in time to file a full account. It got me through the probationary period.

Four decades later, the same story is breaking, over and over. The “sky is falling, end of an era, a giant has fallen” tone doesn’t work on this version.

The Crofton plant has been limping along for years, traded amongst different owners who tried to extract the last few dollars of value before Domtar gave up on it.

By the end, it was employing about 350 workers, a fraction of the workforce during the boom times decades ago.

“The smell of money” they used to........

© Times Colonist