Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

Fort Resolution (Nov 29/99) - The recent closure of the Fort Resolution sawmill has left residents asking what went wrong.

The former mill manager, Don Walton, blames poor equipment, but primarily he said his biggest problems came from the former premier, Don Morin.

"The hardest part of this whole job was dealing with the ex-premier when he was premier," Walton said.

"While this whole conflict of interest thing was going on, I was living it," he laughed.

"There was interference right to the basic management levels -- who to hire who to not hire."

Walton said he grew frustrated with the politics of running the mill and offered his resignation on more than one occasion.

"I just said we do it right or you find a new manager ... I just wasn't going to be party to it because it was third-world politics."

"I used to be able to predict when I was going to get a call from Yellowknife," he recalled.

"If the premier's brother-in-law came in one day, I'd pretty much expect a call from the premier the next day."

He said he worked hard to make the mill a viable operation, but Morin fought him over his management decisions.

"The previous premier and his associates had a hard time fighting integrity, they weren't used to that," he laughed.

"They were trying to tell me black was white and my whole thing was trying to make this thing work -- to have something here they could be proud of."

Don Morin said the problems at the mill came from the management, not from him. He said Walton is trying to shift the blame.

"He's full of bullshit," Morin said. "His incompetence is one of the reasons the mill went down."

Morin said the mill management was overpaid and there was never any accountability placed on the managers.

"The biggest problem we had with that sawmill ever since the Development Corporation took over, was with the incompetence with the management," he said.

"We've had management problems since day one -- we had Thompson and Associates pulling down $1,500 a day there."

"Their performance is never tied to their salary," Morin continued.

"The manager down there now is making around $70,000 or $80,000 a year and he sat there and watched the door swing off the garage -- he couldn't even fix that."

The mill's equipment was out of date and of the wrong design for most of the logs milled, Morin said.

"They had something like 20 per cent waste," he said.

"The way it was set up to run was for big logs and that was fine in the old days, but nowadays, because the majority of the wood is small, you have a lot of wastage."

Morin said the Dev. Corp. should have bought suitable milling equipment from the beginning to make the mill viable, rather than make the estimated $1.2-million investment the government chose to close the mill, he said.

"Kakfwi chose to put people on welfare instead of putting them back to work," Morin said.

Mayor Euen Hunter said by the time Walton was hired by the Dev. Corp., there was little he could do.

"He came on stream when it was pretty much too late," Hunter said.

"In fact, Dan didn't even have a full summer's milling season."

He disagrees with Walton's assessment of the premier's role in the mill's failure.

"I would say to the contrary," Hunter said.

"Donny Morin got the sawmill running again in 1992, I believe. If it hadn't been for (Morin), I personally don't think the NWT Dev. Corp. would have kept putting all this money into it."

The former premier said the town will have a sawmill again. The logs are there, the trained people are there, he said.

"There will be a mill in Fort Resolution in the future -- guaranteed," Morin predicted. "Because the people themselves will do that."

"The sawmill has been a viable operation in Fort Resolution since the 1930s and there's no reason why it couldn't be viable again today."