A Fine Balance: Anne Giardini
In a small meeting room in a downtown Vancouver office, Anne Giardini laughs. “It’s vertical integration!” she says.
She is talking about her careers. There are at least two. Together they represent a resumé unlike any in Canada, and quite probably unique in the world. We are sitting in the headquarters of Weyerhaeuser Canada, which Giardini joined as legal counsel in 1994. Today she is president. Since October 2008, Giardini has been in charge of Canadian operations for the international forestry giant, which has $830 million in Canadian assets, more than 2,000 employees across Canada – about 550 in B.C. – and operations that stretch from harvesting softwood lumber to the manufacture of engineered wood products and pulp.
That pulp will then become paper – clean, white sheets of it. Which is where Giardini’s second career kicks in. Her new novel, Advice for Italian Boys, hit bookstores in March. It follows her successful 2005 debut, The Sad Truth About Happiness. Giardini offers a new approach to the concept of self-publishing: she starts by harvesting the timber.
Giardini has taken the helm of Weyerhaeuser Canada at a challenging time, a fact underlined by our immediate surroundings on a floor where boxes of files marked with Post-its speak of a recent move. “We used to be on three floors,” Giardini says. “Now we’ve consolidated into one.”
The downsizing partly reflects the recent history of Weyerhaeuser itself and decisions made outside this country that shaped the future of its Canadian arm. For a while, Weyerhaeuser International, headquartered on Tacoma’s Federal Way, was rapacious. It acquired local giant Macmillan Bloedel in 1999 for US$2.3 billion in stock, followed by a massive $8.1-billion outlay for Oregon’s Willamette Industries. But it soon became apparent that Weyerhaeuser had bitten off more than it could chew. “They paid way too much for [Willamette],” says one industry observer, who asked to remain anonymous. “Weyerhaeuser got themselves into a jam.”
In 2005 the MacBlo assets, including five B.C. sawmills and millions of acres of timberland, were sold to Brookfield Asset Management Inc. The fine-paper operations were peddled to Domtar Corp. in 2007. Packaging and manufacturing operations went to International Paper Co. in 2008. Sixteen Canadian building materials distribution outlets were sold off in 2007, followed by Canadian mill closings in 2008 and the sale of timber rights to West Fraser Timber Co. Ltd. “This cycle has been brutal on Canadian forest products firms,” says George Weyerhaeuser Jr., president of Weyerhaeuser Canada from 1993 to 1998 and great-great-grandson of company founder Frederick Weyerhaeuser. “Given the reality of today’s marketplace, any forest products acquisition in the previous decade looks ill-advised.”
Today the company that once employed thousands of unionized workers in this province is left with only a single sawmill in Princeton employing 220 people and an engineered-wood facility in Vancouver. “Weyerhaeuser Canada is a shell of its former self,” says Kevin Mason of Equity Research Associates.
By the time Giardini took the helm last October, U.S. housing starts had dropped 60 per cent from their 2006 peak. Lumber prices had plummeted 40 per cent. Demand for pulp and newsprint also saw significant declines. All the doom and gloom makes the writer’s life seem infinitely more appealing – and yet, Giardini remains optimistic. “We’re ready for the upturn when it comes,” she says. “The Softwood Lumber Agreement [with the U.S.] forced us to be efficient – no subsidies, no help. The Canadian industry got itself in shape. We also benefited from the environmental movement. We’ve become stronger and more resilient as a result of embracing environmental concepts – more recycling, less waste. Remember those beehive burners that used to dispose of wood byproducts? Terrible things. Now engineered wood products make better use of the tree. Chips make pulp, and waste generates heat. We’re a very green industry.”
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