New Skeena Forest Products Ltd. was ordered into receivership last week, formally ending the latest attempt to revive the long-troubled northwestern B.C. pulp and lumber operation.

Chief Justice Donald Brenner of B.C. Supreme Court approved the company’s application after the last in a long line of would-be financial rescuers bailed out.

“This is indeed an unfortunate day,” said Brenner, who has presided over years of effort to salvage what was once a linchpin of the northwest B.C. economy.

“It is a day I’d hoped we would not reach.”

The company, which is headquartered in Vancouver but operates in the northwest corner of the province, had been under protection from creditors for almost a year.

There were no objections to the move and most of the court hearing was taken up with arguments over who the receiver should be.

Brenner appointed the international firm Ernst and Young rather than a new, local company made up of former employees of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which had been New Skeena’s court-appointed monitor during its stint under bankruptcy protection.

New Skeena’s principal assets, none of them currently operating, are its pulp mill in Prince Rupert, B.C., a sawmill in Terrace, B.C., and Crown forest tenures.

Company lawyer Doug Knowles said the receiver will likely try to shop around the company’s assets as a package, but if there are no takers it will be liquidated piecemeal.

The assets have been roughly valued at something more than $20 million.

New Skeena’s secured creditors, including parent company NWBC Pulp and Timber Co., are owed roughly $18 million.

But its unsecured debt totals more than $35 million, most of it in unpaid property taxes owed to the region’s municipalities. About $22 million is owed to Prince Rupert alone.

The unsecured debt also includes several million in arbitration awards given to unions for severance and unpaid vacation pay dating from the company’s earlier insolvency.

New Skeena was created in 2002 when forestry executives Dan Veniez and George Petty bought the mothballed assets of Skeena Cellulose Inc. from the B.C. government for $6 million.

The province and two creditor banks had rescued Skeena Cellulose from bankruptcy in 1997 and pumped money into updating the money-losing pulp mill. But the government failed to find a buyer and cut off its cash lifeline, triggering its second insolvency.

Petty and Veniez, who had been executives with Skeena’s former parent Repap Industries of Montreal, launched an ambitious rehabilitation program, selling assets and hammering out concessionary contracts with mill unions.

But they needed at least $55 million in additional capital to reopen New Skeena’s operations. Several potential investors or financiers looked at the operation before backing out.

Last fall, northwestern municipalities tried to seize New Skeena assets to cover years of property-tax arrears, triggering its third insolvency in six years.

Veniez said the receivership was triggered when New Skeena couldn’t reach a deal with MatlinPatterson, a New York-based equity fund specializing in distressed companies.

Skeena Cellulose was once responsible for about 10,000 direct and indirect jobs. Had New Skeena’s revival succeeded, it would have revived about 1,000 jobs in the mills and the woods.