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A Way of Life Lost: The global economic downturn has put Renfrew County and the Pontiac on the precipice of poverty. Hundreds of jobs in the forestry industry have already been lost, and for every one of those, five more are expected to disappear from the Ottawa Valley
For longer than anyone can remember, the forest has put bread on the table throughout the Pontiac and Renfrew County.
But with the closing of the Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation pulp mill in Portage-du-Fort yesterday, much more than just 218 jobs disappeared.
Some say shutting the doors of the mill 90 minutes west of Ottawa marks the end of a way of life in parts of the Ottawa Valley, one that, until the recent downturn in the economy, had been a constant for the past 175 years.
Martin Ladouceur, chief of forestry services for the regional municipality of the Pontiac, said the closing has created an economic crisis because almost all of the municipality’s residents depend on logging, trucking, pulp mill or sawmill jobs for a living.
Already, 11.3 per cent of the Pontiac’s 15,000 people are unemployed, and there are no other industries or businesses in the region that can provide them with work, he said.
Doug Cook, 57, who for the past 14 years ran a machine that stripped bark from trees, doesn’t know what he will do to make ends meet until he can collect employment insurance in about two months.
After that runs out, he will need to find another job—it will be eight years before he can collect a pension—but he’s not optimistic.
“At my age it is hard to get work,” Mr. Cook said. “Forestry was the big thing in the Pontiac, but there is nothing else now.
“I might have to move to the city or go out West to find a job. There is no work close to us in places like Pembroke or Renfrew. I can’t think of anything I could be retrained to do here at my age. This is going to be a bleak winter,” Mr. Cook said.
The Smurfit-Stone closing is one example of the global economic woes causing job losses in Canada—with the manufacturing industries in Ontario and Quebec being hit especially hard.
The demand for the fine paper produced from bleached hardwood pulp by Smurfit-Stone has declined dramatically as a result of the slumping economies in the U.S. and Europe. To make matters worse, the pulp can be produced more cheaply in Third World countries, where there are fewer regulations protecting forests.
The market for photographic paper is a fraction of what it was five years ago, company spokeswoman Mylène Labrie said, and the demand for office paper dropped sharply after the Beijing Olympic Games.
The company is far from the only one in the region to be hit.
A sharp decline in housing starts in the U.S. prompted Maibec Inc. of Quebec City to close its cedar-shingle mill in Clarendon, north of Portage-du-Fort, for six months on Oct. 24, laying off 56 employees.
The closings have had a snowball effect, forcing the last remaining sawmills in the Pontiac to shut their doors, too: There is simply no longer a demand for cedar logs or hardwood chips.
And that affects everyone who works in the forestry industry on both sides of the Ottawa River—loggers, truck drivers and sawmill and pulp-mill workers.
Jeff Muzzi, the manager of forestry services in Renfrew County, said there have already been 500 to 600 forest-industry layoffs in the county and that number is expected to increase eventually to at least 1,000. Renfrew County’s unemployment rate stands at 6.4 per cent.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008