Claude’s father had been swallowed, reduced to pulp. He had passed between the huge rolls of a paper mill. I had gone to the funeral with my head bowed. Everyone was talking, in front of the closed coffin, of the risks of such a profession. A job that consists of crushing trees. As he had been. In the middle of winter.
Every time I open a book or turn the pages of the newspaper, I can’t help but think of the forestry workers and all those workers that the pulp and paper industry continues to swallow while the wealth of our forests are slipping away from us.
In 2021, Domtar was purchased by Paper Excellence for US$3 billion. Shareholders cheered. Think: that was a premium of nearly 37% to the average value of publicly traded stocks.
Last year, it was the turn of Resolute Forest Products to be sold to the same company, based in British Columbia, for 2.7 billion. The origins of Resolute go back to the untimely exploitation of the Saint-Maurice River, at the time of Maurice Duplessis’ Trois-Rivières.
Paper Excellence had already acquired, in 2010, the European subsidiary of the Quebec forestry company Tembec. For months, Tembec had hoped for salvation from China. While employees and factories were sold, the salary of the president of Tembec jumped 22% to more than 2 million.
Who cared about all this concentration? The Competition Bureau? A little. But it was enough for Paper Excellence to put a Domtar plant in British Columbia up for sale to dispel the fears of small civil servants trained to bend before the laws of the market.
While we worry today about TikTok, spy balloons and the role of China in the smooth running of elections which, in any case, always renew the same people in power, the most of Quebec, one of the country’s main natural resources, eludes us more than ever. But we obviously prefer the springs of questions that are fictional rather than wondering what role, in reality, a company like Paper Excellence plays.
A recent report by Greenpeace indicates that the nebula in which Paper Excellence is immersed is marked by questionable environmental and social practices. Forest management here is now linked to companies based in the Netherlands, Malaysia, the British Virgin Islands and China. Should we rely only on Greenpeace? The subject is far too important to leave it only in those hands.
The daily The world, in collaboration with several media from the “Deforestation Inc” project, has just published the results of a vast investigation about Paper Excellence and its master, the company Asia Pulp Paper. The latter, a globalized paper giant, is considered almost infrequent. “The company has been regularly implicated for massive deforestation over the past twenty years and has never succeeded in convincing people of the seriousness of its environmental commitments,” reads the daily article. The investigation also points an accusing finger at Paper Excellence, “this Canadian group with multiple pulp mills”. Both groups actually belong to the same family, that of Teguh Widjaja. They operate, under different names, as one group. They deceive authorities around the world, says the investigation, particularly in the management and pricing of paper.
The team formed by Asia Pulp Paper and its Canadian cover, Paper Excellence, constitutes the largest paper group on the planet. It exceeds the American International Paper. The Paper Excellence entity has allowed Asia Pulp Paper to continue its global expansion after being banned due to its crass practices as well as its human rights and FSC certification abuses. , the standard for supposedly sustainable management, a green cover created by the forest industry.
The international survey establishes that the two groups, Asia Pulp Paper and Paper Excellence, “are not vague distant cousins, linked by shareholders of the same family”. They enjoy influential relationships from top to bottom, and they benefit from a common strategy. In China, reports a former employee of this giant, the two groups jointly set prices on the world market. Dozens of prosecution documents prove it, says The world. At least thirteen people held simultaneous positions in the two groups, the survey also reports.
Why has justice not been seized, in the countries concerned? National or supranational authorities are competent when they consider, consider The world“that their market is affected by the bad practices” of a group assimilated nothing more or less, in this investigation, to an illegal and despicable trust.
Will the Quebec state, for its part, at least lift a finger? In the meantime, in the middle of the forest, giants are looting the marbles. And they leave behind them a devastated country. For decades, this mismanagement has continued. When it comes to forestry, buying silence in the vast market of appearances continues to be common practice.
But who advises the Quebec state? In Romania, the Prime Minister, Nicolae Ciucă, has just presented his new special adviser, a robot equipped with artificial intelligence. The robot was named “Ion”.
François Legault, between two negotiations, where he does not fail to crash in front of Ottawa, will perhaps find it advantageous, too, to buy one. No doubt he would call him “Maurice”, knowing full well that this whole pre-programmed operating system over which he presides cannot be changed by those who, like him and his predecessors, pretend at most to control it, from an election to the other.