Caribou Protection | Communities in suspense

(Sacré-Cœur and Essipit) If we were to organize a popularity contest in Sacré-Cœur, a tightly knit village of 1,700 inhabitants in the Haute-Côte-Nord, I don’t know who would win.

A Dufour, perhaps, given the prevalence of the surname in the area.

I know, however, who would not stand a chance. At the top of the list is the federal Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault.

In mid-June, Mr. Guilbeault convinced the Council of Ministers to authorize an emergency decree aimed at protecting three herds of forest caribou in a precarious situation in Quebec.

One of them is in the area around the Pipmuacan reservoir, north of here. It also happens to be the logging area of ​​the Boisaco Group, a forestry cooperative that employs 440 people and employs 160 full-time forestry contractors.

I repeat the figures because they are at the heart of the issues: Boisaco directly provides work for 600 workers in a village of 1,700 souls.

Among those who would garner few votes in this popular contest, we also find opinion journalists who supported this federal intervention – and in particular those who write their columns from Montreal. I am one of them.

To conclude that I was in hostile territory by going to Sacré-Cœur would be a gross exaggeration. I was welcomed cordially everywhere. But let’s just say that the people of the region had a message to convey.

A message that essentially says this: we have nothing against protecting the caribou, quite the contrary. But it is the future of our village that is at stake and we cannot act as if it does not matter.

I am convinced that the caribou must be protected. I also persist in thinking that the Legault government should have come up with a real protection plan a long time ago instead of blaming the federal government and forcing it to intervene (it has a legal obligation to do so). But I also believe that we need to hear from the people affected and understand the impacts of the actions.

In Sacré-Cœur, I spoke to the leaders and workers of Boisaco, a cooperative whose roots in its community are easy to underestimate (I’ll come back to that). I spoke to entrepreneurs whose jobs depend on Boisaco. I spoke to the grocer, the mayor, the motel owner. They all say the same thing: if the federal decree is adopted, Boisaco falls. And if Boisaco falls, the entire community collapses.

“If that happens, we’ll have to go into exile,” Valérie Dufour, sales and billing coordinator at Boisaco, told me, unable to hold back her tears.

M’s spouse^me Dufour also works at Boisaco. They have three children. Their lives are on hold.

In the following text, I give the floor to 10 inhabitants of the region like M^me Dufour. Their words illustrate the complexity of the issues at stake this summer on the Haute-Côte-Nord. A summer that takes the form of a high-tension countdown.

Minister Guilbeault’s decree includes a map that everyone has seen here. A map dotted with big green spots: areas where cutting down trees would become prohibited to protect caribou habitat. This map and others are displayed in giant format in the offices of Steeve St-Gelais and André Gilbert, respectively president and CEO of Groupe Boisaco.

The two men say that if the decree is implemented as is, the cooperative would lose 50 to 60% of its wood supply. In this context, it is impossible to cover fixed costs, much less generate profits. All that would be left would be to close shop.

The 50 to 60 percent figures are spectacular, but difficult to confirm. The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry says the decree would result in supply cuts for the province’s roundwood processing plants ranging from less than 1 to 50 percent, but it does not explain its methodology.^⁠1. And the impacts per company are kept confidential.

In Sacré-Cœur, we can practically hear the clock ticking. Minister Guilbeault had announced a 60-day consultation period before issuing his decree. That would have taken us to mid-August. This week, the minister added 30 days to the clock. On the one hand, this gives us time to find solutions. On the other, it prolongs the uncertainty in which the communities are plunged.

The Innus for the caribou

Even though it’s less than 20 minutes from Tadoussac, Sacré-Cœur feels like another world. Here, the air doesn’t smell of the sea, the streets are lined with hardware stores and welding shops rather than souvenir shops, and the village is resolutely turned toward the forest rather than the river.

The landscape is different in Essipit, an Innu community about thirty minutes from Sacré-Cœur. The talk about caribou is different too.

Grand chef Martin Dufour takes us to a condo complex with a view of the sea. Tourists are picnicking on rocks, watching two whales put on a breathtaking show near the coast.

Here, the caribou is seen as a pillar of traditional culture. The federal decree, far from being decried as in Sacré-Cœur, had been requested by the band council.

“The goal of requesting a decree was never to close Boisaco, it’s important to say that. It was to make Quebec react,” said Chief Dufour, who deplores the Legault government’s inaction on the matter.

Jean-François Boulianne, an Innu from Essipit who serves as guardian of the territory, notes that the protection of the caribou unfortunately fuels tensions between Whites and Innu.

He blames the provincial government, which he says has allowed “the situation to fester” by continually postponing its intervention plan for the caribou.

In Sacré-Cœur, on the contrary, the provincial government is seen as an ally.

“The provincial government understood that there are important issues, that they are complex and that we must be careful. It is in this spirit that he works,” Steeve St-Gelais, president of Boisaco, told me.

However, when we dig deeper, we discover that these positions are tinged with nuances. Several Innu work in the forestry industry. Essipit is even a partner in a wood pellet plant, Granulco, which is part of the Boisaco Group.

“We understand that caribou are important, but we think that this decree makes no sense,” says Louis Bouchard, a 20-year-old Innu who works in the forestry industry.

I will end by telling you about Boisaco. To fully understand local issues, you need to understand this company and its history.

Between 1975 and 1982, three attempts to establish a sawmill in the village failed. However, the townspeople refused to give in. They took out capital from their own pockets and founded a cooperative.

Today, it has 300 member workers (not all of the group’s employees are shareholders) and 800 citizen investors.

Groupe Boisaco has become a vast constellation of companies that value every part of the tree. The main site is as big as 100 soccer fields. It manufactures lumber and door panels as well as pallet components. Sawdust is transformed into pellets for heating; shavings into horse bedding. The bark powers a thermal power plant that provides the heat needed to dry the wood.

This vast complex, owned by the citizens themselves, is the pride of Sacré-Cœur.

Marc Gilbert, 76, is one of the founders of this regional empire.

When I asked him how he was coping with recent events, he coughed, apologized, went to get a glass of water and came back with tears in his eyes.

“People won’t let this happen,” he predicted, his voice soft and in stark contrast to the force of his words. “It’s going to be tough. And very tough.”

1. Read the text “Federal measures to protect caribou: uncertainty persists over job losses”