Pulp and paper | A century-old school disappears

After almost 100 years, a page in Quebec’s economic history is turning. The School of Stationery in Trois-Rivières, which was created in 1923 to provide the province with one of its first major industries, trained its last technicians.

Helene Baril
The Press

The program, which led to a college diploma, was abandoned by the Cégep de Trois-Rivières, which awarded its diplomas last May to a handful of graduates.

For the city that has long considered itself the pulp and paper capital of the world, the end of this industry-tailored program is certainly a sign of the times. The pulp and paper sector has declined sharply in recent years, and the site of one of the main factories in Trois-Rivières now houses a museum dedicated to the industry.

But the reason why the technical training program at Cégep de Trois-Rivières ended is because it was becoming increasingly difficult to recruit students, explains Nathalie Cauchon, director of studies at the school. .

“Despite all our efforts, we had very few students,” she explained in an interview with The Press.

In an attempt to appeal to a greater number of young people, the program had evolved to take into account the new needs of the industry in terms of green technologies. It had changed its name from Paper Technologies to Ecodevelopment and Bioproducts. “But we weren’t more successful,” says Nathalie Cauchon.

According to her, all technical training courses are more or less victims of the disaffection of young people, not only that intended for the pulp and paper sector. “We have a generation less interested in this kind of work,” she notes.

The fact that the paper industry has declined has obviously not facilitated recruitment, she agrees. “I recognize that there is less need,” she says.

In fact, the pulp and paper industry suffers from the scarcity of labour, according to the CEO of Resolute Forest Products, Rémi Lalonde. “Mechanics and electricians, in particular, are hard to find,” he says.

As for factory employees, the company trains them itself. “We want to train our people,” he said.

Since the early 1980s, the decline of the industry has accelerated.

The remaining factories will not all be able to survive, said recently the Minister of Economy and Innovation, Pierre Fitzgibbon, who is piloting a $1 billion aid plan for this industry.

Masters in your own house

There is a lot of history behind this training program for the pulp and paper sector, which was born out of the government’s desire at the time to take advantage of Quebec’s natural resources.

It was Honoré Mercier, Minister of Lands and Forests and son of the Premier of the same name, who supported the Trois-Rivières stationery school project. It was, according to him, “necessary in a country where the pulp and paper industry has made remarkable progress to the point of being one of the industries essential to the economic future”, can we read in the archives .

The objective was to attract factories to Quebec, at a time when large American or British companies came to seek our wood to transform it elsewhere, recalls François Parenteau, head of research at Innofibre, research center on pulp and paper. established in Trois-Rivières.

A few years earlier, the Quebec government had banned the export of logs to the United States, which forced foreign companies to invest locally and, eventually, to make this sector a pillar of the Quebec economy.

Honoré Mercier fils had foreseen the labor needs of this nascent industry and the objections of foreign investors. “To enable it to fight with advantage against similar industries established abroad, an informed workforce is necessary, he pleaded. It is to train such a workforce that the School of Stationery will work. »

This is what the Stationery School has been doing for almost 100 years, right up to the present day. Some 180 graduates graduated each year during the industry’s golden age. Many executives and plant managers have been trained there, according to François Parenteau.

The Stationery School was founded in 1923 and was expanded in 1948 to include a pilot plant at a cost of nearly $2 million, a considerable sum for the time. It became the Stationery Institute of the Province of Quebec in 1958, before being integrated into the Cégep de Trois-Rivières in the 1960s, when these educational institutions were created.