By Léo Boivin
Former employees of the Graphic Packaging plant in East Angus, Quebec began receiving unemployment benefits as a Christmas gift from their former employer, which decided to cease cardboard production at its plant in the small town on the outskirts of Sherbrooke. This latest closure in a sector already weakened by “free” trade agreements heralds a qualitative change to come in the crisis in the forest products sector.
Much has been written about the Trump administration’s unilateral tariffs, especially those targeting forest products (those targeting lumber, among others, can reach 45 percent). The risks of job losses, closures and a decline in working conditions were already keenly felt in a region with a rich history of value-added production in the pulp and paper sector. The now confirmed closure of the East Angus plant means the loss of jobs for more than a hundred workers, some of whom have worked there for over 40 years. So many good union jobs disappearing into thin air.
Unionization rates in the forest products sector have been steadily declining since the 1980s. The loss of yet another industrial union is a heavy blow to the labour movement.
But what is currently being exacerbated by the tariff crisis involving the United States is only the continuation of a general trend toward the concentration of industrial capital and its weakening vis-à-vis the corporate giants south of the border. In just 20 years, the number of primary wood processing plants has fallen by 56 percent while wood consumption per plant has increased significantly: the average volume consumed per plant has risen from 116,548 m3 in 2012 to 188,370 m3 in 2023, an increase of 62 percent. The total volume consumed in Quebec, meanwhile, has barely changed during the same period.
And those plants that remain open are becoming larger and larger: the number of sawmills with a supply guarantee of between 0 and 100,000 m³ has fallen from 210 in 2012 to 93 in 2023. In contrast, those with a supply guarantee of more than 500,000 m3 increased from 20 to 30 over the same period. The case of the East Angus mill is yet another example of capital concentration in the forestry industry, which is rapidly heading toward a crisis.
In an interview with Radio-Canada, the prefect of the Haut-Saint-François Regional County Municipality, Robert Roy, stated that US-based Graphic Packaging had decided, despite its current profitability, to consolidate its operations in the United States. This highlights the harmful effect of both free trade, which allows US industrial capital to set up in Quebec, and the Trump administration’s tariffs which are forcing its rapid repatriation. These factors, which have been in the background for the past few decades, are intensifying and coming to the surface, but their effects are qualitatively the same.
While the prefect is calling on the government to provide aid (in the form of public funds to an already profitable company) to boost production, something else is needed to stabilize the situation and reverse the crisis looming over the forest products sector. A systemic solution is needed to reverse the crisis in the forest products industry, which has been ongoing since at least the 1980s.
Quebec’s communist newspaper Clarté noted last year that “life outside Quebec’s major centers (Montreal and Quebec City) is becoming increasingly precarious due to the concentration of the Canadian and Quebec service economy around the major centers of capital. […] The effect of ‘mono-industry’ in medium-sized regional cities [means that] residents who do not live there are often left behind.”
The centralization of capital is the source of ruin in these regions. The solution cannot be to rewind the tape and play the same movie again, as the prefect suggests. To achieve equal development of the regions, emancipation from the United States and an improvement in the standard of living across the country, there is an urgent need for a program of massive reindustrialization under public and democratic control, and a forestry program for the benefit of working people.
Failure to do this would mean devastating consequences for working people, but also for small business owners, investors and industry.
Clarté
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