A northeastern Ontario mill town will be the epi-centre of a movement to commercially harvest the wealth of Northern Ontario’s alternative bio-products on a regional scale.
With $1.6 million in seed funding from Ottawa, the town of Chapleau has been chosen to make it happen.
The forestry town of 2,300 was selected in July as one of 11 sites across Canada for Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan) new Forest Communities Program (FCP).
“This is extremely exciting for small regions of Northern Ontario with big ideas and very exciting for the federal government to recognize them in this way,” says project manager Sylvie Albert, a former Chapleau and Timmins economic development officer.
The 11 communities and their yet-to-be created regional organizations will be able to tap into $25 million fund dispensed over five years.
The idea behind these organizations is to develop and share knowledge, tools and strategies to help hard-hit forestry towns make a transition into value-added and emerging new forest-based opportunities.
The program may be headquartered in Chapleau, to be known as the Northeast Superior Forest Community partnership, but Albert wants to cast a wide regional net and build as many collaborations as possible.
Armed with $325,000 for each of the next five years, Albert says the program emphasis is beyond just building bricks-and-mortar and making inventories of what is available in the bush. She wants to see a new wave of innovative forest projects come through to production.
For some small producers, the money will be a final push to go take their fledgling enterprises to the next step.
Besides Chapleau, the five other communities of Dubreuilville, Hornepayne, White River, Manitouwadge and the Township of Michipicoten will be involved in the partnership, which includes involvement with three area First Nation communities.
They’ll have at their disposal university academics, community development personnel as well as government, business and industry experts in value-added forestry.
Albert says she’s out to create the strongest team possible by creating a network of researchers, big and small businesses and wannabe entrepreneurs that grows beyond the region.
Combined with the NRCan money, Albert has raised a total of $2.3 million with additional community contributions and she’s looking for more.
Other players such as the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) and Laurentian University’s School of Management, where Albert teaches, are coming aboard as collaborative partners.
NOSM is interested in using plants in the boreal forest for medicinal and nutraceutical (natural health products) uses.
Albert says one of the most advanced projects is the newly-created Non-Timber Forest Products Corporation.
High on its agenda is finding new and promising non-timber products to commercialize is blueberries.
Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have already done so with great success, she says.
There’s other promising natural crops with Canada Yew (an ingredient used to fight cancer) and fireweed ( a skin care nutraceutical).
“If you have pockets of producers across the North, it would certainly support what other provinces are trying to do on a worldwide scale,” says Albert, who’s a Sudbury-based strategic planning consultant.
“There’s many things the forest has to offer beyond just cutting lumber that could be utilized to start-up cottage industries.”
There’s also some value-added wood possibilities on the table, but Albert was reluctant to get into the business specifics.
To access the NRCan money, Albert faced stiff competition as one of 58 applications from across Canada.
But the potential in developing non-timber forest products caught the attention of NRCan officials.
Brian Wilson, NRCan’s director of programs, says the Chapleau proposal was “very solid” with a strong youth retention and Aboriginal focus.
Wilson says it’ll be up to the individual not-for-profit organizations and their partners to decide how to manage their projects
“As with every partnership, it’s a combination of give-and-take of cash and in-kind contribution.”
Wilson says it’s undetermined whether Queen’s Park will chip in with any provincial funding. But it’s expected matching funds and further collaboration will come from the private sector, academia and municipal governments.
The next stage is a negotiation phase in the following months to firm up every community’s proposal and make sure all the cash and contributions are in place.
