With the forestry in survival mode, business and community leaders in Northern Ontario to looking at trees and industry fibre waste by-products in a new way.
If the province wants to move into a bio-economy to divert forest waste into green fuels, renewable power, and bioplastics, the ideas for new streams of revenue and more greener jobs will have to come from the grass roots.
"We need to re-invent ourselves all the time and create our own future," said Hearst businessman Paul Allaire of Villeneuve Construction.
As the special projects coordinator for a company once heavily dependent on moving logs, it's been an ongoing mission to figure ways to diversify and find a niche in value-added business.
Allaire was one of 50 delegates from business, academia and government, invited to a technical table on value-added forestry and the bio-economy Thunder Bay in January. The feedback gathered from a series of sessions this winter covering mining, transportation, health, alternative energy and education will be folded into the provincial government's Growth Plan for Northern Ontario.
The roundtables were a precursor to the marquee event, a larger 'Think North' summit held in Thunder Bay in early February.
Northern Development and Mines Minister Michael Gravelle has promised the Growth Plan is not just another government report for regional economic growth that will gather dust. It will be legislated into action under the province's Places to Grow Act.
Allaire's company has a yard with a huge 1.5 million tonne pile of biomass, much of it bark. If the economics are right, Villeneuve would like to start trucking it somewhere to be used as feedstock for co-generation operations, bio-refineries or as ingredients to make bio-fuels.
"It's not gold yet, but it may become."
To Allaire, the north's future economy is dependant on how creative and opportunistic businesses and communities can be in cutting energy costs and manufacturing high-end goods.
"We have switch from left to right brain thinking to pull ourselves out," said Allaire. ""Anything that can be done cheap will be shipped to China, India and other places."
Part of Hearst's vision through their Bio-Com project is to become energy self-sufficient with a district heating plan and selling surplus power into the Ontario grid. That will help communities to entice industry to establish in small towns. "We want those (government) policies to change to make that happen," said Allaire.
Allaire favours an intensive biomass management of the forests and one central government ministry that oversees and manages all the North's natural resources, including the way it is allocated. When mills close, the fibre should be prioritized toward projects making high-end value-added products made locally or regionally.
"We need to open the forest for business."
Universities must conduct more applied research and communities should be free to develop their own partnerships in sourcing and sharing natural resources for pilot projects, he said.
To Marilyn Wood, a Timmins entrepreneur, Ontario is a complex and regulation-heavy jurisdiction, especially when it comes to setting up a value-added business.
For a small company with an innovative idea, trying to raise financing while navigating through government regulatory issues can take up to five years.
Her forest biotech company, Mikro-Tek, works exclusively in Chile where they've established commercial plantations of fast-growing pine and eucalyptus trees to take advantage of the year-round growing seasons. The microbes to inoculate the trees are produced in Timmins.
"We've sold (carbon) credits into the EU (European Union) because they're still trading on Kyoto."
She said the same can be done here with stands of poplar and tamarack, once considered junk wood, to become feedstock for biomass projects.
To her, the coming bio-economy is tied to the carbon economy. Many Canadian companies are displacing fossil fuel use with alternatives like wood pellets. But many new green tech applications are being held back by the lack of a coherent federal government carbon reduction policy.
"These companies are aware of what can be done but they just aren't going to do it until they're regulated."
She favours the creation of an ombudsmen, a kind of forest manufacturing secretariat, to represent the interests of all forestry players before government.
"A group that would recognize there are different sides and perhaps act on those concerns in order to fast-track them."
There remain "sticky issues" to be ironed out, such as who can lay claim to forest biomass on Crown land, the effectiveness of co-operative Sustainable Forest Licences, and finding a way to harmonize federal and provincial environmental assessments, she said.
For Allaire, small business and entrepreneurs that are the future builders of the North's economy. "We need a cultural evolution in how we think in our communities."
More places like Hearst need to change their collective mentality in finding ways to reinvent themselves with high-end value products to create good-paying jobs.
"I don't know where it's going to go but we need to try to do things differently."
www.placestogrow.ca
