Fortunes rise for towns at root of North America’s lumber boom
HEARST, Ont. - Louis Audet has heard the stories on the radio about lumber prices hitting exorbitant heights, but he doesn’t pay them much mind. If he needs wood for the cabin he is building for his wife on their 150-acre property near Hearst, Ont., he just goes out and cuts it himself.
“Prices are nuts,” said the 63-year-old lumberjack. “We will probably be working more, because the demand is there, and we may be longer in the bush, but the prices don’t bother me.”
Audet dropped out of high school in 1978 to work in the bush. He was young and eager to make money. Back then, an aspiring lumberjack with a strong work ethic, and an even stronger back, could clear $100 a day felling trees in Hearst’s boreal forest.
The massive swatch of land, twice the size of Prince Edward Island, has been the lifeblood of this predominantly French-speaking community, located about 1,000 kilometres north of Toronto, for nearly a century.
In Audet’s early years, the work was dangerous. Trees could unexpectedly split, shift sideways or pop into the air. Accidents were not uncommon, although a broken hand was the worst he ever suffered. Men worked in pairs, cooked grilled cheese sandwiches on wood stoves, smoked cigarettes and slept well at night.
“It was a hazardous job, the trees, they are big,” Audet said.
As the industry mechanized, he traded in his chainsaw for a feller buncher — picture a backhoe, with a do-hickey attached to cut trees instead of a bucket. The John Deere 903M rig he operates for Lecours Lumber Co., a third-generation family-owned logging and sawmill operation, is worth about $800,000 and capable of harvesting 3,000 trees a day, or 10 times what he cut on his best days 40 years ago.
“It is like driving a car, only better,” he said. “I listen to classical music. It is peaceful.”
The North American lumber market today is anything but peaceful. There’s an insatiable appetite for wood, and Audet, his hometown of 5,000 people and the spruce forest that sustains it — feeding its mills and, by extension, its shopkeepers, contractors, mechanics, truckers, hotels, high schools, churches, grocery stores, gas stations and seasonal tree planting operations — are ground zero in the boom.
“Everything here is connected to the forestry sector,” Mayor Roger Sigouin said. “It is a great time to be in Hearst.”
It’s a great time to be in forestry. More than 200,000 Canadians work in the industry, and millions more rely upon it, according to Natural Resources Canada (NRC). The sector contributed about $23.7 billion to Canada’s nominal gross domestic product in 2019, and the value of its forest product exports was about $33 billion in 2019, with $22 billion of that bound for the United States.
It’s an important industry whether you work in it, or whether you’re fixing an old deck or shopping for a new house.
Eastern spruce, a building industry mainstay, cost about $500 per thousand board feet at the onset of the pandemic, but now runs ambitious renovators close to quadruple that amount, according to the NRC.
The Canadian Home Builders’ Association advises anyone looking to build a new 2,500-square-foot home to tack on another $30,000 to the price to account for increased lumber costs.
City slickers with a do-ityourself mindset can’t just head out to the back forty to chop down a few trees, so it can be a rather painful time to visit the hardware store for a few boards these days.