Forestry

Introduction

It must have been a happy crowd that greeted the first train to arrive in Meadow Lake in 1931. The train would bring a steady flow into town of needed supplies and also provided for the steady outflow of the area's agricultural and forestry products.

Easy transportation to the Canadian and American markets bode well for the many logging camps, railroad tie camps, and mills in the Meadow Lake region. But forestry was tough work. It didn't pay very well and usually only provided winter employment. Workers were housed in cramped, rough quarters, the pay was $1 a day, and the work went on from dawn to dusk. Trees were cut with two-man cross-cut saws and were initially hauled out of the bush by horse until the roads improved and trucks could be used.

Lumber, railroad ties, and pulpwood went their way by train out of Meadow Lake. Wood was also used locally by the Northern Millworks which made boxes for the area's berry harvesters and fish processors.

MEADOW LAKE SAWMILL

From those early days through to the 1960s, sawmills were often operated by farmers as an additional source of income. Then, in 1971, the New York firm of Parsons & Whittemore built the Meadow Lake Sawmill. This mill was a major development in the local forestry sector and employed 80 to 100 people under a management team from Parsons & Whittemore.

The Parsons & Whittemore management team left after a few years and the sawmill languished, mainly because it had not been designed to meet Canadian weather conditions. The poor design often resulted in reduced production and there were long layoffs, particularly from November to January. In 1986, the mill was sold to the provincial government.

When rumours soon arose that the mill was going to be sold yet again, an employee buy out group, called Techfor Services, was formed, and partnership discussions began with the Meadow Lake Tribal Council. The result, in 1988, was that Techfor Services bought 40% of the shares of the mill, with the Tribal Council buying another 40%. The remaining 20% were later bought by Millar Western when that company built a pulp mill here in 1992. The new owners operate under the name NorSask Forest Products Inc.

In early 1998, the Meadow Lake Tribal Council became sole owner of NorSask, thus becoming the largest First-Nations forest products company in Canada. With the mill's ownership finally secure, the goal was to ensure year-round operations by obtaining a secure wood supply and by upgrading the mill. The secured wood supply came through signing a Forest Management License Agreement with the Provincial Government which provided NorSask with a 3.3 million hectare landbase from which it could harvest 5,000 hectares annually.

Mill improvements, often done under adverse financial conditions, overcame the handicaps built into the original mill and helped the mill better utilize its logs. Within five years, new computerized equipment was maximizing the lumber recovery from each log, and the mill had doubled its 1988 production with premium lumber that was well above grade and was being shipped across North America. During 1997, the mill achieved record production levels, producing 101 million board feet of lumber.

Today, the mill's production facilities are in excellent shape, plans are being made for secondary industries, and cooperative management agreements with northern communities will ensure that the mill's activities will benefit all northerners.

FOREST MANAGEMENT

Seeing a vast country covered by the world's largest forest, the earliest settlers set about with their saws and axes without giving much thought to forest renewal. Excessive logging and careless harvesting practices have left their impact on many of Canada's forests, and many lessons were learned too late. These days, more care is given to ensuring a sustainable supply of timber, and responsible use of Saskatchewan's forests is mandated by the provincial government.

In 1988, when NorSask Forest Products was created, they were given rights to a 3.3 million hectare area under a Forest Management License Agreement (FMLA). Not all of the area is usable timberland, only about half of it is. And NorSask was allowed to harvest 5000 hectares of it each year, of which 30% was the softwoods needed by the mill (primarily white spruce, jack pine, and balsam fir). The level of harvesting, along with the expected damage done by forest fires, would result in less than 1% of the forests being depleted each year -- an amount which could be replenished.

Under the FMLA agreement, a user was to be found for the aspen hardwood and, in 1990, such a user was found in the form of the Alberta-based company Millar Western which set about building a pulp mill in Meadow Lake. NorSask and Millar Western then created Mistik Management Ltd. to manage the FMLA. Mistik's task was to supply logs to both mills, monitor regrowth, and to contract suppliers for road building and tree seedlings. Their plans were to be developed under a cooperative approach with northern residents. There are 22 communities in and around the FMLA, and many other uses of the forests needed to be considered, including traditional Native practices.

Mistik Management's goal was to establish a forest management plan that was based on both science and traditional knowledge. They talked with scientists, naturalists, elders, trappers, fishermen, loggers, saw millers and pulp makers. Not everything went smoothly at first. Northerners saw that modern mechanical harvesting methods were replacing traditional methods, and year-long blockades were staged at Canoe Lake and Waterhen.

This crisis actually spurred on the communication process with the northerners, and several co-management boards were formed to ensure that traditional ways and community concerns are incorporated into the forestry activities. There are now eight co-management boards and two advisory boards. The boards meet monthly with Mistik and help make decisions on such things as the size and locations of harvested areas and the methods of harvesting and replanting. The boards' ideas will also be incorporated into decisions concerning wildlife, hunting, tourism, and recreational resources, within their respective areas. This cooperative Integrated Resource Management approach is unique in Canada.

In 1997, Mistik became the first-ever Saskatchewan forest management company to receive Ministerial approval for their environmental impact statement on a Twenty-Year Forest Management Plan. The plan went far beyond short-term logging goals, instead producing guidelines that reach 220 years into the future.

Mistik Management employs 45 people in its Meadow Lake office, and between 500 to 600 people each year to build roads, harvest trees, and plant seedlings.

MEADOW LAKE PULP LTD. (formerly Millar Western)

Millar Western is an Alberta-based company with a pulp mill in Whitecourt, sawmills in Boyle and Whitecourt, and a woodlands group that supplies fibre to the Alberta mills. The Alberta operations also include two chemical plants and a construction division. In 1992, the company opened a pulp mill just east of Meadow Lake.

Both Meadow Lake Pulp Ltd. and Millar Western pulp mills produce a bleached chemi-thermo-mechanical pulp (BCTMP) from aspen, with the company being the largest producer of such pulp in the world, supplying more than 40% of the international market for the product. The two pulp mills combined have a capacity to produce 550,000 tonnes of pulp per year.

The BCTMP product is made by using hydrogen peroxide as the bleach to brighten the pulp, chemicals such as caustic soda to soften the lignin in the chips, with heat and compression to aid the softening and optimize the chemical process. The mechanical action, the heart of the refining process, separates the chips into individual fibres. The pulp is then dried and baled. The process yields almost twice the amount of pulp per tree over conventional pulp methods, and the final product is of exceptionally high quality.

The product is then shipped to paper makers in Europe, Asia, North America and Latin America for use in producing tissues, toweling, writing and printing papers, specialty papers, paperboard and newsprint.

The Meadow Lake plant achieved high environmental standards by being the first in the world to have no liquid effluent discharge. Waste water is cleaned, recycled and reused. Additional water intake is minimal, just sufficient to replace the water lost to evaporation. The process is chlorine-free, generates no dioxins, furans or other chlorinated organics and there is virtually no release into the air of sulphur dioxide or related odors.

Meadow Lake Pulp Ltd.employs over 100 full time employees, along with additional contractors. They are joint owners in Mistik Management Ltd., which manages their forest resources.

MEADOW LAKE OSB PARTNERSHIP LTD.

Meadow Lake OSB Partnership is the newest industry in the Meadow Lake area and became operational in 2003. It is owned by local partners, the province and Tolko Industries Ltd. (75%). It produces oriented strand board, with an estimated capacity of 600 million square feet of OSB. It will require an annual fibre supply of approximately 900,000 cubic metres. Tolko Industries Ltd. is a private family-owned forest products company based in Vernon, B.C. with operations in the four western provinces.