Powered by wind and poetry
A city reinvented; After losing its paper and textile mills, Trois Rivières diversifies for the future
Kevin Dougherty (
kdougherty@thegazette.canwest.com)
The Gazette (Montreal)
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Hyperlink:
https://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=3b0bdd66-75c7-4ce2-a263-9c25d6aa4afc
Windmills and poetry.
Trois Rivières is a small city with big dreams.
Founded as a fur-trading post in 1634, its natural resources - iron, forests and abundant water for cheap hydro-electricity - made the city in Quebec's Mauricie region an industrial powerhouse.
Globalization and changing markets have closed its textile sector and shut down much of its pulp and paper capacity.
But Trois Rivières is up again, rebranded as Quebec's city of poetry, and is repositioning for the 21st century as a diversified manufacturing and services centre.
Marmen Inc., a homegrown Trois Rivières company, makes the windmills for wind farms sprouting up in this province and beyond.
Electricity is still part of the Trois Rivières DNA, and the city may be sitting on a major natural gas play.
The city also draws energy from poetry.
"People come from all around the world," said Magali Cochard, who wrote her master's thesis on the impact of the city's annual international poetry festival.
"We are proud."
Not so long ago, Trois Rivières was known as Quebec's unemployment capital, Cochard recalled.
Poetry has created a positive image beyond the city and transformed the image its residents - known as Trifluviens - have of themselves.
In June, despite lower exports and fears of a recession, unemployment across Quebec was 7.4 per cent. It was 8.2 per cent - a drop of about two percentage points in a year - in the Mauricie region, which includes Trois Rivières, a city of about 130,000 halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.
Poetry contributes to job creation. Foreign visitors to the poetry fest stay for as long as 10 days, boosting the city's restaurant and hotel sector in the winter off-season.
Trois Rivières has learned that not following a dream can mean missed opportunities.
In its early days, fur trading begat what would become one of Canada's leading retail chains. But not in Trois Rivières.
Pierre Radisson, an adventurous coureur des bois, made his way from Trois Rivières to Hudson Bay. New France officials wouldn't back him in his new fur-trading venture, so Radisson went to England. There, his proposal won support and the
Hudson's Bay Co. was born in 1670.
Trois Rivières, Quebec's second-oldest city, sits at the confluence of the St. Maurice and St. Lawrence rivers. Canada's industrial age began here, with the mining and forging of iron in the 17th century.
Les Forges de St. Maurice made iron for cannonballs and for more peaceful purposes.
In the 21st century, the city has a vibrant hospitality industry and a small university, the only one in the province with specialized training for midwives and in tourism.
Researchers at the
Université du Québec à Trois Rivières also have projects to extract hydrogen from water for fuel cells to power tomorrow's buses and cars and to generate electricity in remote regions.
"We are running out of fossil fuels," said
Richard Chahine, director of the
Institut de recherche sur l'hydrogène.
The institute is focused on renewable wind and solar energy to extract hydrogen. Chahine predicts hydrogen will be a cheaper fuel, twice as efficient as gasoline, with zero greenhouse emissions.
Not to be left behind by the West and Atlantic Canada, the Trois Rivières region is the centre of major hydrocarbon exploration. Horizontal drilling could unlock between 4 trillion and 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, giving Quebec, already rich in hydro power and wind energy, its own source of natural gas.
That's a lot of gas.
Gaz Métro, which supplies most of the Quebec market, sold 230 million cubic feet of natural gas last year.
Peter Dorrins, chief operating officer of
Junex Inc., said his company is drilling exploratory gas wells in the Trois Rivières area and other Quebec regions in the Utica shale formation, similar to the gas-rich Barnett shale formation in Texas.
Forest Oil Corp. of Denver, with expertise in the Barnett play, is also active in the region, as are
Talisman Energy Inc. of Calgary and junior oil companies
Gastem Inc.,
Questerre Inc.,
Altai Resources Inc.,
Epsilon Energy Inc. and
Petrolympic Inc.
Natural gas and hydrogen may be the future of Trois Rivières. In the meantime, niche manufacturing, service and technology jobs are replacing mill jobs that have disappeared.
"Trois Rivières was the newsprint capital of Canada," said
Valérie Lalbin, of the
Trois Rivières tourism and conventions office.
The
poetry festival helped Trois Rivières net the Canadian Heritage Department's designation as the
country's cultural capital for 2009, the
city's 375th anniversary, Lalbin noted.
To draw visitors, the city is developing its convention business and stages auto races through its streets every August.
Quebec's political parties have added Trois Rivières as a venue for party conventions; academic and professional associations meet in the Trois Rivières convention centre.
Mill closings and cleaner technologies mean fewer chemical odours from the paper industry.
The area around des
Forges Blvd., the city's main artery and not so long ago a neglected thoroughfare of seedy bars and shuttered businesses, is safe now. It offers a selection of restaurants, cafés and bars one would expect in a larger city.
Elegant new businesses on des Forges and surrounding streets, like
Illico, a café-art gallery-florist shop, and its St. Lawrence River waterfront make Trois Rivières an attractive stopover.
Work on a major real estate development on the waterfront, with a technopark, a 10,000-place outdoor amphitheatre and a residential development, is to start in September.
Construction is booming and the region is getting its share of the $6 billion Quebec is to spend this year to renew highways and other infrastructure.
Yves Marchand, executive director of the
Société de développement économique de Trois Rivières, said
Premier Aviation, a company established at the city's airport, is landing contracts to overhaul Boeing and Airbus commercial jets.
The Trois Rivières airport has no scheduled flights, but Marchand said it is considering using its lower operating costs and location between Montreal and Quebec City to attract charter flights for holiday destinations.
Kruger Inc., the family-owned paper firm, remains the major employer, operating a mill west of the city core, and
GL&V Canada Inc. specializes in water treatment equipment for paper mills.
But Marmen is the rising star in Trois Rivières. Started in 1972 as Fernand Pellerin's machine shop, Marmen now is one of the top three suppliers of wind-energy towers and components in North America.
Marmen, the family name of Pellerin's wife, was chosen as the company name because Fernand thought it would work in French and English.
The company has plans to build a new windmill-tower plant in the United States .
Annie Pellerin, the founder's daughter and Marmen's vice-president (marketing and human resources), said wind and other energy machinery, like components for
General Electric's natural gas turbines, make up about 60 per cent of Marmen's business. A variety of industrial products, with the common thread that they are "complex and of quality," completes Marmen's product line.
The company has a payroll of about 1,000, most age about 30 or less, Pellerin said. Marmen is 100 per cent family-owned, with no plans to go public but lots of expansion ideas.
While southern Ontario has been hard hit by the contraction of its auto industry, Quebec, with fewer automotive jobs, has not felt the same pain.
An exception was the abrupt closing recently of the
Aleris International Inc. plant in Trois Rivières by its United States parent. Aleris made aluminum components for car radiators. The loss of its 450 well-paid manufacturing jobs cast a shadow over the Trois Rivières economy.
"We don't control the dollar and we don't control globalization," said
Trois Rivières Mayor Yves Lévesque, a shameless promoter of his city.
Lévesque noted that Trois Rivières has bucked the trend in Quebec of people leaving the regions for jobs in Montreal and the 450 area code region surrounding Montreal Island.
But in the last 15 years, the population of Trois Rivières has risen to 130,000 from 122,000 as the local economy has adapted and diversified.
"We have a quality workforce," Lévesque said in an impromptu interview in a restaurant looking over the St. Lawrence. "We have workers available."
He boasts his city has a quality of life that can't be beaten, with $50 million in new sports facilities, including extensive bicycle paths, free bicycles, free wireless Internet in the city centre, a low cost of living, and ports and highways that put Trois Rivières no more than 90 minutes away from 90 per cent of the Quebec market.
"So when are you moving to Trois Rivières?" Lévesque asked a man from Grand'Mère who had been listening to his pitch.