Dear Editor,
For the last six months or so, I’ve sat watching out of my picture window or in the breeze way at Highway 148. Because of COVID-19 and the quarantine, like everyone else, it left me with very little to do. After watching the traffic I decided to count the semi’s loaded with, to the hilt carrying timber toward Mont Laurier. Some days I’ve counted over 40. Of course there was some after dark and early morning that I couldn’t see.
The sawmill in Davidson (closed), then the shingle mill outside of Shawville (closed), Portage Pulp Mill (closed) and Jovalco in Mansfield (closed).
Some of the powers that be have talked about bio something or other. I asked, ”Why does Pontiac have to be left picking up the crumbs?” Actually we don’t even get the crumbs. I have a camp up towards Jim’s Lake, there I watched a huge machine I think they call it a feller buncher. There was a man from Gatineau, Que. operating this contraption. He drove up to a tree, clamped on to the trunk and a blade cut it off and then it was limbed. Trucks (from outside Pontiac hauled the timber out of the county to be manufactured.
Day after day 40 or more trucks haul our timber out while our people are unemployed. The Quebec Government gets stumpage fees, we get nothing.
Oh I know we will see our politicians, federal and provincial and municipal cutting ribbons, smiling and congratulating and touting each other on the front page of THE EQUITY for some endeavour only to see it fail in six months, a lot of time wasting public start-up money.
The price of lumber has gone through the roof supposedly because of the pandemic. Tornados, hurricanes and floods have also made the demand greater than the supply.
Our forests are being harvested and sent out of our county, over 40 semi’s a day and we get nothing, as usual. An election is coming and of course we will get a lot of promises.
Lawrence Stafford
Campbell’s Bay, Que.
