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rfmcdonaldMichel Arsenault in Saturday's The Globe and Mail had an interesting article, "'At least these mosquitoes don't give you malaria'". The person of the lumberjack is an iconic figure to Canadians and/including Québécois have national mythos constructed, in part, around the belief that their ancestors were "hewers of wood and drawers of water". No longer. As Arsenault explains, in at least one part of Québec's forest frontier, the municipality of Dolbeau-Mitassini in the famously nationalist Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region, the old stock of lumberjacks is beginning to be replaced by African immigrants.
Although Québec maintains an immigration policy separate from Canada's--as M.C. Andrews notes in the anthology Quebec: State and Society--founded on supplementing the economic requirements of Québec and maintaining the French language in wide circulation, it hasn't figured out that the non-recognition of foreign credentials is a bad idea. It isn't a racism thing, necessarily: French immigrants face the same problem as well. Immigrants across Canada face these problems, despite a federal program aimed at getting the qualifications earned abroad my immigrants recognized in this country, and despite continued talk of making things better. It'd be a pity for the lumber industry if foreign credentials were taken into account, I suppose.
It's already 4 a.m., a little late for breakfast. In a fiercely lit canteen, dozens of forestry workers in oilskin jackets and rubber boots are hunched over wooden tables, siphoning coffee, ingesting protein in the shape of eggs and ham. The room is white, but almost all the faces in it are black. They are recent immigrants, mostly from French-speaking African countries, who live in Montreal but come to cut brush in northern Quebec's boreal forest in the summer.
The local forestry-management company that runs the work camp does hire some Québécois, but today is Friday and they have all left to spend a long weekend with their families in nearby towns and villages. The African-born loggers do not take weekends off. They seldom take even a day off, in the hope of piling up as much cash as they can during the summer season. It would take almost seven hours to drive back to Montreal, ruling out weekend visits to wives, girlfriends and children left behind. And none of them owns a car anyway.
This camp — in the Banc de sable (Sand Bank) sector of a public forest 90 kilometres north of the town of Dolbeau-Mistassini (and about 200 km north of Quebec City) — is run by Aménagement MYR, which hired its first African employee, a man from Ivory Coast, in the late 1990s. Word soon spread in Montreal's African community that there was good money to be made in the bush. Now, 60 per cent of the camp's 90 employees are African-born, and the company is training two dozen more. Another local company, Foresterie DLM, is also staffed mainly by African immigrants.
[. . .]
Most of them speak a polished French that indicates urban middle-class backgrounds and university educations. But those qualifications often are not recognized in their new country, and so to pursue their Canadian dreams — or simply to survive — they take on the punishing forestry jobs that old-stock, white Quebeckers no longer want to do.
Raymond Bertrand, 28, worked for a French bank in Yaoundé after graduating from a Cameroon university. After landing in Montreal in 2006, however, he found that prospective employers didn't recognize the value of his African business-administration degree. So Mr. Bertrand enrolled at the University of Quebec at Montreal to start a second undergraduate degree from scratch. For him, brush cutting is a well-paying summer job, although he has had to leave his pregnant wife behind in Montreal.
"You do it for the money," he says in French. "It's very hard work. You cannot get used to it. It's like the winter."
Not all of his co-workers agree. Mamadou Diane, a debonair-looking musician from Ivory Coast whose stage name is Isaac Roots, says he loves this line of work. "I adore nature. It's my rasta side."
Some of the loggers are refugees whose stories testify to Africa's bloody politics. Prince Yakoub Dao, a 27-year-old merchant from northern Ivory Coast, obtained refugee status after his small shop in Abidjan was torched by pro-government thugs who accused him of being an opposition supporter.
[. . .]
If Africans are more likely than others to accept back-breaking work in the bush, it's perhaps because they cannot land lucrative jobs in Montreal. Quebec's 152,200 black people are as well educated as the rest of the population (14 per cent have a university degree), but they earn 28 per cent less and are twice as likely to be unemployed than other Quebeckers.
Although Québec maintains an immigration policy separate from Canada's--as M.C. Andrews notes in the anthology Quebec: State and Society--founded on supplementing the economic requirements of Québec and maintaining the French language in wide circulation, it hasn't figured out that the non-recognition of foreign credentials is a bad idea. It isn't a racism thing, necessarily: French immigrants face the same problem as well. Immigrants across Canada face these problems, despite a federal program aimed at getting the qualifications earned abroad my immigrants recognized in this country, and despite continued talk of making things better. It'd be a pity for the lumber industry if foreign credentials were taken into account, I suppose.
