True North Timber and Tembec work together for sustainability, with award-winning success. If only they could win more respect.

Loggers are a tough lot. Not much stops them. Rain, mud, bugs, freezing cold, long hours. It’s part of the job so they push through and get it done. 

So you’d think a logging contractor that’s FSC compliant, with award-winning safety credentials, and a major customer that fully supports their outstanding performance, could sit back and say, ok, we’re where we want to be, we can relax. 

Not so. At least, not Ryan Saari, CEO of True North Timber in Chapleau, Ontario. 

Modest about his company’s accomplishments, he says, “We do everything the best we can. But the daily topic around here is improvement. It’s probably our biggest asset as a company - recognizing the fact that every day you have to improve something. You have to change every day.”

Ryan works closely with David Repath, forestry operations superintendent for the Tembec Inc. Chapleau sawmill, True North Timber’s major customer, to the tune of 550,000 tonnes of roundwood per year. It’s part of David’s job to ensure that management controls are in place to maintain FSC certification, a rigorous system that sets standards for every aspect of forest operations, including socio-economic, health and safety, first nations and more. 

“We use an ISO 14001 framework that allows us to identify environmental risk activities, rate the options according to the risk, establish threshold levels and develop solutions,” he explains. “We perform a quarterly conformance check and undergo annual third party verification. On top of that, we’re in one of the most rigorous planning jurisdictions, the province of Ontario, and they do an independent forestry audit every five years.”

“We follow all the rules and regulations and then some,” says Ryan. “We’re a stump-to-mill contractor so there’s no phase exempted. Our operators take a week of training at Tembec every spring to address standard topics and review training modules. It’s become second nature to us now to work in a manner that maintains certification. It’s our culture.”

So, no problems there, right? Certainly not between Tembec and True North Timber, who take a collaborative approach to applying the tough standards day-to-day, working through any issues together. But, according to Ryan, that’s not always the story when dealing with the public.

In spite of all his company’s successes, he often comes face to face with the negative perception some members of the public have of the logging industry, and of loggers in particular. “I can’t believe how misinformed some people continue to be,” he says. “When I tell them what I do, they just stare at me. They don’t want to talk about it. My biggest challenge is keeping operators positive and feeling good about their jobs. It’s hard on the morale.”

Outside the industry there is little understanding of the skill and care it takes to be logging operator who respects the environment. “And there are no other kinds,” Ryan says. “Anyone who doesn’t operate that way is out of business by now, or close to it.”

The negative perception impacts the labor pool, making it difficult for True North Timber to find operators. Not only do young people not want to get into the logging business, experienced operators sometimes give in to the stress of doing a job that gets no respect. “It’s a physically difficult job,” says Ryan, “but the perceptions make it worse. It wears you out to always be asking yourself, how does this look? How is this perceived? People lose faith in forestry and quit.”