Jerry cans to tankers: Northern Ontario contractor Claude D'Amours celebrated his 25&snot; year in business this June, a remarkable career that began hauling jerry cans of fuel to a rented Tree Farmer in the trunk of a borrowed car. He has since become one of eastern Canada's largest full-service contractors

Canadian Forest Industries, Jun/Jul 2003 by Jamieson, Scott

[Graph Not Transcribed]

Every entrepreneur remembers those tough early years, and Claude D'Amours is no exception. A typical day back in 1978 saw the 16-year-old logger load three 5-gallon fuel cans into the trunk of a borrowed car in the cold darkness, and head out on the two-hour drive to his job site. There he'd hop on the old C5 Tree Farmer line skidder he was renting, work all day, and then drive home with his empty jerry cans to do it all over again the next day.

"You can't imagine how you did it, but it's what you had to do to grow," recalls Claude, who now works chiefly for Domtar Inc. He is still based out of Moonbeam, ON, a small forestry town on Hwy. 11 between Timmins and Hearst, and he still works long hours to get the job done. Still, he gets to sleep in a little later these days.

"Those days, I'd leave around 3:30 in the morning, drive the two hours from Moonbeam to Fraserdale with the fuel, a few spare parts and a tackle-box full of tools in a car I borrowed from my dad, and get back around 7:30 at night. I did that every day, seven days a week except Christmas and New Years, for three years."

Growing Pains

Claude got his start in logging doing piecework for Normick Perron, a lumber operation out of western Quebec. After a few months, Claude's father, Gaston, joined his cut-n-skid operation, no doubt attracted more by Claude's energy than those early working conditions. During the first three years, the duo built their equity and grew to a three-skidder operation by the time Claude turned 19. Around that time, Claude also started bidding on MNR site prep jobs, originally to keep his machines working through the summer and keep the cash flowing during the crazy high interest rate days of the early-'80s (when you get your logging start as a teenager financing new machines at 20% plus, you can face just about anything after that).

"I did a lot of site prep for the MNR and other forestry companies, right up to 1992. It was a good mix - we'd log the winters and then site prep off-season with our skidders. It was a good way to keep working in the clay belt up here through the summer even before the days of flotation tires."

The crew did site prep work across most of Ontario, renting skidders from other contractors to keep up with the bids they'd won.

"At one time we had up to 15 skidders pulling all sorts of attachments - from rakes to Brakke's, drums, barrels and chains - whatever we could get our hands on to keep up with work that went from North Bay at one end of Ontario to Fort Frances at the other. Our best year saw us do 18 000 ha of site prep from April to first frost."

[Graph Not Transcribed]

Throughout all of this Claude continued to expand his logging side at every opportunity. In 1984, at 22 years old, he bought a timber license on the Cochrane Management Unit (CMU) in northeastern Ontario, a 20 000 m[Symbol Not Transcribed]/yr allocation he took over from a logger wanting to retire. Claude's father left the business in 1989 for health reasons, leaving the son as sole owner. In 1995, Claude bought out a fellow contractor, which pushed his volume up to 300 000 m[Symbol Not Transcribed]/yr, a key threshold at the time. The next year, another contractor's operation was purchased, this time in Foleyet, a region further south with terrain and soils that would allow the crew to become a true four-season logging operation. The move also boosted annual production to 450 000 m[Symbol Not Transcribed]/year.

Finally, in September of 2002, Claude took over the management of one of Domtar's two union camps in the Spanish River area near Sudbury (the Day Group took over managing the other). The company's annual volume now tops 700 000 m[Symbol Not Transcribed], making C. D'Amours Contracting Ltd. one of the largest full-service logging contractors east of the Rockies. In a region where tree size varies from 3 trees/m[Symbol Not Transcribed] to over 10, and conifer volumes drop as low as 35 m[Symbol Not Transcribed]/ha, that's no mean feat.

"I'll admit to taking a few chances," the award-winning businessman concedes. "But they turned out to be the right chances, and it worked out."

Full-Service Logger

Claude's current operation is as complex as it is impressive. Logging takes place over four distinct operations and geographical regions, mostly for Domtar but with incremental volumes going to other majors like Tembec, Grant Forest Products (OSB poplar), and Maibec, a specialty mill some 1 000 km away in southern Quebec. "They like the cedar up here, so we send it to them by rail." Operations include:

- The clay belt region around Moonbeam: A winter-only operation with trees in the 8-10 per m[Symbol Not Transcribed] range. Road-building and planning are relatively straightforward, but timing is everything and the winter push relentless.

- Cochrane Management Unit: C. D'Amours own license, also winter only and now a small part of the overall operation.

- Foleyet: Pineland region with much firmer ground allowing summer work, but with more challenges in road layout and construction as well as harvesting tactics. There are also more species and sorts, and more public scrutiny of the operations. Claude works here himself from Sunday night to Wednesday, spending Thursday and Friday in the main office.