Quesnel in the B.C. Interior, Red Rock in northwestern Ontario and Newfoundland's Stephenville are typical of small-town Canada. They sprang up in remote regions of the country as people capitalized on the nation's vast natural resources, quickly evolved into close-knit communities, and fostered fierce loyalty among the people who chose to make their homes there.

Now — like many communities across Canada whose prosperity is hitched to a single, troubled industry — the three towns are fighting for survival.

For years, they fed the demand for lumber and paper. Despite the ups and downs of the economy, sawmills and pulp mills provided the townspeople with a good living. For many families, these places have been home for generations.

However, the $84-billion Canadian forestry industry has fallen on tough times of late. Production costs are skyrocketing, lumber prices falling, and offshore competition intensifying.

Roughly 10,000 full-time jobs have disappeared in the sector in the past three years, according to the 150,000-member Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union, the country's largest union of forest industry workers. In January 2007, the Ontario Forest Industries Association, a provincial trade group, estimated that Ontario alone has lost more than 4,400 forestry jobs since the spring of 2005.

Add to that the three or four spinoff jobs that depend on each forestry job, and it's a recipe for economic chaos.

As the industry tries to improve its bottom line through layoffs and plant closures, and as new forces come into play in the various regions, the future of all three towns is on the line. For places like Red Rock, Quesnel and Stephenville, the question is whether they can survive — let alone continue to thrive — without forestry-sector income to support them.

Are Quesnel, Red Rock and Stephenville destined to become relics of Canada's industrial past, or is this just an evolutionary phase for their economies? Can they attract new industry and employment or will their populations dwindle until they become ghost towns? What happens to even the strongest community spirit and family bonds under extreme economic pressure?

Economic challenges

Red Rock is a prime example, a town where residents used to joke that the odour coming from the pulp and paper mill was "the smell of money." Indeed, mill jobs were the main contributor to the $74,660 average income enjoyed by its 370 families at the beginning of the decade.

But a recent one-two punch knocked out both of the region's primary employers in quick succession and left the community reeling. The pulp and paper mill around which Red Rock was built shut its doors in November 2006. Then in early 2007, residents watched helplessly as a fire destroyed the sawmill in nearby Nipigon.

Statistics Canada reports that Red Rock's population dropped from more than 1,200 in 2001 to about 1,000 in 2006 — and that was based on figures taken before the mill closure and fire. With few employment alternatives in the area, Red Rock — located several kilometres off the Trans-Canada Highway on a remote stretch of the north shore of Lake Superior — has been scrambling to attract new employers even as its skilled tradespeople are lured away by work in other regions.

Stephenville, in the Bay St. George area on Newfoundland's west coast, is a larger town in similar economic straits. It began as a fishing and farming community in the mid-1800s, and grew quickly in the 1950s, thanks to its military base. When the base shut down in 1966, businesses from brewing to aviation tried to fill the void, but it was the opening of a linerboard mill in 1970 that kept the local economy running.

In 1981, Abitibi converted the mill to a newsprint operation and Stephenville boomed. By 2005, the average mill worker earned almost $80,000 per year and every one of the more than 250 jobs in the mill created an estimated three more in the community of about 6,500. But in December of the same year, squeezed by the same economic vise as Red Rock, the Stephenville mill shut its doors.

Through 2006 and into 2007, Stephenville has been evaluating a number of promising options and working to attract new employers or jump-start alternative industries. Meanwhile, some people have packed up and left, while many families that remain have endured agonizing splits as they watch parents or spouses head off to find work in economic hot spots such as Alberta's oil-rich Fort McMurray, sending back money to cover the bills and making occasional visits home.

On the other side of the country, Quesnel faces different woes. Unlike Red Rock and Stephenville, the B.C. town is booming. But residents know they have only a few more years until things go bust, and the town's population dropped from more than 10,000 in 2001 to about 9,300 in 2006, according to Statistics Canada — one of the steepest rates of population decline for a community of that size in the 2006 census.

Quesnel's problem is that it's a mill town nestled in the heart of a remote forest being steadily eaten by an infestation of mountain pine beetles. As a result, the local forestry industry is operating at full tilt in an effort to harvest the surrounding trees before they are lost to the pest. Residents know they have roughly a decade, perhaps less, before the trees and the source of their prosperity will be gone, and the search is on for new sources of employment to sustain the town.

The question is whether a new economic foundation can be built before the bugs eat the remaining timber out from under Quesnel.

Three Towns

The towns ultimately face a common problem, one shared in a broader sense by many communities across the country whose economic lifeblood is pumped by a single industry.

But each town — Quesnel, Red Rock and Stephenville — is also subject to a unique set of circumstances and has different options.

CBC.ca's Three Towns goes beyond the balance sheets, the layoff tallies and the corporate financial outlooks of typical plant-shutdown news coverage, and examines the human impact. Its goal is to strip away the numbers and, over the coming months, provide a view of these evolving business stories from the perspective of the local people involved.

Along with in-depth background on the social and economic histories of Red Rock, Stephenville and Quesnel, Three Towns provides ongoing accounts from local people about what life in these towns is like today, how things are changing, and how the communities are coming to grips with the economic realities that will shape their future.

These towns have everything to gain — or lose — as this modern-day survival-in-the-woods story unfolds.

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