Canada on the Skids

Canadians prefer graphite sticks to wood

The Canadian Loonie dollar may be up compared to the US dollar, but other, more disturbing signs point to a looming crisis for our neighbors to the North. Indeed, this headline bodes ill for Canada's all important forest products industry: Sher-Wood to stop making wooden hockey sticks.

They've scored untold millions of goals on rinks, ponds and streets across the country, but in a few weeks' time workers will lovingly fashion the last of Sher-Wood's signature Quebec-made wooden hockey sticks.

It's yet another sign of changing times: After 58 years, Sherwood-Drolet will, starting in January, farm out the mass production of wooden sticks and concentrate on the increasingly popular – and vastly profitable – business of making composite sticks fashioned from graphite, Kevlar and other synthetics.

Forestry experts warn that if this trend toward outsourcing and plastic composites continues, most of Canada will soon be covered with an impenetrable canopy of trees, like the forests of the Carboniferous period. Al Gore, the wealthy American climbitallogist, and Nobel Peace Prize recipient predicted this calamity in his award winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Not only does the production of composite plastics consume precious petroleum, but leaving Canada's vast forests unharvested will cause a dangerous imbalance in the oxygen content of our atmosphere, robbing the rain forests in South America of needed carbon dioxide.

What can you do to save Canada (and perhaps all of human civilization)? Go to your nearest sporting goods store and demand that the petroleum based hockey sticks be removed from the shelves. Write to Sher-Wood and tell them you want only natural, eco-friendly wooden sticks. Ruining our planet shouldn't be a sport.
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The impending demise of the big-circulation print newspapers is expected to add to Canada's over-forestation problems. The misguided American toilet paper rebellion may play a role in this crisis as well.