On the faded white walls of the recently abandoned Huntington Mills textile plant, someone has spray-painted a message in red: "Capitalism strikes again. The Solution: Revolution." The slogan, written in French, underscores the seething anger that grips the southwest Quebec town of Huntingdon. A second textile company is scheduled to close this spring, ripping about 800 jobs out of the frayed industrial fabric of this community of 2,600 people. The wall message is also grimly ironic: A prime agent of Huntingdon's pending economic disaster is one of the most revolutionary regimes of modern times, the Communist Party-ruled People's Republic of China.
An hour southwest of Montreal, Huntingdon lies at the epicentre of an economic earthquake that is shaking the global clothing and textile industry. On Jan. 1, import quotas ended for members of the World Trade Organization, thus opening rich Western markets to suppliers such as India, Pakistan and the world's most formidable low-cost textile producer, China.
In Huntingdon, a 180-year-old mill town, the spectre of an aggressive and unrestrained China dominates conversations. On a single day just before Christmas, the town learned that the 215-employee Huntingdon Mills was bankrupt, and that 600-worker Cleyn & Tinker would soon shut down, selling its customer list to a U.S. rival.
"All the contracts are going down to China," shrugs Paul-André Ricard, 63, over a cup of coffee at Restaurant Papou on Huntingdon's main street. A 26-year veteran in the boiler room at Cleyn & Tinker, he will lose his job by spring.
The residents of Huntingdon don't blame China entirely for their plight. They feel buffeted by trade-aid policies in the United States and Canada that have given tariff preference to Caribbean and extremely poor nations. And they feel betrayed by a federal government that sat idly by as the Canadian dollar soared in value.
"The American dollar started to drop -- that was the thing that hurt us the most," says Yves Nadeau, union president at Cleyn & Tinker. At 58, Mr. Nadeau, too, will soon be out of work, after 38 years with one employer.
Others say the mills' owners, who do not live in the town, threw in the towel too quickly, before the unveiling on Dec. 14 of a $600-million federal assistance package designed to help the textile and apparel industries make the transition to this new trade era.
But Cleyn & Tinker's president and part owner Jonathan Hurstfield-Meyer, who lives in Montreal, says there is nothing in the aid package that could have saved his company. He describes the firm as a victim of the sudden, sharp increase in the Canadian dollar and of misguided government policy.
The aid package, like most other recent federal actions, is largely aimed at reducing duties on imported fabrics to bolster the country's apparel makers, while containing only marginal relief for Canada's basic textile makers, he says.
"It's political grandstanding," complains Mr. Hurstfield-Meyer, a former venture capitalist who was part of a management buyout of the company four years ago. "How is that aid package going to help primary producers? In fact, it's a devastating blow to them."
Mr. Hurstfield-Meyer plays down the China syndrome, but people in Huntingdon feel it is no coincidence that they lost their mills just as China was poised to unleash a flood of apparel on North American markets. Canada already faces a steep and deteriorating trade deficit in clothing and textiles, but the quota-restrained Chinese have been held in relative check -- until now.
The reverberations are being felt across Canada, but particularly in Quebec, where more than half the country's 45,000 textile workers live. In towns like Huntingdon, Magog, in the Eastern Townships, and Montmagny, just east of Quebec City, textile mills offer some of the best jobs, with average compensation including benefits topping $40,000 a year.The mill jobs often act like inheritances, passed down from generation to generation. It was Mr. Nadeau's father, for example, who found him a job at Cleyn & Tinker, where he is now a lead hand in the weft-weaving operations. His electrician friend Gaétan Viau, 53, is the third generation of his family to work there; Mr. Viau's two children are the fourth.
The living is not rich by big city standards -- the average wage at Cleyn & Tinker is $16 an hour -- but Mr. Nadeau can walk to work in seven minutes. The idea of having to commute frightens him. The moment he crosses the big bridges in Montreal, he says, he seizes up with stress.
When the mills fail, whole communities will be brought to their knees. Mayor Stéphane Gendron says the demise of the two factories will slice 25 per cent off his tax revenues. Most of the laid-off workers live in Huntingdon, where unemployment is already 20 per cent and welfare numbers are high.
"We are going to fight our way through, but who is going to be the next Huntingdon?" asks Marcel Thibault, president of Consoltex Inc., a Montreal-based textile firm. "It's not going to be Consoltex, but it is going to be someone else. I can guarantee you that."
Ottawa's economic package is designed to smooth the post-Jan. 1 transition for both the textile industry and the apparel industry, which employs another 95,000 people. Although the two industries are lumped together, their interests often collide. The labour-intensive apparel industry wants the flexibility to buy fabrics at the lowest possible prices anywhere in the world. Industry wages tend to be lower. Work forces are largely first-generation Canadian. And production is mobile -- it can quickly shift to where it makes the best economic sense.
Meanwhile, the capital-intensive textile industry is less transitory, pays higher labour costs, and needs to invest in new technology and higher-value products to justify its Canadian wage base.
For apparel makers, the financial package eliminates tariffs on fibre and yarn inputs, allowing textiles not produced in Canada to enter the country duty-free. But it also contributes an additional $50-million to a program that helps existing textile makers to invest in new equipment and market opportunities. New operators of Huntingdon's closed mills could apply for the money, but the former owners can't use it to start up new plants, a federal official says.
"This is helpful, but it is not the end of it," says Mr. Thibault, echoing the concerns of Mr. Hurstfield-Meyer. "We still need volumes. We still need customers."
The textile industry is now targeting the $6-billion worth of apparel that each year enters the country without a thread of Canadian content. Textile makers want duty-free treatment of clothing imports made from Canadian fabrics, in the same way that the apparel makers won their tariff break.
Mr. Thibault, whose firm has mills in Montmagny and Cowansville, bristles at suggestions that this is protectionism, arguing that the program would be structured so that no textile buyer could be disadvantaged on cost. "This question of protectionism is all bulls---," he says. "If we can't import garments with Canadian fabric, with jobs that generate $40,000 to $45,000, is it really protectionism?"
He says textile companies are responding to pressures from low-cost producers by moving out of mass consumer fabrics and into "technical textiles," such as fire retardant or durable materials geared for military or medical use. But the Chinese, complains Mr. Thibault, are moving there too. "I believe they are undermining the entire North American and European manufacturing structure."
This sentiment is echoed by Mr. Nadeau, who sees the loss of jobs in Huntingdon as simply one step in the steady decline of Canadian working standards and salaries toward Third World levels. These trends are particularly shocking in little Huntingdon, which has long seemed isolated from the tumult shaking the global industry. The town was originally settled by British soldiers after the War of 1812, and in the 1820s, grist mills and lumber mills popped up along the Châteauguay River.
Huntingdon emerged as a textile centre in the 20th century, attracting mills with local owners. During the hard Depression years, entrepreneurs François Cleyn and Alec Tinker came to the town's rescue by building a company that, through mergers, grew to five factories around the town.
Mr. Cleyn, who lived in Huntingdon and is buried there, became a local hero. "They thought Mr. Cleyn was God almighty because he came in and saved this town," Mr. Viau says. "The father image was really living when he was here -- it's not the same now."
Inevitably, perhaps, the dominance of textiles had a downside. Huntingdon's town fathers once maintained a pact with the textile firms, agreeing not to try to attract new industry. Wages rates were thus maintained at artificially low levels, giving the fabric firms an easy ride.
Today, that policy seems perversely cruel for workers such as Mr. Nadeau and Mr. Viau. Now in their 50s, they must find new jobs to bridge the period to 65, when they can start to collect small pensions. It's a particular challenge for Cleyn & Tinker workers who average 46 years old.
As Huntingdon seeks ways to revive, China continues to loom large. Michael Bofinger, local union president at Huntingdon Mills, wants to turn the bankrupt plant into a co-operative between the workers and new investors. He is talking to a potential investor about a venture to make specialized fabrics, but this investor is also weighing an opportunity in China.
Mr. Gendron, the mayor, sees the mills' closing as a great loss, but also as an opportunity. The mayor's desk is cluttered with phone messages and notes for about 50 proposals.
One that he particularly likes is from a Chinese textile company that might locate a North American showroom and small finishing plant in one of the abandoned mills. Ironic as it sounds, he says, "I have great hopes for China."