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April 2009 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Trois-Rivières Feature: Vikings Feature: Métis population The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

The historic quarter of Trois-Rivières has become an attractive backdrop for cultural events such as Festivoix, an annual music fest. Photo: Benoit Aquin

Feature story Trois-Rivières: A tale of tenacity Map: Explore the region Photos: Places and faces More... Video: The city and its culture CBC Radio: Interview with author Monique Roy-Sole Timeline: Major events shaping Trois-Rivières 375th anniversary: Festivities Resources www.tourismetroisrivieres.com www.375tr.com

Walking along the picturesque main streets of Vieux-Trois-Rivières, it is easy to forget the city’s not-so-distant struggles with industrial decline. Cafés, restaurants, art galleries andmuseums have given new life to refurbished centuries-old buildings. Workers are busy setting up stages near the port, in parks and on streets for FestiVoix de Trois-Rivières, a 10-day music fest that will usher in the 2008 summer-festival season and attract 320,000 visitors. The walls of buildings throughout downtown, from heritage homes to a funeral parlour, are adorned with poetry verses, a nod to the Festival International de la Poésie to which poets from around the world have been flocking over the past 24 years. These are but a few of the events that have helped shape Trois-Rivières’ dynamic cultural life and revitalize its downtown, earning an award in 2005 from the Washington, D.C.-based International Downtown Association. More recently, Trois-Rivières has garnered the Canadian Heritage designation as the 2009 Cultural Capital of Canada for cities of 125,000 residents or more.

“We have everything here to perform well on the economic front,” says the former merchant marine captain, who chose to live in Trois-Rivières after working in Germany and throughout his native province, from Montréal to Rimouski. “We have many advantages, including our geographic location. We are in the heart of Quebec, close to the large centres of Montréal and Québec, and we have a university and a port.”

Attracting a young, skilled and loyal workforce will be the city’s main challenge over the coming years, says Lévesque. He hopes that the planned technology park at the confluence of Rivière Saint-Maurice and the St. Lawrence—which will specialize in clean energy, ecological industrial cleaning products and telecommunications— will do just that.

“People who work in techno-parks are highly educated and are looking for a certain quality of life,” says Lévesque. “Often, techno-parks are located in industrial parks or along highways. Ours will be on one of the most beautiful properties in Quebec, on the water, near parks and near Vieux- Trois-Rivières.”

The flagship of the city’s new economy is Marmen, a company that manufactures and services metal parts for the energy sector, including oil and gas, metals andmining, pulp and paper, forestry and wind energy. The family-run business was started in 1972 as a small machine shop by Fernand Pellerin, who was raised in Cap-de-la-Madeleine. Three of Pellerin’s five children now manage the company, which employs nearly 1,000 people in five plants in Trois-Rivières and Matane, on the Gaspé Peninsula. Marmen ranks among the top three manufacturers of wind towers in North America, supplying such corporate giants as General Electric.

Everything about Marmen is big. The soaring ceilings in its orderly plant in the Cap-de-la-Madeleine sector of Trois- Rivières were built to accommodate the jumbo parts it manufactures, whether for hydro turbines or mining equipment. In a hangar outside, a 30-metre freshly painted windtower section — one of three needed to build an average tower—is ready for shipping. And the company’s plans for the future are no less expansive. Conducting a tour of the factory, Annie Pellerin, Marmen’s vivacious vice-president of human resources and communications, explains how the company is planning to expand its wind-tower operations, which account for 55 percent of its production, to the American Midwest. (As this issue goes to press, Marmen has temporarily put those plans on hold due to the uncertainties of the global economy.)

“My father was audacious. He saw opportunities. He always said, ‘The train is passing by, jump on,’” says Pellerin in her rapid delivery, stopping occasionally to chat with a machinist or to check in with a technician. “In 2002, we made the leap into wind energy, for which we weren’t known. And now we’re among the best-known players in the industry.”

Despite such successes, Trois-Rivières is still grappling with the residual effects of its deindustrialization and its boom-and-bust history. A few blocks from the revitalized downtown are dilapidated neighbourhoods. Last summer, the Aleris International, Inc. plant, which manufactures aluminum parts for car radiators, was closed by its American parent company, putting 450 people out of work. Although it’s too early to tell how the current global economic situation will affect Trifluviens, who are all too familiar with the ravages of economic downturns, the collective mood remains guarded but optimistic.

“Despite the fact that Aleris closed, the city is managing relatively well,” says Yves Marchand, executive director of the Société de développement économique de Trois-Rivières. “Among other factors, the latest unemployment figures are reassuring.” Indeed,Trois-Rivières’ unemployment rate stood at 6.5 percent at the end of 2008, just below Canada’s 6.6 per-cent. Residential construction is booming, ahead of larger centres such as Montréal, Québec and Ottawa-Gatineau, and housing prices are among the lowest in the country.

For many Trifluviens, the quality of life in Trois-Rivières outweighs any swing in the economy. Marie Chartier, the great-granddaughter of Louis-Philippe Normand, grew up with her brother and two sisters in Trois-Rivières in a century-old house on the St. Lawrence, where a portrait of Normand, painted by the illustrious Quebec artist Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté, hung over the mantel. Chartier and her sisters were schooled at the Ursulines’ Collège Marie-del’Incarnation. Other than a year spent at Université Laval in Québec and a few years working in Montréal, Chartier, who is the mother of two teenage boys and whose luminous smile is matched by her dynamism, has spent her whole life in the Trois-Rivières region. Over her career, the 46-year-old director of strategic planning for Bell Aliant, a telecommunications firm, has lost two jobs to company closures. But that’s not enough to make her want to leave her city.

“The city has been hit hard time after time,” says Chartier. “However, it’s always been a good place in which to live. Trois-Rivières is a beautiful city that has all the advantages of a big city without the inconveniences.”

Chartier and her 40-year-old sister Lucie, a civil engineer and mother of three who returned to Trois-Rivières after 11 years in the United States and Germany, rave about their 10-minute commutes to work in Trois-Rivières from their homes on the St. Lawrence’s south shore — not to mention the affordable housing and the proximity of the river, which has been in their blood since they were children growing up on its bank and sailing its waters. “The St. Lawrence River is majestic,” says Lucie, who attributes her love of the seaway to her father, a former commodore of the marina at Île Saint-Quentin. “It is a great treasure that we have.” For Marie, living along the St. Lawrence is “a constant source of regeneration.”

As Trois-Rivières reconnects with the rivers that shaped it—primarily through the planned development at the confluence of the Saint-Maurice and the St. Lawrence—it, too, may draw strength and a renewed vitality from returning to its source. No longer the workhorses of the industrial past, the waterways and their shores will serve as a place to gather, live and innovate, a starting point from which the city can forge a more sustainable future.

Monique Roy-Sole is a senior editor with Canadian Geographic. Photographer Benoit Aquin is based in Montréal.