Sophie Kuijper Dickson, reporter

Funded by the Local Journalism Initiative

Two surveys are being circulated by the MRC Pontiac collecting public feedback on what direction the MRC’s new AgriSaveur project should take.
The vision for the project, as the MRC’s economic director for agriculture Shanna Armstrong described it, is to open a food processing centre that will offer local producers resources to transform raw goods they produce on-farm into additional products that can be sold to consumers.
The MRC is imagining that along with a new facility with big kitchen spaces available to producers as well as meeting and training spaces, the project would include the development of a local agricultural brand that could be used to market Pontiac products to consumers elsewhere.
“If it’s someone needing space for catering, or someone who has leftover tomatoes and wants to make their own sauces . . . The overall goal is to help producers capture more of the end-dollars of the product,” Armstrong said.
She emphasized that while this is what the MRC is envisioning, the surveys open until Feb. 15 are intended to gather more concrete suggestions as to how such a project could actually benefit local producers.
One survey is designed for local consumers, to get a sense for the local appetite for products that might be created through such a facility. The other, more in-depth, is designed for producers or future users of the facility.
“These surveys are the foundation of what will be the market study to help indicate what the needs are of the community,” Armstrong said.
“We support it one hundred per cent,” said Claude Vallières, president of the Pontiac branch of the Union des producteurs agricole (UPA), translated from French.
“It’s a way to bring value-added to our products,” he said. “It’s a gain for the producers but also for the larger population because it can bring the development of agricultural products, and even new tastes.”
As the project awaits its official direction, to be determined by the results of the surveys, it is also awaiting official management.
The MRC has a second call for tenders open to hire somebody to oversee development of the project.
The first call for tenders, which closed Jan. 16, saw only one application. It was “determined non-compliant and therefore inadmissible,” according to a statement from the MRC sent to THE EQUITY in response to a request for interview with Director General Kim Lesage on this topic.

In Dec. 2023 the Council of Mayors voted to create a not-for-profit organization to administer the operation of the project, and chose Valliéres, along with Mansfield and Pontefract Mayor Sandra Armstrong and MRC Pontiac Director General Kim Lesage as three of five of the organization’s founding members. Two of the seats remain empty.
The person or group selected through the call for tenders will run the not-for-profit.
The project will be funded by a few different pots of money the MRC has collected for the purpose.
It received $450,000 of the $2,032,000 of FRR stream 4 provincial funding for revitalization projects in the region, the largest amount received by a project.
It received $1,041,665 in FRR stream 3 funding from the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing designated for a project that develops a regional strength, such as agriculture, for which a region is already known.
The MRC also received $100,000 from the Entente sectorielle bioalimentaire de l’Outaouais. It is using $62,500 of the total funding to complete these surveys and develop a business plan.
Determining need
“It’s not a secret that there’s not a lot of food transformation that happens in the Pontiac,” Armstrong said, adding that a recent study found as much.
An Outaouais-wide survey of producers conducted by L’Observatoir du développement de l’Outaouais, the results of which were released in 2023, found that each Outaouais MRC had what Armstrong called a “glaring need” for more shared transformation facilities.
This, she said, encouraged the MRC in its ambition to create such a facility, which local producers had already been requesting.
The MRC led a series of in-person consultations last fall to get a better sense of what the interest level was from local producers. Vallières said the general response he saw at all three consultation meetings was positive.
Armstrong acknowledged not every producer would find this kind of facility useful.
“If your only interest is to grow your product, whether it’s cash crop or livestock, and then sell it off on the international market, then this isn’t really something that will impact you very much,” she said.
Mariane Desjardins Roy has been running an apothecary business in Thorne for 12 years. She grows medicinal plants that she transforms into natural health and body products such as soaps and tinctures. It’s all done on her own property.
Roy said when she first caught wind of the plans for the AgriSaveur project, she was pleased the MRC was making an effort to support agricultural businesses like her own, the Little Red Wagon Winery and Coronation Hall, that have been transforming products independently for a many years and in her words, “working so hard to put the Pontiac on the map.”
She said the lack of clarity around what the AgriSaveur trademark would involve and what services the facility would provide leaves her worried the MRC will invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into something that is not actually needed.
“What I’m worried about is that all this money is going to be put into this really high tech building and nobody will use it,” Roy elaborated, explaining she has seen many local agricultural projects “collapsing” because of the MRC’s frequent staff turnover and the top-down approach to development projects.
She wishes the MRC would do more to learn what the agricultural community needs beyond a transformation facility, rather than seeking feedback on one specific project.
More than a transformation facility, Roy would like to see a local one-stop-shop where she and other farmers can sell their products directly to consumers.
“Any producer-transformer in the Pontiac will tell you they need to have a central store to sell their products. That’s a huge need,” she said.
“I’m hoping the AgriSaveur trademark and space will also serve the existing producers that have developed local products over the past 20 years.”