Cover Story
THE NORTH WEST COMPANY
AND THE HUDSON’S BAY
COMPANY HAD HUGE ROLES
TO PLAY IN THE BUILDING
OF CANADA AS A COUNTRY.
and mapped by Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie,”
MacDonald writes.
“In these often modest stores … people gathered, as they
had done at those vanished trading posts, to exchange goods,
news and gossip, as well as to pick up necessities. Often the
outlets retained the name of a post, harkening back to their
uses during the glorious, outsized fur trade era and in recog-
nition of an active and substantial fur trading business, right
into the 1950s.”
According to MacDonald, the HBC’s northern stores kept
“the legend and lore of the North West Company alive” un-
til 1987 when they were sold to an employee consortium. It
was this group of savvy entrepreneurs who revived the name
North West Company in 1990.
Today, NWC’s 139 Canadian stores include 122 Northern
Stores, which offer a combination of food, general merchan-
dise and financial services to remote northern communities.
The company’s seven NorthMarts target larger markets in
the North and offer an expanded selection that includes fresh
food, clothing and health products.
Marchand, who serves as vice-president, logistics and dis-
tribution, for the North West Company, says some of the
supply chain challenges of outfitting all those stores are simi-
lar to those of the old trading post days.
“We’re still following many of those same routes. Some of
them have been turned into roads but our real challenge isn’t
the road network,” he says. Many of the NWC stores aren’t ac-
cessible by road and need to have provisions shipped (at least
part of the way) by rail, ship or aircraft. Some 80 NWC stores
are located in fly-in communities which may or may not have
the benefit of a winter ice road for part of the year.
“There’s nothing like it that I’ve ever seen,” says Marchand,
who has more than 30 years of supply chain/logistics experi-
ence, 20 of them in the Canadian military. Weather, of course,
is a huge obstacle, he explains, and it’s not just the bone-chill-
ing extremes of an Arctic winter. In the spring and fall, ice
dams, flooding, fog, rainstorms and blizzards are just some of
the conditions the NWC’s logisticians regularly face.
“Every day, there’s a challenge to overcome, and every day
is a little bit different,” Marchand notes. “To me that’s fasci-
nating, putting a modern logistic spin on something that’s
been going on for so many years.
“You’re moving product through five or six different hubs,
using three or four different modes of transportation, just to
get it to those communities. To me, that’s the real charm of
the job. I actually get excited about it because it is so complex
and it has such a history,” he says.
“I consider this to be one of the most complex logistics
routes in the world, just to serve all these remote commu-
nities,” Marchand adds. “It’s just an amazing challenge to get
things to the top of the world.”
In the early days, the NWC was alert and responsive to the
difficult and mostly uncharted territories where the compa-
ny wished to conduct business. Examples include the use of
small canoes known as canots du nord, which enabled the
early voyageurs to successfully traverse the long and often
treacherous trade routes into the heart of the continent.
“This craft was an extraordinary engineering feat, custom
designed for the Canadian Shield, while still holding two tons
and six paddlers. It could be carried across portages, some
as long as 10 miles, by just two powerful and tireless men,”
MacDonald writes. He cites the use of pemmican as anoth-
er adaptive strategy that helped revolutionize the NWC’s
success.
Made of pulverized dried buffalo meat, animal tallow and
Saskatoon berries, the pemmican bartered from aboriginals
and the Métis provided canoe crews with their essential fuel.
Marchand says this can-do attitude remains a core value
of the North West Company today. “Being able to adapt to a
situation where you are going into some location and every-
thing is stacked up against you — that’s something we still
figure out how to do. We haven’t lost that,” he says.
“We built a business doing things that other people feel are
almost too tough to do and may not be worth it. We’re talking
SUPPLY CHAIN CANADA • QUARTER 1 2017 • 11