In the bag

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/07/2018 (2658 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Good luck gleaning much information about the St. Boniface Bag Co. from the internet.

Sure, the 69-year-old business, which, true to its name, stocks a wide variety of bags including jute bags, firewood bags and heavy-duty, one-ton-capacity polypropylene bags, garners a brief mention on the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce’s website.

And OK, if you dig deep enough, you’ll eventually come across a news story from May 2017 when owner David Harder, who took over in 2001 following the death of his father Peter, shipped 300,000-plus sandbags to flood-affected areas in western Quebec.

Aside from that, if you’re really curious about what goes on at 426 Goulet St., your best bet is to head there in person and ask Harder to give you a quick tour.

(It isn’t a stretch to say St. Boniface Bag Co. is as much a museum as it is a place of work. On its walls hang dozens of folk-artsy, decades-old bags: examples of units Harder’s father used to produce for long-forgotten entities such as the Captain Cook Coffee Company, Victoria Brand Feeds and Randy’s Red Dandies potatoes. A-ha moment: who knew a local company called Winnipeg Cereal used to sell grits? Medium white buckwheat grits, at that, says the lettering on a weathered, burlap bag.)

“No, we don’t have one of those fancy web pages or whatever it is the kids call it,” says Harder, who doesn’t own a cellphone and prefers a sharpened pencil and word search puzzle book to an iPad when he’s killing time, waiting for the phone to ring.

“I’ve been told we’re one of the best-kept secrets in town and I can’t really argue with that. Most people, the only time they need a bag is when they need a bag,” he states matter-of-factly.

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Harder’s father was one of the first people hired at St. Boniface Bag Co. when it opened in 1949. Two years later, the original owner — “a Belgian fellow named Julien,” Harder recalls — had a heart attack, after which he announced his plan to sell the business.

Before putting it up for sale, he called a meeting to see if any of his nine employees were interested in taking over. The only person who raised his hand was 25-year-old Peter Harder.

“It wasn’t always easy for Dad to make ends meet, back in the day,” Harder says, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a white, Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt.

“We were six boys in the family and to make sure there was always enough food on the table, he used to get up at five in the morning to help unload trucks at a Dominion store on Marion Street, before going to his own place.”

Harder, 61, guesses he was 11 or 12 when his father began paying him $1.25 an hour to help sew bags after school. In 1975, he dropped out of Nelson McIntyre Collegiate to work there full time.

“Most people have plans or dreams of what they’re going to be when they grow up, but that was never the case with me,” says Harder, who has only taken six weeks vacation in the last 45 years.

“I never wanted to work anywhere else, and I’ve never particularly wanted to go anywhere, either. I might regret that one day when I’m sitting in my rocking chair, but I guess we’ll see.”

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Because sandbags are such a big part of the biz, Harder, who also has a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in St. Boniface where he stores extra inventory, begins tracking flood forecasts just after Christmas. Like his father, he has never wished hardship or disaster on a single soul.

At the same time, because high water levels directly affect his bottom line, he has to be prepared for whatever Mother Nature dishes out.

“My gosh, busy, busy, busy…” he remarks, when asked about 1997’s Flood of the Century, which all but wiped out downtown Grand Forks and turned southern Manitoba into a giant lake.

That spring, Harder and his father sold in the neighborhood of 16 million sandbags to the city and province, a number that, at first glance, sounds like a windfall.

Except that’s not the way his dad operated, Harder is quick to point out.

“Dad was a gem of a man who never gouged anybody his whole life. In fact, he always lowered his prices whenever there was a flood. In 1997, for example, the normal price of a sandbag was 40 cents.

“If you do the math, multiplying 40 cents by 16 million bags, well, that’s a good chunk of change. Except Dad only charged half-price that year, and barely made a profit. ‘It’s nice to have money,’ he used to say, ‘but don’t make it your god.’”

At its peak, the St. Boniface Bag Co. employed 12 people. These days, it’s just Harder and his daughter Julie, who has managed the books for her father since moving back to Winnipeg from La Broquerie.

No sooner does Harder say things are nowhere near as busy as they once were, due in large part to overseas competition, than he spends the next 10 minutes excusing himself to answer a phone suddenly ringing off the hook.

First, it’s a representative of a northern mining company who wants to buy 50 storage bags for a worksite in Rankin Inlet. Next it’s a person looking for a few pre-packed bags of sand to weigh down the back of his vehicle. The third call is from a construction crew supervisor, who orders 25 bales of burlap, each bale of which consists of 1,000 yards of burlap.

“They use it for curing cement…they lay it over the top of the new road they’re putting down,” Harder says, when asked what would possess a person to purchase almost 23 kilometres’ worth of burlap.

‘No, we don’t have one of those fancy web pages or whatever it is the kids call it. I’ve been told we’re one of the best-kept secrets in town and I can’t really argue with that. Most people, the only time they need a bag is when they need a bag’– David Harder

For the time being, Harder isn’t contemplating retirement. Because small, family-run operations such as his are getting scarce, he believes he would be doing a disservice to his customers, many of whom he’s been dealing with for decades, if he closed shop and forced them to go elsewhere.

“Some of the folks who come to me don’t necessarily want to order from overseas, because most of the time they don’t need, or can’t afford to buy, the minimum number of bags some of those foreign companies force them to buy,” he says.

“Here, we’re just as happy to sell you one (bag) as 1,000.”

Finally, Harder has become accustomed to questions along the lines of “And you make money doing that?” when he meets people for the first time and they discover what he does for a living.

“I tell ‘em ‘I guess so because here I am, still doing it.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca