Marianne Berube: Public Sector Award Winner, North Bay.

• Author: Stewart, Nick
• Position: A Decade of Honouring Achievements

With a Northern Ontario forest industry looking for an answer to its flagging fortunes, Marianne Berube has spent seven years asking all the right questions.

As the Ontario director of Wood WORKS!, an industry-backed initiative to promote the use of wood in non-residential markets, Berube has helped to directly influence 85 projects in Ontario to use wood instead of steel or concrete, a feat worth up to $54 million in Northern wood product sales.

"If you look at Europe and the Scandinavian countries, they take pride in wood, and we don't," Berube says.

"In Ontario, it's the second-biggest contributor to our economy, and people don't get that. When I mention it, they are wowed because they didn't realize how important it is and that we need to support that industry."

After spending 18 years within various managerial roles in the North Bay banking industry, Berube found in 2000 that further job growth would only be possible by transferring to another city, which was not an option given that her husband, Andre, is a North Bay police officer.

With a growing sense of frustration, she decided to cast caution to the wind by exploring different career avenues. When Wood WORKS! sought to establish its first Ontario pilot project in North Bay that same year, she jumped at the chance, and leveraged her skills into her current role.

Her background in banking initially left her with little experience in the wood construction sector, however, her endless tenacity and determination has made all the difference.

I love a challenge, and it just goes to show that with enough determination and will to act, you can develop a good skill set and do anything you put your mind to."

Foremost among the challenges is to develop a wood culture in the minds of industry decision-makers, city planners and architects, who believe that non-residential construction is synonymous with steel. She offers one-on-one technical support for wood projects and has created regional seminars and an annual Wood Solutions Fair as testament to her passion to convert industry professionals into thinking wood first. In fact, she even convinced former Minister of Natural Resources John Snobelen to institute a ministry policy mandating the use of wood in its projects.

"We still have a long way to go, but we're incrementally making our mark. We look at 85 per cent of our wood being shipped south of the border, and if we could just change 10 per cent and use that much more wood in Ontario, it...