Shipping Containers Smiths Falls, Ontario

By Paul LeBlanc owner, and Christian LeBlanc second-generation operator, Van Blanc Ent. Inc.

Reading time: 12 minutes

The Hershey, Canopy, Hershey cycle and what it means for buyers

Smiths Falls is the rare Ontario town that lost its industrial heart, then bought a different one with cannabis money, and is now watching the original heart move back in. The Hershey chocolate factory on Hershey Drive opened in the early 1960s and ran for four decades as the town’s defining employer. When Hershey closed the plant in 2007 around 700 unionised jobs left with it, and the town spent the better part of a decade in a difficult adjustment. Tweed Marijuana Inc., later renamed Canopy Growth Corporation, bought the facility in 2014 and rode federal cannabis legalisation into a workforce that peaked near 1,800 in 2018.

That peak did not hold. Canopy Growth’s operations downsized through the early 2020s, and in mid-2023 the company sold the Hershey Drive facility back to Hershey Canada Inc. in a major transaction. The cannabis era left fewer than 200 employees behind on its way out. As of the most recent reporting, Hershey has confirmed reacquisition but disclosed little about the operational future of the plant. The town is waiting on the next chapter, and the contractor base that grew up around the cycles is in motion either way.

For our work, this matters in two concrete ways. First, transition periods produce demand for secured jobsite storage. Whatever the next operational use of the Hershey Drive facility looks like, getting it from where it has been to where it will be involves trades work, equipment moves, and lay-down storage. Second, a town of roughly 9,500 people that has lived through two cycles like this carries a particular kind of buyer: pragmatic, value-conscious, and immediately suspicious of any supplier whose pricing or delivery promise sounds too clean. Smiths Falls buyers ask hard questions. We answer them in plain language, and the relationship usually opens up from there.

A Rideau Canal lock town with the highest single lift on the system

Smiths Falls sits roughly 78 kilometres southwest of Ottawa on the Rideau Canal National Historic Site the 202-kilometre water route Lieutenant-Colonel John By’s Royal Engineers cut through the Canadian Shield between 1826 and 1832. The canal links Ottawa to Kingston through a chain of locks that climbs over the Rideau height of land and then descends to Lake Ontario. Smiths Falls is the operational midpoint, and it carries lock infrastructure that no other town on the system has.

In 1974, Parks Canada replaced a flight of three traditional locks in the heart of town with a single combined lock that lifts vessels 26 feet in one chamber. That is the highest single lift of any lock on the Rideau Canal. Right next to it sits the Old Slys lockstation and the Detached lockstation, all within a short walk of the historic downtown. The canal’s lock gates themselves are still manufactured in Smiths Falls. The trade tradition that supported the original construction of the canal is operationally intact two centuries later, and the town is the place where that tradition lives.

The recreational economy that the canal generates is substantial. Cottage and seasonal-residence properties line the Rideau system from Smiths Falls north toward Westport and south toward Kingston, with summer boat traffic moving between Lake Ontario and the Ottawa River through the lock chain. The recreational-property owner is one of the steady customer types for our Smiths Falls deliveries. They need somewhere to put boats, lift equipment, lawn machinery, and the seasonal infrastructure that does not belong in the residence over the winter. A 20ft Wind & Watertight container on a gravel pad behind the property handles that need at a fraction of the cost of building a winterised outbuilding.

Rideau corridor recreational property and the storage rhythm

The seasonal rhythm of Rideau Canal recreational property runs to a predictable calendar. The lock system opens for navigation in late May and closes in mid-October. Cottage owners along the corridor run their boats, lift their docks, and use the property heavily through that window. The closing weekend in October is the moment when the year’s accumulated equipment has to go somewhere covered, weather-tight, and rodent-resistant for six and a half months of Eastern Ontario winter.

For the property owners we work with along the corridor, the calculation is straightforward. A 20ft Wind & Watertight container delivered to a Lanark County property holds two snowmobiles, a Sea-Doo, lawn equipment, summer furniture, and the cottage’s accumulated tooling with room to spare. It pays for itself against the cost of an equivalent winter storage rental in roughly two seasons. After that, the math is gravy. A buyer who keeps the property for fifteen years and amortises the bin across that horizon is paying a few hundred dollars a year for storage that the next generation of the family will inherit when the cottage passes down.

The geography of placement matters in this corridor. Many Rideau Canal properties have moderate-to-steep lot grades down toward the water, and the bin needs to land on the upper or middle terrace of the lot rather than at the waterline. Tilt-deck delivery handles most of these placements without difficulty, but the conversation about where the bin goes happens before the truck rolls. We confirm site access, gate width, overhead clearance, and the specific gravel or compacted-base condition during the order process. The driver who shows up at a Rideau cottage on delivery day is not finding out about the slope for the first time.

A trades economy that builds the gates the canal still runs on

Smiths Falls’s trades economy is not the warehouse-and-distribution pattern that defines the towns along the 401 corridor. It is closer to the small-shop fabrication tradition that the canal-construction era originally established. Steel work, mechanical assembly, equipment maintenance, and the Parks Canada lock-gate manufacturing all operate out of small-to-mid-sized facilities in and around the town. The Lanark County trades base includes the kind of buyer who knows steel grades by feel, who reads a container’s floor and welds in the first ten seconds of stepping into it, and who values an honest grade label over a polished sales pitch.

For these buyers, our cargo-worthy 20ft units are a frequent fit. The grade carries a recent re-inspection for international shipping certification, the floor and structural frame are evaluated under the same standards that put it on a vessel originally, and the cosmetic wear costs a fraction of what a one-trip unit would. A Smiths Falls fabrication shop running a CW 20ft as overflow tooling storage is paying for the steel, the structural integrity, and the lock bars. The cosmetic surface is incidental for that buyer’s use case. Our pricing reflects that: a 20ft Cargo Worthy delivered to Smiths Falls puts trades-grade storage on the property at a cost the buyer can defend against the working life of the steel.

The contractor work tied to the Hershey-facility transition is harder to predict in advance, but it is real. Trades operations in and around Smiths Falls have been adding to their tooling and lay-down capacity in anticipation of the activity that the next operational chapter at Hershey Drive will produce. Some of that demand reaches our Brantford yard early, before the activity it is preparing for materialises. We have been delivering into Lanark County trades shops for over two decades, and the conversations follow a familiar pattern across cycles.

Paul, on watching one factory reinvent itself twice

The relationship-across-cycles pattern is the through-line of Van Blanc’s Eastern Ontario customer base. Smiths Falls in particular has produced families who buy a bin, use it through one phase of life, sell it within their network when that phase ends, and the next buyer inherits a unit whose history they can trace to a name they know. Rural Eastern Ontario relationship economies have always worked this way, and the container business benefits from it because the steel itself is durable enough to support the chain.

Paul started Van Blanc in 1995 after four decades in import and export trade with Asia, originally moving footwear and bulk goods before recognising that the steel boxes the goods travelled in were a more durable opportunity than the goods inside them. The company has been operating from the same Brantford footprint since the founding, and the Eastern Ontario customer base has accumulated across the full thirty years. Smiths Falls is one of the long-relationship towns in that accumulation.

What containers do Smiths Falls buyers order?

The four grades are not interchangeable, and the right one for a Smiths Falls property depends on what the bin is going to do. One-Trip is essentially a new-build container that has crossed the ocean once with cargo to offset the freight. Cargo Worthy is used inventory recently re-certified for international shipping, with the floor and frame evaluated under that standard. Wind & Watertight is used inventory guaranteed to seal against weather and rodents but not re-certified for ocean transport. As-Is is the lowest grade, sold cheap for buyers with specific non-storage applications. We carry all four. We tell buyers which one fits before they pay, not after.

The vocabulary in Smiths Falls reflects the regional mix. Older rural buyers say “sea can,” picked up from generations of farm and cottage usage in Eastern Ontario. Trades-economy buyers tend toward “container” or occasionally “c-can” inherited from professional crew language. Recreational-property owners moving up from Ottawa weekends say “shipping container” or “storage bin.” The product is the same. The language is buyer-revealing, and we adjust the conversation to match the customer.

Three Smiths Falls container stories

The grade ranges and use-case categories above are abstractions. Here is what the work actually looks like on the ground, three Smiths Falls deliveries from the past few years, anonymised.

The Rideau cottage closer: Family with a year-round residence near Smiths Falls and a recreational property further north along the Rideau corridor. Bought a 20ft Wind & Watertight in 2022 for the recreational property as a winter consolidation point: two snowmobiles, the Sea-Doo trailer, summer furniture, and the cottage’s accumulated tooling all going into the same bin in mid-October each year. Container sits on a gravel pad behind the property, has come through three Eastern Ontario winters with intact seals, and is now part of the family’s seasonal-close routine.

The Lanark County fabricator: Trades shop operating out of the Smiths Falls industrial corridor, running steel work and mechanical assembly for regional clients. Bought a 40ft Cargo Worthy in 2023 to add lay-down capacity for client-staged inventory that the existing shop floor could no longer accommodate. The bin sits behind the building on the property’s gravel yard, holding bulk steel stock and partially completed assemblies between client pickups. The owner asked to walk our Brantford yard before placing the order. We met him there on a Saturday and he picked the specific unit himself before signing.

The downtown small business: Restaurant and event-space operation in the Smiths Falls historic core, near the combined lockstation, that needed exterior-visible storage for furniture, event equipment, and outdoor service inventory. Bought a 20ft One-Trip in 2024 specifically because the bin would be visible from the street and the property’s streetscape mattered. The unit landed on a prepared concrete pad behind the building, with the original factory paint still presenting cleanly. Same buyer is now in conversation with us about a second unit for a residential workshop conversion.

Honest freight: five and a half hours from our yard

Brantford to Smiths Falls is roughly 530 kilometres by Highway 401 and Highway 15, which puts the drive at five to five and a half hours under standard conditions. We dispatch on the long-haul Eastern Ontario route, which puts standard delivery in the three-to-five-day window for Smiths Falls. The route covers our trucks’ largest single Ontario distance from Brantford after the Northern Ontario premium-freight zones, and the freight is priced accordingly.

The honesty about that is the same honesty we apply to every quote. The container price is one number, the delivery is a separate number, and both are stated up front before the order is confirmed. No hidden tilt-deck surcharges show up at the gate. No fuel adjustment appears on the invoice that wasn’t priced in the quote. If a Smiths Falls buyer has site-access constraints (a narrow farm lane, a tight residential driveway, an overhead utility line at the property entrance), we discuss them during the quote and adjust the dispatch plan, not on the day of delivery. Every quote includes a real lead time, not a hopeful one.

The premium for the long-haul Eastern Ontario corridor is what it is. We do not pretend it isn’t there. The buyers who keep coming back to Van Blanc from Smiths Falls do so because the all-in number we quote is the all-in number they pay, and because the bin that arrives is the bin they ordered. That has held across thirty years of operation, and it holds at five and a half hours of haul as cleanly as it holds at fifteen minutes.

The Facebook trap reaches Lanark County too

Many people call us saying they can get a bin far cheaper on Facebook. Two weeks later they call back, scammed. Don’t fall for it. The pattern reaches Eastern Ontario as predictably as it reaches anywhere else, and Smiths Falls buyers are not exempt because the town is small or because Lanark County feels insulated from urban-style fraud. The listings are coordinated by people who do not live in Ontario, who use stock photos of containers they have never owned, and who collect deposits from buyers across the country before disappearing.

The tells are consistent. The price is suspiciously low, far below the realistic market for the grade being advertised. The seller will not show you the unit in person. Payment is requested up front, in full, by e-transfer. The property address listed on the ad is vague or non-existent. The phone number rings to a voicemail that was set up the week before. By the time the buyer realises the bin is not coming, the seller has gone dark and the funds are gone.

Our policy: walk the bin before you pay. Our Brantford yard is open, the inventory is real, and we encourage Smiths Falls buyers who are uncertain about a supplier to make the drive at least once before placing the order. The five and a half hours from Smiths Falls to Brantford and back is one Saturday. The thirty-year track record at the other end of the trip is what the day produces.

Frequently asked questions

Worth the drive, even from Smiths Falls