The book Bear mountain puts out about building canoes says that their plans are protected. However I was able to reach out to them and discovered that the royalty fee is only $40.
I'm professionally curious as to what the $40 applies to. Since you have not yet added your location to your profile, I'm not sure what country you are in. So, my remaining comments apply only to U.S. law.
To be clear, I am not in this or any thread on this site ever giving legal advice in the attorney-client sense to any individual, but only discussing general legal principles as I might in a publication or lecture.
Paper and digital plans can be copyrighted. This means you can't buy plans and then start making copies of those plans and selling the plans to other people. This is because the creator of the plans remains the copyright owner, and hence is the only one permitted to make copies of the plans.
However, that has nothing to do with making boat hulls from the plans and selling the boats. The boat hulls themselves cannot be copyrighted. The only available legal protection for a boat hull in the U.S. is the 1998 Vessel Hull Design Protection Act, which currently protects probably no canoes. See my more extended explanation in
THIS thread. Again, I know nothing about Canadian law.
I see a FAQ on the Bear Mountain site that says this:
"For those wishing to use a CNC router, we can provide .dxf format digital plans. The charge is $210 for the files, plus an additional $40 royalty for each
set cut after the after first. Please contact us . . . for purchasing details."
I'm not familiar with CNC routers, digital plans or the technicalities of boat building, but I'd want to know whether this $40 purportedly applies: (1) only to cutting additional sets of mold forms from the digital plans, or (2) also to the boats that are produced from one cut set of mold forms and later sold.