Five years since Stephen McNeil’s Liberal government placed a moratorium on fracking in Nova Scotia, the Progressive Conservative party seems intent on putting it back on the agenda. In February this year, the two PC members of the Standing Committee on Natural Resources and Economic Development — MLAs Pat Dunn and Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin — proposed...
Nova Scotia has a mercury problem
Facilities associated with Northern Pulp Mill's proposed effluent pipe are immediately adjacent to a mercury-contaminated toxic waste site left over from the Canso Chemicals operation
Cover photo: A Mad Tea-Party by Lewis Carroll with the Hatter, March Hare and Alice. It turns out that using a lot of mercury, as human beings have done for centuries — in everything from haberdashery to gold production to medicine — wasn’t such a great idea after all. Although this realization came only in […]
Spill at Moose River gold mine raises environmental concerns
Atlantic Gold springs an effluent leak, plugs a new mine, and sells itself to investors
Cover photo: the tailings facility at the Touquoy gold mine. Photo: Saint Mary’s River Association Atlantic Gold’s manager of environment and permitting, James Millard, calls it a “spill” or a “loss of control” caused by a “gasket failure.” By whatever name, the event happened on the night of January 3, 2019, at the company’s open […]
The Canso Chemicals mystery: With the chemical plant long gone, why is the company still alive? And what about all that mercury pollution?
Canso Chemicals hasn’t produced any chemicals for 29 years, but — contrary to what I wrote in the Halifax Examiner in “Northern Pulp’s environmental documents: missing mercury, a pulp mill that never was, and oodles of contradictions” — the company lives on. Sort of. For two decades Canso Chemicals produced chlorine for the pulping process […]
Northern Pulp’s environmental documents: missing mercury, a pulp mill that never was, and oodles of contradictions
Cover photo: “Point D,” where treated Northern Pulp wastewater currently flows from Boat Harbour into the Northumberland Strait, just a few hundred metres from Pictou Landing First Nation. There is much to wade through in the documents Northern Pulp submitted to Nova Scotia Environment on February 7, 2019, when it registered its “Replacement Effluent Treatment […]
Northern Pulp says it “cares” — but for whom and for what?
“We care,” says Northern Pulp on the website it has created to spread the word that it “cares about forestry families of Nova Scotia.” The site is a vehicle for the company’s letter-writing campaign to get people in the forestry sector to contact Premier Stephen McNeil, their MLA, MP, or even Canadian Senators to ask […]
Like blood from a stone: trying to get information out of the Department of Energy and Mines
Late last year, Nova Scotia’s Minister of Energy and Mines, Derek Mombourquette, penned an op-ed that his department sent out to the media. As I mentioned in Morning File on January 16, 2019, the opinion piece was entitled “A little piece of Nova Scotia, everywhere,” and it claimed that the province’s mining industry was “something we can all take […]
“Everything won’t stink so bad”
The countdown to Boat Harbour closure begins
The children of Pictou Landing First Nation didn’t mince words when they addressed the standing-room-only audience that had gathered in their school gymnasium on January 31, 2019 to mark the start of the one-year countdown to the legislated closure of Boat Harbour. They “hate” Boat Harbour. It makes them “sad.” And “it stinks.” Once the […]
Friends of St. Mary’s River say “NOPE” to Atlantic Gold
For many years, when the St. Mary’s River Association (or SMRA) held meetings in Sherbrooke on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore, the group members’ purpose was primarily to report on the headway they were making in their efforts to achieve their vision of “Health for our river, the Atlantic salmon and our community.” Members would gather […]
Fixing freedom of information in NS (and jails), pulp mill politics, and plastics – all that, and more.
Morning File, Wednesday, January 16, 2019
I’m Joan Baxter, filling in for Tim today. News 1. Freedom of Information in Nova Scotia – the failure and the fix As Tim wrote, yesterday Nova Scotia privacy commissioner Catherine Tully and auditor general Michael Pickup released their reports on the FOIPOP website security failure. Both painted damning pictures of how the government handled […]