Last month, Northern Pulp — the Paper Excellence company that owns the shuttered pulp mill in Pictou County — sent letters to laid-off unionized workers informing them that their pension recall rights had been terminated.
That means that should the Northern Pulp mill be reopened, workers cannot simply restart payments into their previous defined benefit pension plans, but will instead be offered a new defined contribution pension plan.
The reaction from the workers’ union Unifor was swift and pointed.
“Unifor is demanding Northern Pulp reverse its decision to end pension recall rights for members of Unifor Local 440,” read a statement issued on January 26.
“Extending pension recall rights costs the company absolutely nothing out of pocket but they chose to snub the group of people who have been their most ardent supporters,” said Unifor Atlantic regional director Jennifer Murray.
“This will impact approximately 50 Unifor members enrolled in the defined benefit (DB) pension plan, and another 60 members in the defined contribution (DC) plan,” said the statement.
Murray also said Unifor had given a “strong recommendation” to Northern Pulp to wait until its creditor protection proceedings in the British Columbia Supreme Court were resolved before making any decisions that affect Unifor members who had been employed at the Northern Pulp mill in Pictou County.
Northern Pulp ignored Unifor’s request and terminated the pension recall rights before anything had been resolved in the British Columbia court.
Protection for Northern Pulp, not for workforce
In other words, while Northern Pulp continues to enjoy creditor protection in the Supreme Court in British Columbia, the company is refusing to extend protection to its workers’ pension rights.
Related: The “weird” legal mechanism being used by Northern Pulp in its $450 million lawsuit against Nova Scotia
A short recap of how that creditor protection case has been going is in order here, with a spoiler alert: so far, Northern Pulp has pretty much got everything it has asked for in the British Columbia court.
Northern Pulp closed its Nova Scotia mill in January 2020 and then laid off most of its workforce, after it failed to secure environmental approval for a new effluent treatment facility to replace Boat Harbour, and thus had no place to treat and dispose of its pulp effluent — close to 90 million litres a day.
Since June 2020, Northern Pulp and six affiliates companies have been benefiting from creditor protection in the British Columbia court, under the Companies’ Creditor Arrangement Act (CCAA).
Northern Pulp’s largest creditor by far is its owner, Paper Excellence, followed by the province of Nova Scotia, with outstanding debts over $86 million. While the CCAA case is on, Northern Pulp is not making payments on its debt to Nova Scotians.
Suing Nova Scotia
A year and a half after it sought creditor protection in the British Columbia court, Northern Pulp together with its owners, Hervey Investment BV (Netherlands) and Paper Excellence, filed a lawsuit in the Nova Scotia Supreme Court against the province of Nova Scotia. The lawsuit, “expected to exceed $450 million,” is for losses Paper Excellence and Northern Pulp said they incurred because of the closing of the mill.
Four months later, despite strident protests from Nova Scotia legal council Robert Grant and Maurice Chiasson, British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Shelley Fitzpatrick agreed to Northern Pulp demands. On April 1, 2022, Fitzpatrick ordered Nova Scotia to participate in closed-door mediation to hammer out a resolution with Northern Pulp and Paper Excellence over the lawsuit and other pending legal issues with the province.
The outcome of that mediation and court case could be very expensive for the people of Nova Scotia.
Related: Northern Pulp’s $450 million lawsuit looms over Nova Scotia
In December 2023, Fitzpatrick extended the mediation and CCAA proceedings until June 2024.
However, Northern Pulp wasn’t willing to extend the pension recall rights of its workforce.
A month after Justice Fitzpatrick extended its creditor protection, Northern Pulp informed its laid-off workforce their pension recall rights had been terminated.
‘It’s not good news for any of the workers’
In an interview with the Halifax Examiner, Jennifer Murray explained that because of the termination of their pension recall rights, if Northern Pulp restarts and if the workers are recalled, they will have to start afresh on a defined contribution pension plan. That, she said, would be very different from the defined benefit pension plan the workers were on before they were laid off.
Murray said that obviously it’s not good news for any of the workers. But it’s even worse for people who were close to retirement when the mill closed.
“Some people had five years, or just a year left,” Murray said. If the mill were to restart, they would have to start all over.
Murray said Unifor is meeting individually with their members affected by this termination of their recall rights, to help them through this and to understand what it means.
“We are disappointed they moved on this now, when there’s still so much uncertainty around Northern Pulp’s status,” said Jennifer Murray.
Northern Pulp betrays ‘the last group of people who supported them’
In the past four years, Northern Pulp has repeatedly told the British Columbia Supreme Court that it intends to revamp and re-open the mill on Abercrombie Point in Pictou County.
Northern Pulp hosts both a website and a Facebook page called “Tomorrow’s Mill,” on which it promotes the “transformation of Northern Pulp” that will be “a source of pride and opportunity for the region.”
A January 24, 2024 post on the Tomorrow’s Mill Facebook page sought to placate mill supporters and employees after Northern Pulp sent out the letters:
We understand there is some confusion and concern as a result of letters sent out to former employees this week.
Since the mill’s closure in 2020, we have continued working with the union to extend recall rights. The final extension expired on Dec 31st. The end of recall rights does create decision points for former employees related to their pensions, and the letters sent out this week provide our former employees with this information.
We remain committed to providing our former employees with offers of re-employment should the mill re-open.
Terminating recall rights does not affect our commitment to re-opening a mill in Nova Scotia.
One commenter was neither impressed nor placated:
The company has abused and abandoned the only people who stood by them. There was no confusion about the content of the letters, just the fact that the company gave the former employees no notice of this development. Until today, the employees had a pension plan and recall rights in the event that the mill might reopen. For some unexplained reason, the company decided to betray the last group of people who supported them.
Special pensions also unpaid
The pension recall rights aren’t the only pension rights Northern Pulp is no longer willing to respect.
In October 2021, Nova Scotia’s Superintendent of Pensions wrote to the British Columbia Supreme Court, noting that Northern Pulp had no plans to make 2021 and 2022 special defined benefits pension contributions worth $6.64 million, or to make special pension payments totalling $2.5 million in 2021.
The Superintendent of Pensions expressed concern that the failure to pay the special payments to the pension plan and the planned failure to pay post-2020 Special Pension Payments “is contrary to the law.”
At the time, Unifor also issued a statement saying it was “disappointed by Northern Pulp parent company Paper Excellence’s decision not to make a special pension payment for its workers.” That April 2022 statement quoted Unifor’s then Atlantic regional director, Linda MacNeil:
This news is incredibly hard for recent retirees who have zero time left to alter their plans for their senior years, particularly as the cost of everything soars. The Nova Scotia government set up a $63.5 million Forestry Transition Fund when Northern Pulp was forced to cease operations, which excluded workers at the mill itself. Now, it seems the company has turned its back, too, and that leaves our members without any support, and increased anxiety about their retirement.
‘These companies must be held to account’
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Paper Excellence has also been doing things that hardly endear it to its workers and governments.
On January 25, just after Northern Pulp sent letters to their employees informing them that their pension recall rights had been terminated, Paper Excellence “indefinitely” halted all operations at its Crofton Mill on Vancouver Island, leaving 75 employees out of work.
Paper Excellence closed its mill in Crofton just a year after the company received $4.5 million from the government of British Columbia and $14.3 from the federal government, so it could restart the mill, improve its efficiency, and recall 100 employees.
This led Unifor to release yet another statement expressing its “disappointment” at the Paper Excellence announcement, and asking for an “immediate response” from “all levels of government.” The statement continued:
“An indefinite curtailment is an immeasurable loss for too many workers and their families who deserve so much better from Paper Excellence,” said National President Lana Payne. “These companies must be held to account and Canada and B.C. must support a value-added forestry industry that creates good, union jobs for generations to come.”
This wasn’t the first time Unifor expressed its frustration with Paper Excellence and its treatment of workers at its Crofton mill.
In November 2023, Unifor issued a statement headlined, “$19 million in government funding for Crofton mill and nothing to show for it.”
The frustration is understandable, especially in light of the government funding and the promises Paper Excellence had made about transforming the Crofton Mill.
Jackson Wijaya’s ‘commitment’ to Canadian communities
In March 2023, Paper Excellence issued a press release boasting about “Jackson Wijaya and Paper Excellence’s commitment to Canadian communities.” The photo accompanying that statement doesn’t show Wijaya, said to be “the sole owner of Paper Excellence,” nor is his photo to be found anywhere on the Paper Excellence website.
Instead, the photo shows NDP MP Alistair MacGregor with employees from its Crofton mill. The caption explains that MacGregor was touring the mill to learn “about the exciting transformation project planned for the mill.”
Nine months later, Paper Excellence indefinitely closed the Crofton mill.
“Exciting transformation project” indeed.
A week before Paper Excellence closed the Crofton mill, the British Columbia government fined the company $25,500 for “discharging more than a million litres of toxic waste into the Pacific Ocean.”
And, believe it or not, there’s more.
Snubbing parliamentarians
Not only has Paper Excellence been snubbing workers and Unifor that represents them, but last year its owner, Jackson Wijaya, snubbed Canadian parliamentarians.
The Paper Excellence website describes Wijaya as “the founder and sole shareholder” of the Paper Excellence Group, a “private equity holding company that oversees individual pulp and paper business units.”
Wijaya is a member of one of Indonesia’s richest families, grandson of the late Eka Tjipta Widjaja who founded a trading company in 1938 after he immigrated to Indonesia from China. Since then that company, called Sinar Mas, has grown into a sprawling multi-billionaire corporate empire, and Eka Tjipta Widjaja’s eldest son, Teguh Ganda Wijaya (also Widjaja) heads its crown jewel, Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), with its notorious financial, human rights and environmental record.
Jackson Wijaya (Limantara) is Teguh Ganda Widjaja’s son.
In 2023, Forbes put the Widjaja family fortune at US$10.8 billion, making them the fourth richest family in Indonesia.
Paper Excellence claims there are no links between Paper Excellence and APP.
The investigative 2022 report “Papering over corporate control: Paper Excellence’s relationship with Asia Pulp & Paper and the Sinar Mas Group,” contradicts this claim, and delves into the incredibly complex and opaque corporate structure of Wijaya businesses around the world, many of them in popular tax havens.
This was the focus of last year’s months-long investigation by the Halifax Examiner, CBC, Glacier Media, Le Monde and Radio France into Paper Excellence, part of the Deforestation Inc. project led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
In recent years, Paper Excellence has been swallowing up pulp and paper companies in North America, so that today it controls 21% of the pulp and paper market in Canada.
Regardless of what the complex and secretive corporate paperwork may say about just who owns what and where on the planet, there is no question that Jackson Wijaya, an Indonesian citizen and a member of the powerful Widjaja/Wijaya family, now controls the largest pulp and paper player in Canada, managing more than 22 million hectares of forest land — an area four times the size of Nova Scotia.
Related: Deforestation Inc.: Nova Scotia opts for forest certification scheme critics call ‘greenwashing’
In Nova Scotia, Northern Pulp — a Paper Excellence company — owns about 172,000 hectares it purchased with a $75 million loan from the province in 2010, and is not repaying while it is under creditor protection.
Yet, Paper Excellence owner Jackson Wijaya still refuses to appear in front of Canada’s Parliamentary Natural Resources Committee, brazenly snubbing elected representatives from across the country and four political parties, who invited him to come and answer questions.
In a May 1, 2023 letter to the committee, Wijaya wrote that he was “unable to attend due to extensive global business commitments.”
On September 27, Wijaya again defied the Committee’s efforts to have him appear, and declined the invitation.
NDP Natural Resources Critic Charlie Angus, MP for Timmins-James Bay, called this “absolute disrespect to Parliament and a slap in the face.”
‘A cut above the rest’?
One might think all these transgressions and snubs to workers and elected officials might tarnish a corporation’s reputation in Canada.
Apparently not.
As the Examiner reported here, Corporate Knights, “a leading sustainable-economy media and research B” corporation, last year honoured Paper Excellence as one of Canada’s “best 50 corporate citizens.”
It was the third time Corporate Knights bestowed that honour on Paper Excellence.
Maybe this year when Corporate Knights is deciding which companies to honour among Canada’s “best corporate citizens,” it might consider consulting with some of the workers and parliamentarians that Paper Excellence has snubbed, and have a word with people in Nova Scotia whom the company is suing.
And then, people in Canada will decide for themselves if Corporate Knights is correct when it says Paper Excellence is “a cut above the rest.”
Surprise. The big corporation run by the billionaire doesn’t care about the average person that helps to make them rich. Same old story. All of the profits that pulp mill produced not only left Pictou county but left the country and the continent. Millions and billions of dollars in profits have been shuffled elsewhere by every owner. When the mill shut down everybody’s left with empty pockets.
This is the story of the resource economy in rural NS or rural Canada in one form or another. If people don’t create co-ops or make the companies create endowments for the community this will continue to be the case, forever.
Imagine if the mill had been forced to contributed even 100K a year over it’s lifetime out of it’s millions and billions in profits. If managed well the community would have millions of dollars to draw from today.
While this is a terrible development for the workers most workers in Canada have no real pension plan. Most have a glorified RRSP that their company may or may not contribute to. The sole reason that the feds invented the RRSP was to allow big corporations (and small ones too) to offload the costs of retired employees to the employees themselves. If I was one of these workers I would be pissed, but in the back of my mind – maybe even in the front of it – I would be very concerned that the pension funding would disappear and I would be left with no pension.
The change over in pension plans from defined benefit to defined contribution should not be surprising, however it is not right for the workers. This applies to the several large Canadian and other companies who have gone this route in the name of corporate greed. WHY do our corporate CEO and company executives, who are paid multi million in salaries need multimillion bonuses earned on the back of its employees. Then they wonder where the employee loyalty is- it is following the smell of dollars.