NEWS

1. Paper Excellence

The other day, I was trying to explain to one of my American friends how we can view Canada as simply a resource colony — much of our economy is based on public subsidies to oil, mining, and forestry companies, with the hope that as the private owners make gigantic fortunes, enough of the export revenue will spill over to give the peasants enough to live on without complaining too much.

At the very least, there will be jobs.

That certainly has been the history of Nova Scotia for the past century, at least.

Nova Scotia had already been flirting with the forestry industry devil for decades, but the contract for the provincial soul was inked in 1965, when Premier Robert Stanfield made a deal with Pennsylvania-based Scott Paper to build a mill at Pictou in return for basically free trees from nearby forests, and basically free water and basically non-existent environmental regulations to operate the mill.

Like all deals with the devil, the Scott Maritimes Act was irreversible, and will live on for all eternity.

History, of course, happens. Governments come and go. Companies get bought and sold. People go to work, retire in exhaustion, and their children go to work. But the same general geography of the circle of hell that contains a profit-maximizing foreign-owned company with no regard for the condition of the province or its populace, much less their salvation, is static: the blood and sweat of Nova Scotians is forever tapped for the never-ending thirst of the serpent-tailed beast.

Various governments have wiggled this way and that within the torture chamber. In 2002, the Hamm government signed a 25-year lease with Scott Paper’s successor company, Northern Pulp, to dump toxic effluent in Boat Harbour; John Hamm later ended up on the company’s board of directors.

The Dexter government made a sweetheart deal with Northern Pulp, in which the province loaned the company $75 million so it could purchase 475,000 acres of timberland, and then bought 55,000 acres back from Northern Pulp at 1.7 times the price company paid for the land. Last I heard, Darrell Dexter was shilling cannabis out west somewhere.

The McNeil government had to do something about the poisoning of Boat Harbour and the growing discontent with the mill on the North Shore, and so passed the Boat Harbour Act, which effectively shut down the mill, at least temporarily. But a deal with the devil is a deal with the devil, so the government assumed all the costs ($300 million and growing) of the Boat Harbour cleanup. Stephen McNeil is now pretending he’s a lawyer in one of those shiny towers downtown.

And Beelzebub wasn’t going to just walk away. Northern Pulp’s owner Paper Excellence put Northern Pulp into creditor protection, with its largest creditor being… Paper Excellence. No, this makes no sense. And, Paper Excellence sued Nova Scotia for $450 million.

Four-hundred and fifty million dollars is, well, a hell of a lot of money. With cleanup costs at Pictou and other related expenditures, we’re in the billions of dollars ballpark, which is to say, on the scale of the entire lobster industry.

Paper Excellence filed its creditor protection motions in the most corporate friendly court in the nation, with the same B.C. court that perversely agreed to turn Mountain Equipment Co-op into Mountain Equipment Corporation without so much as a nod to the co-op ownership.

Provincial lawyers did what they could to oppose Paper Excellence. Robert Grant and Maurice Chiasson rightly told the court that the entire proceeding was an affront to both common decency and the rule of law, but a corporate-friendly bankruptcy court judge is going to do as told by its corporate masters, and so Nova Scotia lost at every turn.

Enter Tim Houston.

Nova Scotia had already lost in court. The hand-writing was on the wall, and by all reasonable expectation, Nova Scotia would be out $450 million in cash upfront and billions in the long run.

So I can’t really blame Houston for avoiding a spectacularly in-your-face court victory by Paper Excellence and trying to find face best he can. Grant and Chiasson were replaced by lawyers more tailored for negotiation than defiance, and they came to terms.

The settlement agreement announced yesterday doesn’t change the geography of hell, but it does refund Northern Pulp’s pension plans and perhaps gives some work to the somewhat idled forest industry. Never mind that the pension funds are being made whole with public money, and that the forest health continues to decline.

Along the way, the $84 million debt Northern Pulp owes Nova Scotia is erased, and a bunch of public money, hundreds of millions of dollars at least, but probably billions of dollars, will subsidize the construction and operation of a new mill in Liverpool, and the effluent that was going to be dumped into the Northumberland Strait off the North Shore will instead be dumped into the ocean off the South Shore.

No matter what, Paper Excellence will get a 14% annual profit, guaranteed.

In short, the deal with the devil was refinanced, extended 20 years out, and the public assumes all the additional costs.

For more on this, read my article from yesterday, “Nova Scotia and Paper Excellence reach settlement over $450 million lawsuit and creditor protection process,” and Joan Baxter’s commentary, “True costs of Nova Scotia settlement with Paper Excellence’s Northern Pulp remain unknown.”

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2. Housing Accelerator Fund

“After months of work by HRM planners and public hearings this week, Halifax regional council unanimously passed the Housing Accelerator Fund,” reports Suzanne Rent:

Under the Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF), the federal government is providing municipalities across Canada with money to increase housing stock. Halifax Regional Municipality will get $79 million. To meet the conditions of the funding, the municipality had to make new rules around zoning and housing.

Some of those changes include allowing four units per lot as of right within municipal service boundaries, reducing minimums for parking, creating and expanding heritage districts, and allowing taller building on particular transit routes. The changes mean up to 200,00 new units of housing could be built in the city and suburbs.

Click or tap here to read “Halifax council passes Housing Accelerator Fund.”

In yesterday’s Morning File, Rent discussed how people view the changes the HAF will bring differently depending on their own station in life — basically, those opposed to the changes tend to be more older, established home owners while those in favour of the changes tend to be younger people facing the brunt of the housing crisis head-on.

Councillor Sam Austin commented on that split at council’s debate yesterday, saying “There is a certain undercurrent to the discussion around this that was a little unsettling at times… frankly, a little bit classist.”

Done right, adding more fourplexes to the streetscapes can make the city more interesting, both architecturally and culturally, while helping address the housing crisis. I’ve lived in several cities where fourplexes were fairly standard even in older established neighbourhoods — this seems to have been an architectural style in parallel with the arts and crafts houses of the early 20th century and into the 1940s. Life went on just fine.

But I just don’t see a rush of people tearing down their existing house and replacing it with a fourplex. The changes will mostly happen slowly, I think. Maybe it will provide some opportunity for infill housing more quickly.

Opposition to such housing can very much be classist — those poor apartment dwellers will bring down housing values, and so forth. But there’s another kind of classism-by-default that assumes that the solution to everything is to rely on rich people to solve all our problems, so if we only give them enough latitude, we’ll have a better world.

When it comes to big private developers, that certainly hasn’t been the case. Let’s recall that many years ago two very large public properties in the densest parts of the peninsula — the St. Pat’s-Alexandra and Bloomfield schools — were sold to private developers with the promise that much-needed housing would be built. But not a damn thing has been done with either property. The buildings have deteriorated and become rat-infested hellholes and firetraps, and it’s only a matter of time before terrible tragedy results. This isn’t the result of zoning restrictions; rather, it’s the result of a capitalist system that doesn’t meet the needs of the broader citizenry.

In Dartmouth, there’s an obvious public site where lots of new affordable housing could be built — Shannon Park. No one at all will object. Transit can easily be extended to it. It’s close to employment centres at the Burnside business park. Rightly, bulldozers could be fired up Monday morning to start the construction process. But rather than just build the damn housing itself, government has gone through this ridiculously tedious process of tendering the property out for private development, and some new housing might come on line…. in 2034, a date that almost certainly will be pushed back another decade or so.

So: I’m not opposed to fourplexes or the other changes brought through the HAF, but they alone won’t solve the housing problem. We need government to fully and meaningfully spend money to build and manage public housing itself. And no, Shawn Cleary, tossing $6 million over three years to under-resourced and unskilled non-profits is neither a full nor meaningful use of public money. Increase that by two orders of magnitude and manage it yourself, and then we can talk.

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3. Cogswell construction

The municipality has announced major changes to the street and bus network around Scotia Square to accommodate the Cogswell reconstruction project. The changes, which start Monday, June 17 and will continue for about six months, are as follows:

Work details: This long-term closure is to facilitate work on the Cogswell District project. Crews will be realigning and regrading Barrington Street, installing underground services and building a new Halifax Transit hub. Crews will also remove the last overpass of the former Cogswell Interchange, marking another major project milestone.  

Halifax Transit impacts: Halifax Transit users will be significantly impacted as the four busbays in front of Scotia Square will be relocated. As a result, 30 routes passing through Barrington Street and surrounding area will be rerouted.  

The impacted bus bays will be relocated to (see map below):  

• Granville Street before Duke Street (Bay 1) 
• Barrington Street before George Street (Bay 2) 
• Albemarle Street before Duke Street (Bay 3) 
• Barrington Street before Prince Street (Bay 4)  

For more information on the service disruptions, visit our website or call 311.    

Road closure impacts: Barrington Street, from Upper Water Street to Duke Street, will be fully closed. A section of the new Cogswell Street will be temporarily connected to Barrington Street at Upper Water Street, which will allow for the re-opening of Albemarle Street and will reconnect a key east-west corridor downtown.  

With the closure of Barrington Street, access to Hotel Halifax will be from a new driveway off Cogswell Street.  

Access for loading and deliveries has been coordinated with abutting property owners.  

It is anticipated the new Halifax Transit hub on Barrington Street will open by end of year and include new heated shelters, additional seating space, wider sidewalks and layover space for passengers and buses. The new permanent Cogswell Street from Brunswick Street to Upper Water Street is expected to open, replacing the overpass that was previously demolished. Additionally, it is projected the new permanent Barrington Street from the roundabout at Nora Bernard Street and Barrington Street to Duke Street will open, including access to Valour Way.

The exact re-routing of the buses hasn’t been spelled out, but will presumably eventually show up here, or I guess we’ll just find out when we’re on the bus June 17.

I still think this project would make a lot more sense if we blew up the casino.

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Government

City

Halifax Regional Council Continuation (Friday, 1pm, City Hall and online) — if required

Province

No meetings

On campus

No events

In the harbour

Halifax
Friday
02:00: NYK Romulus, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Saint John
04:00: Delphinus C, container ship, sails from Fairview Cove for Fort Lauderdale, Florida
06:30: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, moves from anchorage to Fairview Cove
07:00: Silver Arctic, cargo ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Saint-Pierre
07:00: Pacific Trader, container ship, sails from Fairview Cove for sea
12:00: Qikiqtaaluk W, oil tanker, sails from Imperial Oil for sea
14:30: East Coast, oil tanker, arrives at Irving Oil from St. John’s
15:30: Asian Majesty, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from Southampton, England
16:30: Silver Arctic sails for Saint-Pierre
17:00: Atlantic Sail, ro-ro container, arrives at Fairview Cove from Norfolk, Virginia
18:00: Oceanex Sanderling sails for St. John’s
18:30: AlgoCanada, oil tanker, arrives at Imperial Oil from Montreal
22:00: Eagle II, container ship, sails from Pier 27 for sea
Saturday
01:30: Atlantic Sail sails for Liverpool, England
05:00: NYK Romulus sails for Southampton, England
06:00: Em Kea, container ship, arrives at Berth TBD from Montreal
06:30: Asian Majesty moves to Pier 9
11:30: Asian Majesty sails for sea

Cape Breton
Friday
03:00: Nordlotus, oil tanker, arrives at EverWind from Mongstad, Norway
08:00: Arctic Lift, barge, with Western Tugger, tug, sails from Aulds Cove quarry for sea
08:00: CSL Kajika, bulker, moves from Canso anchorage to Aulds Cove quarry
Saturday
10:00: Silver Etrema, oil tanker, arrives at EverWind from New York

Footnotes

I’m gonna plant some cannabis seeds today.