It was a Saturday morning and Ellen Page was giving up some of what could have been a bit of down time to do a telephone interview about her forthcoming film on environmental racism in Nova Scotia, which will have its world debut this September at the Toronto International Film Festival. I was hammering her […]
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 […]
McNeil government is moving slow with greenhouse gas reduction plan
Details are wanting, industry is worried, and regional cooperation is sidelined.
Nova Scotia continues to resist a sales pitch from Ottawa to sign on to its system for reducing emissions starting in January 2019. That resistance comes despite a warning different carbon pricing regimes within Atlantic Canada could drive up administrative costs for companies such as Irving Oil, Wilson Fuels, Northern Pulp, and Lafarge Cement. Those...
Judge refuses to intervene in Lafarge’s tire-burning plan
A handful of citizens who live beside a cement plant in Brookfield, 10 kilometers south of Truro, have lost a court battle to prevent Lafarge Canada from burning tires for fuel. CABOT (Citizens Against the Burning of Tires) launched a judicial review of Environment Minister Iain Rankin’s decision last July approving the project. Yesterday, Nova...
Judge rejects motion against Lafarge’s tire-burning plan
Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Denise Boudreau has rejected a motion from a citizens group opposed to burning tires for fuel at the Lafarge cement plant in Brookfield. The motion was that new evidence from a toxicology expert be admitted as part of a judicial review this March of Environment Minister Iain Rankin’s decision to...
Brookfield residents ask court to consider new tire-burning evidence
“I say to the Dept of Environment: Now that you know, what are you going to do about it?” Lydia Sorflaten was a talking about an affidavit by an internationally-known toxicologist expert who accuses the province of applying the wrong scientific data to approve a one-year pilot project to burn tires at the Lafarge cement...
Dirty Dealing
Northern Pulp Mill and the province are set to roll the dice with Boat Harbour’s replacement, but a cleaner alternative exists.
This once pristine tidal estuary, Boat Harbour has been used as an industrial waste lagoon for the Abercrombie pulp mill (now Northern Pulp) near Pictou for fifty years. Photo courtesy Dave Gunning. You could cut the tension in the room with a knife. Earlier this month a delegation of fishers from Nova Scotia, PEI, and […]
Toxicologist Douglas Hallett raises concerns about Lafarge tire-burning
A citizens’ group opposed to the burning of tires for fuel at the Lafarge cement plant in Brookfield is asking a court to consider a report from a toxicology expert as part of its judicial review of the Nova Scotia Environment Minister’s decision to approve a one-year pilot project. Douglas J. Hallett (M.Sc and Ph.D...