This is Part 1 of a three-part story about the toxic legacy from historic gold mines in Nova Scotia, which its citizens will be paying many millions of dollars to try to clean up, and how the contamination at just one of these sites — Montague Mines in HRM — is still affecting lives today,...
Bad math at Lands & Forestry
An "arithmetic error" increased the cut for the WestFor timber companies by a whopping 28% — until the Halifax Examiner discovered the mistake.
In what can only be described as a peculiar series of events, the Department of Lands and Forestry is cancelling the third year of an interim lease signed with WestFor Management Inc. WestFor represents 13 forestry companies which are allocated wood from Crown land in southwestern Nova Scotia previously managed by Bowater Mersey. Back in […]
After the gold rush
Nova Scotia is ignoring the toxic legacy of past mining manias while rushing headlong into the next
If learning from past mistakes were a government tradition in Nova Scotia, the current government would not be exhibiting all the symptoms of gold fever. But it is, and it looks like a raging bout of the affliction. In the past few years, it has amended legislation based on recommendations made by the industry’s cheerleader-in-chief, […]
The Archaeology of Loss
How industrial logging in the Mi’kmaq heartland is destroying a lot more than trees
“We were in wonderful moose country now.” At least this is how Albert Bigelow Paine described the Nova Scotia landscape he and three others journeyed through in his 1908 book The Tent Dwellers. The book tells the true story of a June trout fishing trip led by two guides, Charlie Charlton and Del Thomas, who […]
The $722 million deal
An Australian company is buying the Vancouver company that owns Nova Scotia’s largest gold mining operation; what’s in it for us?
Here’s the deal. On Wednesday, May 14, an Australian gold mining company called St. Barbara Limited, with one gold mine in Australia and a second one in Papua New Guinea, agreed to pay $722 million for Atlantic Gold Corporation, which operates one open pit gold mine in Nova Scotia, has proposed three more along the […]
Truth Be Told: Nova Scotia’s forest department hires a PR firm with forest industry ties to help it with transparency
Cover photo: recent drone shot of a clearcut located between Kejimkujik National Park and Lake Rossignol. Photo courtesy Jeff Purdy. The Nova Scotia Department of Lands and Forestry (DLF) recently hired DG Communications, a public relations firm, to assess the department’s progress in meeting the recommendations of William Lahey’s Independent Review of Forest Practices, specifically […]
Forest Confidential
An investigation into Nova Scotia’s biomass harvest data and how the numbers aren’t adding up
A few months ago I reviewed a film that has been circulating the province about the growing use of forest biomass as a form of so-called renewable energy. The film — Burned: Are Trees the New Coal? — reported on how the biomass industry sells itself as green by making two bogus claims: it uses […]