In March 2020, the Halifax Examiner published the award-winning series, “Port Wallace Gamble: the real estate boom meets Nova Scotia’s toxic mine legacy.” The three articles (available here, here and here) looked at Clayton Developments’ proposed new and massive subdivision for Port Wallace in Dartmouth, and serious concerns about the mercury and arsenic contamination from […]
Public paying the price to clean up old gold mines
Anaconda Mining says the province indemnified it from any liabilities associated with the toxic historic tailings in Goldboro, and plans to mine around them, while Nova Scotians pay to clean them up.
The gold rush in Upper Seal Harbour near Goldboro began with the discovery of gold in 1892 by a fellow named Howard Richardson. For the next 65 years, gold miners dug rock out of the earth in what was known as the “Richardson Belt” on the banks of Gold Brook Lake in Guysborough County. […]
Anaconda Mining joins the gold rush on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore
Part 1. What do we know about its plans for a new open pit mine in Goldboro (and haven't we been here before)?
Gold exploration and mining companies are lining up to get at Nova Scotia’s gold, as the province undergoes a fourth gold rush. In 2017, Atlantic Gold opened the province’s first-ever open pit gold mine in Moose River, with plans to open three more along the Eastern Shore, in what it peddled to investors as its […]
Northern Pulp mill plans “best in class” or best in BS?
The Paper Excellence company that is part of the global corporate empire of the Widjaja family has submitted plans for the “transformation” of its hibernating pulp mill to the Nova Scotia government for approval, even as it sues the same government for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Northern Pulp is claiming that the changes it’s proposing for its 54-year-old pulp mill in Pictou County will make it “best in class.” Even the blurb that appears on the Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change page for the “mill transformation and effluent treatment facility project” includes the phrase “best in class.” And although Northern […]
Why isn’t Northern Pulp using the wastewater treatment plant next door at Canso Chemicals? Is mercury an issue?
Northern Pulp is using $450,000 dollars to sue Nova Scotians for what could be hundreds of millions of dollars, and the money for the litigation comes from the interim financing its creditor protection in the British Columbia Supreme Court affords it. But the Paper Excellence company doesn’t seem interested in spending any money to put […]
Wastewater from Northern Pulp’s hibernating paper mill is being discharged into the Bay of Fundy
Wastewater from Northern Pulp’s mill is being discharged into the Bay of Fundy. Since July 2020 Northern Pulp has been shipping run-off and “landfill leachate” from its hibernating pulp mill site on Abercrombie Point in Pictou County to Colchester County’s municipal sewage treatment facility in Lower Truro, which discharges into the Bay of Fundy. Invoices […]
Port Wallace Gamble: the real estate boom meets Nova Scotia’s toxic mine legacy
Part 1: The making of a toxic mess and the uncalculated costs of previous gold rushes.
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, […]
Provincial budget update: increased surplus and debt reduction, but also large bills for cleaning up historic toxic mines and the Yarmouth ferry
“You’re richer than you think” Scotiabank used to say in its marketing campaign to prospective customers. Today we learned the Province is in better financial shape than we were led to believe a year ago. Audited financial statements for the year March 2018–March 2019 show the province had a surplus of $120 million, four times...
Northern Pulp Mill’s missing environmental data
The mill says its effluent comfortably meets federal regulations, but a new study published by Dalhousie researchers suggests there is no way to know.
Cover photo courtesy Gerard James Halfyard. If Premier Stephen McNeil is wavering on the Northern Pulp / Paper Excellence file, entertaining notions on amending the Boat Harbour Act so that effluent from the Pictou County pulp mill can continue to flow into the lagoon after January 31, 2020, he would do well to put off […]
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, […]