The Nova Scotia Department of Environment has listed nine pages worth of missing information from Northern Pulp’s Environmental Assessment of a new wastewater treatment system to replace the 50-year-old one at Boat Harbour next to the Pictou landing First Nation. The missing information is required to fulfil the “terms and conditions” of a focus report […]
Boat Harbour cleanup to be subjected to environmental review
The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency announced yesterday it was launching an environmental assessment of the proposed cleanup of the Boat Harbour lagoons where tens of million of litres of daily effluent from the kraft pulp mill at Abercrombie Point have been stored, aerated, and released into the Northumberland Strait for 50 years. Tonnes of watery […]
Fixing freedom of information in NS (and jails), pulp mill politics, and plastics – all that, and more.
Morning File, Wednesday, January 16, 2019
I’m Joan Baxter, filling in for Tim today. News 1. Freedom of Information in Nova Scotia – the failure and the fix As Tim wrote, yesterday Nova Scotia privacy commissioner Catherine Tully and auditor general Michael Pickup released their reports on the FOIPOP website security failure. Both painted damning pictures of how the government handled […]
Northern Pulp, Scotsburn Lumber, and U.S. tariffs
Morning File, Tuesday, January 8, 2019
News 1. Northern Pulp, Scotsburn Lumber, and U.S. tariffs Last month, Scotsburn Lumber sent out a letter encouraging “all our employers, contractors, business owners, forest landowners and associated suppliers to call or write a letter to your local or elected official” to express support for Northern Pulp Mill and its efforts to continue operating after […]
Moncton’s bid to host the Francophone Games is a disaster
Morning File, Friday, December 14, 2018
News 1. Secret police commission meeting Yesterday, the Police Commission received an update on the street checks report in secret. No legal justification for the secrecy was spelled out beyond “legal matters,” which isn’t actually in any of the governing regulations for holding secret meetings. But even more remarkably, the Commission’s debate about whether to […]
Containing Northern Pulp’s mess
A half century of toxic waste in Boat Harbour, a leaky pipeline, and what happens next in the mill saga.
The numbers are staggering. Over the past 51 years, the bleached kraft pulp mill on Abercrombie Point in Pictou County has piped about 1.25 trillion litres of toxic effluent into Boat Harbour.[1] That’s enough to fill about half a million Olympic-size swimming pools, or a pipeline one metre in diameter stretching about 1.6 million kilometres, […]
Battle for the Mill
The plan to pipe effluent from the Northern Pulp Mill into the Northumberland Strait is dividing the community of Pictou, pitting neighbour against neighbour and fishermen against mill workers.
This is a follow-up to Linda Pannozzo’s investigative articles in The Halifax Examiner detailing the issues around Northern Pulp’s proposed effluent treatment and disposal system: Dirty Dealing Part 1: Northern Pulp mill and the province are set to roll the dice with Boat Harbour’s replacement, but a cleaner alternative exists; Dirty Dealing Part 2: Wading through the quagmire […]
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 […]
Testing the Limits
Part 2: The Examiner Goes on the Road in Search of an Endangered Lichen. (A Photo Essay)
On a clear, crisp Sunday morning in March, Tim Bousquet and I drove about 30 minutes inland from Sheet Harbour, Nova Scotia to Twin Lakes, an area slated to be clearcut by Northern Pulp. As I reported in Part 1 of “Testing the Limits,” at the end of February the Abercrombie pulp giant posted several […]