Details of new treatment facility up in the air
Two years before it’s supposed to be running, Nova Scotians don’t have an estimated cost to replace Northern Pulp’s treatment facility or what portion they, as taxpayers, will have to cover.
The provincial government and Northern Pulp haven’t even yet sorted out who will own the facility that has to be working by 2020 when the existing treatment plant at Boat Harbour is legislated to close.
“Details around who owns and operates the effluent treatment facility, and who pays for it, are all part of negotiations which have yet to occur,” said Marla MacInnis, spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal in an emailed response to The Chronicle Herald on Wednesday.
The province built the Boat Harbour effluent treatment site in 1972.
For the five years prior to that, the mill’s former owners had just been dumping untreated effluent nearby. In 1995, the province turned over management but not ownership of the facility to Northern Pulp’s then owners Scott Maritimes Ltd.
An indemnity agreement signed by the province and Scott Maritimes as part of the 1995 deal protects the mill’s owners from any “liabilities, losses, claims, demands, actions, causes of action, damages (including, without limitation, lost profits, consequential damages, interest, penalties, fines and monetary sanctions)” relating to Boat Harbour.
The document goes on to state, “This undertaking and indemnity shall extend to all claims made by any person or government made on their own behalf, on the public’s behalf . . . or on behalf of any other party.”
And finally, it protects the mill’s owners against “the cost of diverting or altering components of the facility in response to claims.”
In 2011, Northern Pulp was bought by its current owner Paper Excellence Canada Holdings Corp. of British Columbia.
The maker of northern bleached softwood kraft pulp, a strengthener used in tissues and paper, has a lease until 2030 to use Boat Harbour under which it pays $25,000 a month to the province and covers the treatment facility’s operating costs.
General manager Bruce Chapman told The Chronicle Herald on Tuesday that because the lease has value to the mill, the province will be pressed during negotiations to provide compensation for ending it a decade early.
Asked if he could appreciate the concern of taxpayers who are already footing the bill for cleaning up historic contamination at Boat Harbour (for which the province has set aside $133 million) with being asked to help fund a new facility, Chapman responded, “I would also be concerned with a province or any entity that makes a contract then arbitrarily breaks it.”