CRUEL JOKE

I’m sorry to have to point out a glaring mistake in the placement of your Northern Pulp story on July 17. Surely you meant to include it in your Comics section. It has to be a joke, right?

After all, the people of Pictou said, “No way!” when the last mill proposal — to carry their effluents over the Town of Pictou’s drinking water and distribution system — was screamingly turned down, one reason being the town had just invested gobs of money refurbishing the water system and didn’t think it appropriate to have a pipeline of messy, dangerous sludge travel right over their sources of freshwater.

Oh, I know, Pictou seems awfully self-interested and “small-townish” to want to protect their drinking water, and who do they think they are to stop an industry, and a foreign one at that, from making as much money with as little effort or responsibility as possible? That’s what industry does — particularly one that has always had the ear (and purse strings) of the government (especially Liberal ones).

So, what is the latest proposal from the mill? Simple. Dump the stuff directly into Pictou Harbour. Never mind this nonsense about piping it elsewhere; just dump the whole mess straight over the bank into the harbour.

Laughable, if not so frightening.

That an industry, which is part of the data on the increase of thousands of lung-cancer deaths since the mill’s arrival half a century ago, can dare make such a proposal is beyond outrageous.

Well, yes, we’re now in an election campaign. Let’s stack maybe 300 jobs against the stack of deaths that have occurred, and that would continue in the area, if the Liberals cave in again to this ugly pressure. Dan Macdonald,

Halifax (former Pictonian)