N.S. on hold until a government is available

Your future is important to us. Please stay on the line. A government will be with you as soon as one becomes available.

Not exactly in those words, but that was pretty much the gist of the message Nova Scotians on both sides of the Northern Pulp divide heard from the provincial government's head office Wednesday.

It came from Premier Stephen McNeil by way of a three-paragraph statement a day after his environment minister ordered an environmental assessment on the Pictou County mill's new effluent treatment plan.

“Because this is one of the most difficult decisions our government has had to make to date,” said the premier's whinging statement, “we need to take more time to reflect.”

“Time to reflect?” Everyone in Nova Scotia with a passing interest in this issue has known for the better part of a year that the government would, almost certainly, face this decision. In a nutshell, it's whether to extend the dismal life of Boat Harbour where Northern Pulp and its predecessors have been sending the mill's toxic effluent since 1967.

The premier gave himself until Friday to make a decision that he's known for almost a year was coming his way.

Had Environment Minister Gordon Wilson rejected Northern Pulp's new treatment plan outright, that would have been the end of the road for Northern Pulp. But that was a long shot. More likely was approval with conditions, or the assessment Wilson ordered.

The environmental assessment can take up to two years. So, if Boat Harbour is extended, the final verdict on Northern Pulp gets pushed out past the next provincial election. That's not to say political calculus is what's driving the decision — Nova Scotians can make that judgment all on their own — but it is reasonable to chart the issue on the political timeline of the province.

More than four years ago, McNeil's government passed a law to close Boat Harbour at the end of January 2020. The pulp mill didn't offer up its proposed replacement until last February, and it was clear then that the new treatment facilities wouldn't be in place before the Boat Harbour deadline arrived.

To keep the mill operating, Boat Harbour would have to be extended. Everybody and their Aunt Pearl knew that.

Premier McNeil has said repeatedly that's not going to happen, although he did allow on at least one occasion that it won't happen without the consent of the Pictou Landing First Nation's (PLFN) community. Ominously, the premier's office couldn't find space in Wednesday's statement to even mention the PLFN.

PLFN has been living next to the heavily polluted treatment lagoons of Boat Harbour for more than 50 years. January 31 is supposed to be the beginning of the end of their environmental nightmare, which isn't over until the ruined tidal estuary is remediated and, if possible, restored to its once pristine state.

But Wednesday's statement from the premier equivocated on the Boat Harbour deadline and that equivocation sent shivers down the spines of the thousands of Nova Scotians who've come to the conclusion that the air and water pollution from the mill is simply no longer acceptable. The Abercrombie Point mill went past its best-before date years ago.

And, if the premier's statement was intended to give heart to the hundreds, some say thousands, of Nova Scotians who work in the mill, in the woods and in the sawmills, it came up short there, too.

Those men and women had every right to expect that the government would be ready with a decision on Boat Harbour when Wilson rendered his verdict Tuesday.

The premier is correct that this was never an easy decision. On one hand, an extension of

Boat Harbour betrays the PLFN and tells the thousands of Nova Scotians, particularly on the North Shore, that the pulp mill is there and will operate for two more years at a minimum. If the government decides to extend Boat Harbour, those folks can be excused for believing the fix is in — that the environmental assessment's eventual approval is all but pro forma.

On the other hand, closing Boat Harbour means closing the mill, and an end to the 300 jobs there, plus the ripple effects that will be felt across the entire forestry sector. The industry claims those ripples will sink hundreds if not thousands of forest-related jobs.

At its essence, this is a political decision. But the premier's unsatisfactory statement Wednesday sidestepped that reality.

To be accurate, that statement needed to read: “(T)his is one of the most difficult political decisions our government has had to make to date.”

And Nova Scotians have little choice but to stay on the line until a government becomes available Friday.