Time for Plan B: Life after the mill
What’s Plan B?
Plan A seems DOA, so surely some of the best and brightest minds in the province have Plan B pretty much ready for prime time.
Plan B is about life after the mill. It contemplates a very different forestry sector in Nova Scotia and figures out how to get there. It answers questions like: What about the 300 people who work at the Abercrombie plant?
And, perhaps most important, Plan B takes Nova Scotians who are economically or emotionally tied to the mill or its closure beyond their fear and loathing and starts the healing in communities that are now divided between those who dread a future without the mill, and those who dream of it.
We are told closure of Northern Pulp, which sits across Pictou Harbour from the old town itself, will cause grave, perhaps lethal, injuries to the province’s forestry industry. Saw mills, woodlot owners, forestry contractors all depend on Northern Pulp for a sizeable chunk of their incomes, if not the whole paycheque.
Across great swaths of rural Nova Scotia work is in the woods or nonexistent.
Nova Scotia needs a Plan B to preserve those jobs, absent Northern Pulp’s voracious appetite for wood fibre. Respected voices in the forestry doubt that’s even possible, which makes Plan B and their participation in it all the more urgent.
For more than 50 years, first Scott Paper and now Northern Pulp operated the mill that’s been both an economic mainstay and an environmental disaster on the province’s North Shore.
Boat Harbour, the lagoon adjacent the Pictou Landing First Nations’ community where the plant dumps its effluent is the most infamous of its environmental harms, but its smokestacks have been belching noxious fumes across Pictou County and beyond for those same five decades.
However, it is Boat Harbour, and the province’s commitment — entrenched in law — to close it by the end of January 2020, that’s forced the question: Is Northern Pulp to be, or not to be?
Before the end of March, Nova Scotia’s Environment Minister Margaret Miller will pass judgement on Northern Pulp’s plan to treat and then pump its effluent out into the Northumberland Strait. But, even if the plan is approved, Northern Pulp says it needs an extension to the January 2020 deadline because it will take until the end of next year, at least, to complete the new treatment facilities.
Premier Stephen McNeil is adamant that the deadline stands unless the Pictou Landing First Nation community agrees to the extension and that’s not on. Northern Pulp says without an effluent treatment system the mill must close and once closed it will stay closed.
Taking everyone at their word, it would seem a time warp is required for Plan A to proceed and the plant’s future to be assured.
And even if Northern Pulp gets its environmental approval and there’s a magical solution to the time crunch, the province is left with a potentially dangerous situation.
Fishermen along the Strait are determined that there will be no pipe taking effluent from the mill out into the waters they fish.
The fishermen aren’t alone. “No Pipe” is the dominant opinion along Nova Scotia’s North Shore and it’s unanimous in Prince Edward Island.
The fishermen have already shown their willingness to physically block a pipe. Northern Pulp had to get an injunction to stop fishermen from blocking a survey vessel from mapping the proposed pipe’s route.
That blockade was a warm-up for what could happen should Northern Pulp somehow get to the point where it needs to place its pipe in the Strait.
Obviously, the provincial government can’t allow the threat of illegal activity to influence any of its decisions on this file, but it also needs to consider the depth of emotions and the damage that’s occurring to communities in Pictou County right now.
The hundreds, some say thousands, of families whose livelihood is in whole or in part dependent on the mill need to know there’s a Plan B if Northern Pulp closes. In fact, it would be a better plan if they had some say in drafting it.
“The fishermen have already shown their willingness to physically block a pipe. Northern Pulp had to get an injunction to stop fishermen from blocking a survey vessel from mapping the proposed pipe’s route.”