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)
在一个清晰的、脆3月份星期天早上,蒂姆·马林squet 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 […]