After 50 years of having effluent pumped into their waters, the people of Pictou Landing First Nation in Nova Scotia are happy Northern Pulp has finally turned off the tap — a tap that ran up to 90 million litres of liquid waste directly into the harbour every day. 

The mill stopped producing in January, but the story of Northern Pulp isn’t over yet. On June 19, the company — represented by its B.C.-based owner, Paper Excellence Canada — was granted creditor protection by the B.C. Supreme Court.

The company owes around $85 million to the Nova Scotia government and an additional $213 million to Paper Excellence. (Yes, you read that right: Paper Excellence says its subsidiary, Northern Pulp, owes money to the parent company.) Creditor protection gives Northern Pulp time to restructure business operations and cut costs to avoid bankruptcy. 

Despite its financial troubles, Northern Pulp wants to reopen its embattled mill in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. 

A boat in Pictou Harbour with the pulp mill operating at the far shore in 2009. Photo: Ann Baekken / Flickr

The pulp mill has been at the centre of controversy in Nova Scotia for decades as a stunning example of environmental racism.

The pulp mill opened in 1967, adjacent to Pictou Landing First Nation. The mill dumped contaminated water into the once-productive estuary called A’Se’k, turning it into a heavily polluted treatment site. The life source for the First Nation became lifeless, and the water and air became foul-smelling. 

After years of negotiations between the province and Pictou Landing First Nation, the mill finally dumped the last of its wastewater into the harbour in April. The provincial government had allowed Northern Pulp to continue dumping wastewater after ceasing operations in January as work continued to put the mill into hibernation.

“The community is experiencing fresh air for the first time in over 50 years and it’s amazing to be able to witness,” Michelle Francis-Denny told The Narwhal. Francis-Denny is from Pictou Landing First Nation and is the community liaison for the Boat Harbour remediation project.

So who is Paper Excellence Canada, and what does its presence mean in B.C.? Can the shuttered Northern Pulp mill really reopen? Here’s what you need to know.

Who is Paper Excellence Canada?

Paper Excellence Canada, founded in 2010, is one of the largest pulp producers in North America. Prior to the closure of Northern Pulp — and a second mill in Mackenzie, B.C. — it was producing 1.6 million tonnes of pulp per year.

The company is owned by Jackson Widjaja, the grandson of the late Eka Tjipta Widjaja — a Chinese-Indonesian billionaire who founded Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), one of the world’s largest pulp and paper companies. 

Paper Excellence began buying struggling paper mills in Canada in 2007, and over the next few years scooped up Northern Pulp, Meadow Lake in Saskatchewan and four mills in B.C. (Howe Sound, Skookumchuck, Mackenzie and Chetwynd). The company poured millions into these mills, investing $115 million into modernizing the Howe Sound mill alone. In 2018, it acquired Catalyst Paper, adding three more B.C. mills to its roster (Crofton, Port Alberni and Powell River).

Northern Pulp mill in operation in the early 1990s, owned at the time by Scott Paper. Photo: Verne Equinox

The Widjaja family’s work is steeped in controversy beyond Canada’s borders through its other business, Sinar Mas Group. The company has been accused of illegal deforestation, having violent conflicts with communities, causing smog in Singapore and Malaysia, and contributing to forest fires in Indonesia.

On May 15, an international coalition of 90 non-governmental organizations published an open letter calling on investors and buyers to “avoid brands and papers linked to APP, Sinar Mas, Paper Excellence and their sister companies controlled by APP’s owner, the Widjaja family.”

What happened with Northern Pulp in Nova Scotia?

Scott Paper built Northern Pulp in 1967, decades before Paper Excellence was on the scene. Scott Paper told the Pictou Landing First Nation Chiefs at the time the water would be clear and there would be no smell, and gave the nation a lump sum of $60,000 for lost fishing. Then the liquid waste began pumping, collecting in frothy, white-brown, odorous ponds.

The nation started to push back in the 1980s, and by the 1990s the province promised to find an alternative to dumping mill waste in the estuary. 

In 2010, after years of delays, Pictou Landing First Nation filed a lawsuit against the province and Northern Pulp, which Paper Excellence acquired one year later. Then, on June 10, 2014, an effluent leak spilled 47 million litres of untreated wastewater on Mi’kmaq burial grounds. The First Nation set up a blockade at the mill, demanding an official closure date.

The blockade worked. The next year, Nova Scotia passed the Boat Harbour Act, promising the closure of the Boat Harbour effluent facility by Jan. 31, 2020. Northern Pulp hadn’t designed an approved effluent facility in the five years since the spill, so the mill was forced to close.

What now? Can Northern Pulp really reopen?

Remediation of A’Se’k will likely cost over $200 million and the federal government committed $100 million. The federal impact assessment agency is reviewing the province’s restoration plan. Francis-Denny said she hopes Pictou Landing First Nation will benefit economically from the cleanup and be able to “reconnect to the land and nature once again.” 

Meanwhile, Northern Pulp and Paper Excellence remain committed to reopening the mill.

“We want to continue to invest and operate in Nova Scotia and are committed to working closer with local governments and residents,” Graham Kissack, vice-president of environment, health and safety and communications for Paper Excellence Canada, said in a public statement.

Receiving creditor protection was essential for Northern Pulp’s future — otherwise, it have would likely run out of cash by late July.

In the short-term, it owes Nova Scotia $1.8 million on a $9-million loan that’s part of its larger debt, but its protection was extended first from June 29 to July 3, and now to July 31, so the company is temporarily off the hook. There is no limit to how many times creditor protection can be extended.

Kissack said in a statement the protection was necessary to “complete the hibernation of the mill in a safe and environmentally responsible manner and to provide needed time to engage with stakeholders and explore alternatives for restarting the mill.” 

But in order to reopen, Northern Pulp needs a viable way to treat its effluent. So far, nailing down that plan has been a contentious process. 

Boats gather in Pictou Harbour during a July 2018 ‘No Pipe’ land and sea rally against Northern Pulp’s plans for an effluent pipe proposed to carry mill waste into Caribou Harbour on Northumberland Strait. Photo: Gerard James Halfyard

Northern Pulp proposed building a pipeline to dump treated wastewater directly into Northumberland Strait, which has Pictou Landing and fishers concerned about damage to prime spawning ground for herring and lobster.  

Nova Scotia’s environment department asked for a report from Northern Pulp on its proposed treatment plant. Environment Minister Gordon Wilson found the report was lacking details, and federal scientists who provided feedback on the report said it was “cumbersome,” “incomplete” and at times “factually inaccurate.” 

Wilson requested a federal impact assessment, but the federal government turned it down. Wilson then ordered Northern Pulp to undergo a full provincial environmental assessment of its proposed treatment plant, which can take up to two years — a decision the company was not happy with.

The route of Northern Pulp’s proposed effluent discharge pipeline.  Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

But the province has also been making concessions for the Northern Pulp. It is covering half the cost of shutting down the treatment facility, up to $10 million. In addition, the Chronicle Herald reported that Nova Scotia promised in June to defer all of Northern Pulp’s loan payments if it committed to the environmental assessment process for a new effluent treatment facility. 

Despite this offer, days later Paper Excellence announced that Northern Pulp would be putting a “pause” on its participation in the assessment to “facilitate further detailed discussions” with stakeholders and the community.

Kissack called the terms of the environmental assessment “ambiguous” and said Paper Excellence was concerned it “would not result in a clear outcome.”

Until Northern Pulp resumes the assessment, the mill will remain closed.

Chief Andrea Paul of Pictou Landing First Nation said in a June 10 Facebook post that Northern Pulp contacted the Chief and council to “explore better technology for the mill.”

“Today I shared the historical and multigenerational impacts this mill has had on the people of [Pictou Landing First Nation]. This is not a case of just pollution and air — there is much more involved that needs to be understood,” she wrote.

What’s happening with Paper Excellence’s B.C. operations?

In June, Paper Excellence announced it would shut down the Mackenzie mill (north of Prince George) on Aug. 9, leaving more than 200 people out of work. It said the shutdown is due to bad market conditions caused by COVID-19.

Mackenzie residents held a rally on June 24 in the face of disappearing jobs. In addition to the Mackenzie mill, two sawmills in the area have curtailed their operations.

The province announced it will assist people put out of work under its $69-million forestry worker support fund.

Paper Excellence’s Crofton mill in B.C. has also been temporarily shuttered, but is expected to reopen sometime over the summer.

The industry has been struggling the past few years due to a multitude of factors, including low market prices and forests being desecrated by mountain pine beetles and wildfires. 

The B.C. Supreme Court ruling that granted Northern Pulp creditor protection offered the same protection to its affiliate, Northern Timber Nova Scotia, which is also owned by Paper Excellence Canada. Northern Timber owes $65 million on a $75-million loan from Nova Scotia.

How is Boat Harbour an example of environmental racism?

Put simply, the settler colonialism that created Canada has resulted in rampant environmental racism across First Nations, Métis and Inuit territories. This has persisted with Indigenous, as well as Black, People of Colour and those in lower income areas being disproportionately subjected to the negative environmental impacts of industry. 

Indigenous Peoples have had their waters polluted to the point that they can’t be used to wash or drink. Food sources have been eradicated (think bison) or pushed to the brink of extinction (think salmon). First Nation reserves have been built on the wrong side of dikes, leaving people at risk of floods. Dumps and industrial sites have been imposed on neighbouring reserves, subjecting the people there to toxic waste — just like Pictou Landing First Nation.

Chief Andrea Paul. Photo: Joy Polley

Ingrid Waldron, an associate professor of nursing at Dalhousie University in Halifax, wrote a book called There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, which spawned a documentary by the same name hosted by Elliot Page. The documentary includes the pollution of Boat Harbour and its impact on Pictou Landing First Nation. Waldron framed the mill’s closure as bittersweet.

“I thought, wow, the Indigenous community has been calling on the government to close Boat Harbour since the ’80s,” she said in a recent interview with The Narwhal. 

“It’s great that the mill was closed at the end of the year, but for the past several decades there was enough evidence to indicate this was harmful to the Mi’kmaq community and it continued anyways.”

In There’s Something in the Water, Francis-Denny said a person is not able to heal in the same environment that made them sick. Months later, with the air clean, she said healing will still be a long journey.

“Healing will be different for everyone in our community. Some may take a spiritual or cultural path, others will be able to start healing just by knowing there is no more pollution being dumped into our backyard or with each breath of fresh air,” she said. 

“Personally, my healing hasn’t begun yet. There is still a long way to go for me, but I do take comfort in knowing we all had a hand in our ancestors being able to rest.”

— With files from Carol Linnitt.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

On a bitterly cold March day, Greg Egilsson drives his pick-up down Fisherman Road to Caribou Harbour, parks on the deserted fishing wharf and gazes out at the blindingly white pack ice covering the harbour that provides him and many other fishing families their livelihoods.

“Seventy boats come out of this harbour,” he says. “There’s another 10 or 12 out of Pictou Harbour, some more out of Sinclair’s Wharf and another 20 or more out of Tony River, west of here.”

Egilsson, who is chair of the Gulf Nova Scotia Herring Federation, has been fishing here in Caribou Harbour for more than 30 years. He says Caribou Harbour is an important spawning ground for herring and lobsters, a nursery area for rock crabs and scallops.

He points along the shoreline to a fish plant he says employs about 100 people during fishing season.

Right now, though, the Northumberland Strait is ice-bound. Fishing boats that in summer fill this harbour have been pulled from the water and put on blocks beside fishers’ homes until the ice is gone.

Greg Egilsson. Photo: Joan Baxter

Rough frozen water along Northumberland Strait near Caribou Harbour. Photo: Joan Baxter

Egilsson — like hundreds of others who fish the waters of the Northumberland Strait from Nova Scotia, PEI and New Brunswick — is eagerly awaiting May 1 when lobster season starts, and after that, seasons for all the other seafood treasures that come out of these waters.

But this year, the fishers and all the local industries that depend on the inshore fishery, are also waiting for something else — albeit nervously.

On March 29, Nova Scotia’s Environment Minister Margaret Miller will deliver her verdict on the plan by the 52-year-old Northern Pulp mill on Abercrombie Point for a new effluent treatment facility. The minister can either accept it as is, reject it outright, or ask for more information about the planned project.

The plan is to treat the pulp effluent on-site in a “biological activated sludge” plant and to pump up to 85 million litres a day of warm treated effluent through a pipe nearly a metre in diameter and 11 kilometres long to the Caribou wharf, and then 4.1 kilometres out into the fishing grounds of Caribou Harbour.

Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

“Right smack in the middle out there,” Egilsson says, pointing at the open area between Caribou and Munro Islands that flank the harbour. The islands buffer it from the open strait, which is part of the Gulf of St. Lawrence that is already suffering from de-oxygenation and warming as a result of climate change.

He says there is one deep channel between the islands, which brings lobster and herring larvae into Caribou Harbour. Egilsson is worried that the tonnes of suspended solids that will go into the harbour every day will lead to eutrophication — when excessive nutrients in water supercharge the growth of plant life (like algae), resulting in the death of animal life from lack of oxygen.

He says that Northern Pulp’s documents registered with Nova Scotia Environment for the environmental assessment do not accurately portray the risks of piping treated effluent directly into the strait.

He is far from the only one.

Plan to pump treated effluent into Northumberland Strait raises questions

Chris Miller, executive director of the Nova Scotia chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS-NS), wrote to Nova Scotia Environment that his organization is concerned about the impact the new effluent facility “could have on the environment and the inshore fishery.”

Miller also notes that “… so little information has been provided within the Environmental Assessment Registration Document … dealing with ‘wetlands’ that CPAWS-NS is unable to carry out a proper review.”

“In fact, it is shocking just how little information is provided.”

The Ecology Action Centre describes Northern Pulp’s registration documents as “very poor,” and says they fail “to provide necessary information about key elements of their plan, including and importantly — the content of the substances they wish to pump in large volumes into the Northumberland Strait and the potential impacts that it undoubtedly will have on marine life and air quality.”

Scallops harvested from the Northumberland Strait. Photo: Sam Pennyfather

Egilsson has written to Jonathan Wilkinson, minister of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, with his concerns about the effect the pulp effluent could have on critical herring spawning areas. But it’s not just the risk to the ecosystem that worries him about the proposed pulp pipe.

“I mean, it’s at an entryway to a province, the smell and the brown water’s going to be the first thing you see when you come to Nova Scotia on that ferry, or the last thing you see when you leave and go to PEI. Who wants that? Nobody that I know.”

‘It’s going to be a battle’

Warren Francis of the Mi’kmaq Pictou Landing First Nation, and brother to Chief Andrea Paul, is another fisher who has joined the “No Pipe” campaign to oppose the plan to pump pulp effluent into Caribou Harbour, where he’s been fishing for lobster and herring for 31 years.

He says 17 members of the Pictou Landing First Nation band fish near the outlet of the proposed pulp pipe, and another seven fish within eight kilometres of it.

“I don’t want that pipe in there, and neither does anyone else in our reserve,” he tells me. “If that pipe goes in, and it hurts the fishery, that would devastate a lot of us.”

The Northern Pulp mill is seen across Pictou Harbour. Dozens of fishing boats blocked a survey boat for the mill from leaving the harbour on November 19, 2018. Photo: Darren Calabrese

Warren Francis with his lobster traps. Photo: Joan Baxter

If Northern Pulp does get environmental approval from the province for the new effluent facility, Francis says there will be a lot of opposition.

“It’s going to be a battle. It’s not just us, but there’s going to be all the fishermen. They’re going to have to have a lot of police.”

Francis tells me the “No Pipe” campaign has brought together the First Nation and settler communities.

That unity was on full display last July at a land-and-sea rally that brought thousands of protestors to the Pictou waterfront, and filled Pictou Harbour with fishing boats from both groups.

Warren Francis’ boat, Jaxton Brock, in Pictou Harbour during a July 2018 ‘No Pipe’ land and sea rally against plans for an effluent pipe proposed to carry mill waste into Caribou Harbour. Francis’ boat is named after his eight-month-old grandson. Photo: Gerard James Halfyard

“I was proud and happy to see that,” he says. “Everybody coming together to fight this.”

Francis makes no bones about their goal. “We want that mill shut. It’s not just the water quality, it’s also the air quality. We get the winds all the time.”

“Growing up, if we went to another reserve, they would tell us that we live in the ‘stinky reserve,’ ” he tells me.

Francis says his wife and two children have asthma, which he blames on the mill.

“People turn off their air exchangers, because they don’t want the air coming in their houses.”

That leads to mould problems in their houses, and still more breathing problems. Francis worries now about the health of his eight-month-old grandson, Jaxton Brock, after whom he has named his fishing boat.

52 years of pollution

Since the mill opened in 1967, the people of Pictou Landing First Nation have suffered with the stench of the mill — both what comes out of its stacks and out of its pipe.

Prevailing winds in the area mean that the reserve is often shrouded in a fog of noxious emissions from the mill (as it is the day I visit), and for more than half a century the mill’s effluent has been directed to Boat Harbour right in the band’s backyard.

Currently, the effluent is piped under the East River to Pictou Landing, then overland into settling ponds, an aeration basin and from there, into the 142-hectare Boat Harbour lagoon where it “stabilizes” for another 20 to 30 days before being released into the Northumberland Strait.

Before it was dammed and filled with pulp effluent, Boat Harbour was a tidal estuary that was so precious to Pictou Landing First Nation for fishing, hunting, foraging and recreation that they called it “A’se’K” or “the other room.”

But in 1966, unscrupulous provincial government officials convinced the First Nation to sign over Boat Harbour for the pulp effluent, with false promises that Boat Harbour would hardly be affected.

Within days, all the fish were dead.

Eventually, Boat Harbour became a toxic wasteland.

After the opening of the mill in the 1960s, Boat Harbour was transformed into a series of effluent ponds, seen here in the early 1990s. Photo: Verne Equinox

Environmental racism at Boat Harbour

Nova Scotia’s former environment minister, Iain Rankin, has described Boat Harbour as one of the worst cases of environmental racism in Canada.

It took a major pipeline break in 2014, which spewed 47 million litres of untreated pulp effluent onto sacred Mi’kmaq burial grounds, and then a blockade by Pictou Landing First Nation that closed the mill until the government pledged to shut down and remediate Boat Harbour, for change to come.

In 2015, with support from the New Democratic and Progressive Conservative parties, the provincial Liberal government of Premier Stephen McNeil passed the Boat Harbour Act. It stipulated that Boat Harbour would be closed on January 31, 2020, giving Northern Pulp five years to find another way to deal with its effluent.

Chief Andrea Paul. Photo: Joy Polley

On January 31 this year hundreds of Pictou Landing First Nation members and their allies gathered in the gymnasium of the Pictou Landing school to celebrate the beginning of the one-year countdown to the closure of Boat Harbour, and its eventual remediation.

On the same morning, Kathy Cloutier, communications director for Paper Northern Pulp/Paper Excellence (part of the corporate empire of the multi-billionaire Widjaja family of Indonesia), held a press conference in Halifax to announce that the company was registering its plans for a “replacement effluent treatment facility” with Nova Scotia Environment for a 50-day Class 1 environmental assessment.

Cloutier said a new treatment facility could not be approved and constructed by January 31, 2020, so it would need an extension on the legislated deadline.

“If we have no barriers or hiccups,” she said, “then we would be looking in the proximity of a year.”

Cloutier indicated that without the extension, the mill would have to close. She said a temporary shutdown was not a possibility.

In recent months, Northern Pulp has launched a major public relations campaign, filling the airwaves with advertisements. It has also created the website “NPCares,” which encourages mill workers and supporters in the forestry industry to write to politicians and the media to push for an extension on the use of Boat Harbour.

Screenshot of the Northern Pulp Cares webpage.

Lana Payne, head of Unifor Atlantic that represents mill workers, has joined in, penning letters and opinion pieces criticizing Premier McNeil for putting the mill’s future at risk, which she describes as “political posturing” and “failing leadership.”

Chief Paul acknowledges that “it can’t be easy for McNeil, who so far has refused to consider any extension for the use of Boat Harbour.”

“I need to give the Premier credit for being a leader on this file, and to continue to give respect to Pictou Landing First Nation that we deserve,” she says.

Like many of those supporting the “No Pipe” campaign, Chief Paul is waiting to see if the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency will decide the Northern Pulp effluent treatment facility requires a federal assessment. Should that happen, the project would be delayed for up to two years, regardless of what the provincial government decides this week.

Without a change to the Boat Harbour Act, that would make it impossible for the mill to operate during that time.

Chief Paul met in late February with federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change Catherine McKenna, and was told that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency was still in the process of reviewing the project. Paul is still waiting for an update, but she has already decided that no matter what happens, she has had enough of the mill.

“They’ve done what they’ve done for the last 52 years and their days are numbered,” she tells me.

“I’m saying no extension, and I’m saying no pipe. So I’m saying no mill. That mill, their days are done.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.