This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on August 25, 2025.
Article summary:
• Over the lifetime of the Northern Pulp mill, Nova Scotia lost hundreds of millions of dollars because of incompetent, naive, and complicit governments.
• As Northern Pulp’s billionaire Indonesian owners have opted not to build the new mill and instead allow the company to go into bankruptcy, 420,000 acres of Nova Scotia forest land are up for grabs.
• A shadowy company called Macer Forest Holdings has placed an under-valued bid of $104 million on the land.
• A Macer-affiliated company called Acadian Timber looks poised to log that land.
• One of Acadian’s board members, paid $56,000 annually, is Karen Oldfield, the interim president and CEO of Nova Scotia Health.
• Maurice Chiasson, a lawyer who represented the province in the Northern Pulp insolvency hearings, is now representing Macer Forest Holdings in the very same court process.
• As the government is mandated to protect 20% of the province and is far short of meeting that obligation, buying back the Northern Pulp land presents an inexpensive opportunity to meet that goal.
It was clear from the start of Northern Pulp’s insolvency case filed in the British Columbia Supreme Court six months after the Northern Pulp mill closed, that the outcome was never going to be good for Nova Scotia.
Spoiler alert: the outcome is not only not good, it’s downright bad.
Legal giveaways and concessions by successive generations of Nova Scotian governments to the various large foreign owners of the pulp mill meant Northern Pulp had all kinds of legal recourse to punish Nova Scotia for not amending the 2015 Boat Harbour Act, and not allowing the mill to continue to pump toxic effluent into Boat Harbour, which had despoiled the Pictou Landing First Nation estuary for half a century.
When Northern Pulp failed to come up with a viable new effluent treatment system that passed environmental muster by the deadline of 2020, the mill had to shut down.
Joan Baxter Effluent from the pulp mill in Boat Harbour in 2016.
Northern Pulp strong-armed NS in court
In June 2020, Northern Pulp declared itself insolvent and sought creditor protection under the Companies’ Creditor Arrangement Act (CCAA) in the British Columbia Supreme Court, and proceeded to pull those legal levers to strong-arm Nova Scotia into a mediation process and settlement agreement.
That agreement proposed two options — one a new pulp mill in Nova Scotia, the other a no-mill scenario. Both are lose-lose scenarios for Nova Scotia, and winning propositions for Northern Pulp.
Northern Pulp’s largest creditor is its owner Paper Excellence, which now calls itself Domtar, although both are part of Paper Excellence Canada Holdings. Paper Excellence Canada is, in turn, owned by an outfit called Elite Shine Investments controlled out of Indonesia, but domiciled in the British Virgin Islands, the world’s number one tax haven. Statistics Canada’s intercorporate ownership database shows the bewildering corporate maze of 62 corporations with Canadian presence that are owned by Elite Shine Investments.
Nested deep in that confusing and confounding corporate puzzle is Northern Pulp Nova Scotia Corporation, which is also controlled out of Indonesia.
All of these corporate entities are part of the multibillion-dollar corporate empire of the Indonesian billionaire Wijaya (sometimes Widjaja) family.
Related: Deforestation Inc. series investigating Northern Pulp, Paper Excellence and Asia Pulp & Paper
No-mill scenario a losing proposition for NS
A new pulp mill would have cost Nova Scotians and other Canadians billions of dollars, and done still more irreparable damage to the province’s much-diminished forests.
In July 2025, Northern Pulp decided against a new mill because even with all the public financing, it would not get the hefty 14% return it wanted.
But the no-mill scenario also threatens to be very costly for Nova Scotians. It means Northern Pulp is leaving debts unpaid and leaving Nova Scotians on the hook for the polluted mess at the mill site on Abercrombie Point.
Dr. Gerry Farrell Paper Excellence’s Northern Pulp mill in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, in 2016.
Northern Pulp is selling off its timberland assets in Nova Scotia. Those include 420,000 acres of forest land in the province, Northern Pulp’s tree nursery in Debert, and its Crown licenses that date back to the 1960s, which as recently as 2023, allowed Northern Pulp to harvest 100,000 green metric tonnes on 308,000 hectares (761,000 acres) of Crown land.
‘Stalking horse’ bid for NS woodlands
Now the offer for those timberland operations and assets is in. It’s called a “stalking horse” bid, in the bizarre parlance of bankruptcy law meaning one bidder has been chosen to make the baseline bid on Northern Pulp’s timberland assets.
The bid for that huge chunk of Nova Scotia timberland that represents 1.2% of the province’s land mass and those huge Crown land licenses, is a paltry $104 million.
That is not enough to cover everything Northern Pulp owes to the province and pensioners, and also cover the maintenance of the polluted mill site on Abercrombie Point, let alone the expensive clean-up of the mill site.
Mill leaves huge liabilities
The site also comprises the mercury-laden bedrock underneath the former Canso Chemicals plant. Northern Pulp owns 50% of Canso Chemicals, together with the giant U.S. arms and chemical manufacturer, Olin Corporation.
The citizens of the province are already on the hook for at least $425 million to remediate Boat Harbour where the Northern Pulp mill dumped its toxic effluent for 53 years, a project that will take years to complete. The federal government is pitching in $100 million to that project.
Other bidders can come forward until November 20, but at the August 21, 2025 court hearing, the Ernst & Young court monitor told Justice Shelley Fitzpatrick that Macer Forest Holdings had been chosen as the stalking horse bidder because it offered the most for the assets.
I’ll get back to Macer Forest Holdings shortly, after a short recap of the mill’s sorry history in Nova Scotia.
Joan Baxter The notorious Boat Harbour pulp effluent treatment facility in 2016, where the Northern Pulp mill disposed of about 70 million litres of toxic effluent every day until the facility closed in January 2020.
Case study in corporate capture
The pulp mill saga is incredibly complex. It’s a case study in corporate capture of a province. I’ve written about it in depth in a book and in dozens of articles for the Halifax Examiner, for anyone who wants to immerse themselves in the sorry tale of how a pulp mill polluted the water, air, and politics of Nova Scotia, and introduced the kind of industrial pulp forestry that involves clearcutting diverse and fire-resistant Wabanaki-Acadian forests, and replacing them with single-aged softwood and fire-prone plantations that resemble crops more than healthy woodlands.
Related: The Halifax Examiner investigates: Northern Pulp
Related: The Borealization of Acadia
How in the name of pulp enablers did we get here?
The first explanation is politicians — some naive, gullible, and unquestioning, others complicit — who, since the Pictou pulp mill opened in 1967, have given the various large foreign mill owners everything they asked for, and sometimes even more than they asked for.
Progressive Conservative, Liberal, and NDP governments all participated in the resource and financial giveaway over the decades.
Related: The Pictou mill: fleecing Nova Scotia for 53 years — and counting
In the 1960s, the Progressive Conservative government of Robert Stanfield wooed the U.S. giant, Philadelphia-headquartered Scott Paper, to Nova Scotia by offering the company countless incentives. There were vast quantities of cheap freshwater and forest resources, a $5 million tax holiday, and a pulp effluent facility that would destroy Boat Harbour, the precious Pictou Landing First Nation tidal estuary called A’se’k, meaning “the other room.”
After the pulp mill opened in 1967, its manager Walter Miller told Bob Christie, who had worked on the mill site, that the Nova Scotia government had offered Scott such huge incentives that, “They’re still laughing in Philadelphia.”[1]
Complicit politicians
In 2002, then Progressive Conservative Premier John Hamm extended the pulp mill’s permit to use Boat Harbour until 2030. Ten years later, Hamm joined the board of the new holding company for the mill, Northern Resources Nova Scotia Corporation, which the mill owners — the U.S. private equity firms Atlas Holdings and Blue Wolf Capital — had just created.
Hamm then became chair of the Northern Pulp board, and only resigned in 2020 in January 2020 when the mill had to close because it had failed to come up with an acceptable plan for a new effluent treatment plant.
In 2010, the NDP government of Darrell Dexter loaned Northern Pulp $75 million to purchase 475,000 acres of timberland in the province that belonged to Neenah Paper. As part of the deal, the province immediately purchased 55,000 acres of that land at 1.7 times the price per acre that Northern Pulp had paid for it. The loan has never been repaid, but Northern Pulp is now selling the land.
An April 26, 2010 press release from Atlas Holdings, partial owner of Northern Pulp at that time along with Blue Wolf Capital, thanked former Premier Hamm for helping to “conceptualize and execute this complex transaction.”
Northern Pulp $75 million to purchase in Nova Scotia. It also shows the lands included in the purchase, which Northern Pulp then sold to the province, and 200,000 acres of Northern Pulp Crown leases.
The premier who stood up to Northern Pulp
Liberal Premier Stephen McNeil was the first leader to stand up to the mill owners, passing the Boat Harbour Act that gave Northern Pulp until 2020 to close Boat Harbour, and develop a new effluent treatment facility for the mill. Northern Pulp failed to do so.
Joan Baxter In 2019, Chief Andrea Paul, then chief of Pictou Landing First Nation, was optimistic that then-NS Premier Stephen McNeil would honour the Boat Harbour Act, which he did.
But Northern Pulp had the agreement former Premier Hamm had signed giving it the use of Boat Harbour until 2030. The company also had a series of 1995 indemnity agreements signed by the Liberal government of Premier John Savage, which Northern Pulp proceeded to use against Nova Scotia in the British Columbia Supreme court. It pushed for and was granted mediation and a “settlement agreement” that could leave debts and clean-ups for Nova Scotians to pay for.
That is just what has now happened.
Case raises many questions
The latest documents from Northern Pulp’s insolvency case in the British Columbia Supreme Court show that $104 million is not going to go very far in repaying Northern Pulp’s debts to the province. The 20th report of the court monitor gives the priority list of creditors to be repaid, or as legal jargon puts it, the “waterfall of the distribution of sale proceeds” from the sale of Northern Pulp’s timberlands assets:
- reasonable costs of sale
- repayment of Interim Financing Facility and CCAA Charges (about $60 million according to CBC)
- pay amounts required to wind-up pension plans (about $30 million)
- $30 million to the province to settle its debts ($99 million are owed but the province will release its security)
- $15 million to maintain mill site and implement closure plan
- remit any remaining proceeds to the province.
The settlement agreement stated that if there weren’t enough funds to maintain and close the mill site, Nova Scotia Pulp would “assign itself into bankruptcy.” Which, inevitably, means Nova Scotians would be saddled with that clean-up.
According to CBC reporter Michael Gorman, Northern Pulp has yet to even submit a reclamation plan to Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change.
What is Macer Forest Holdings?
The latest news from the Northern Pulp CCAA case raises other questions too, about an extremely large land transaction that will give yet another corporate entity control over vast forest holdings in Nova Scotia.
There is not a great deal of information online about the stalking horse bidder, Macer Forest Holdings. Incorporated in Ontario, Macer acquires and holds forest and recreational properties.
In an emailed response to an inquiry from the Halifax Examiner, Macer’s principal shareholder Malcolm Cockwell said they were not commenting at this time, and directed us to publicly available documents.
A 2019 “early warning” press release from private equity giant Brookfield Asset Management, stated that Macer had acquired shares in Acadian Timber Corp. worth about $128 million and representing about 45% of Acadian’s common shares. At the same time, Brookfield immediately disposed of the same number of shares in Acadian and said it had no intention of acquiring any more. In other words, Macer acquired Brookfield’s shares in Acadian.
The press release stated that Malcolm Cockwell, “current director of Acadian and a principal of Macer,” had also become chair of Acadian’s board.
Ties to private equity giant Brookfield
Keith Dalrymple, who writes Edper, a substack about Brookfield Asset Management (BAM), noted that the early warning press release failed to mention Malcolm Cockwell, the president and principal shareholder of Macer, is the son of Jack Cockwell, “current BAM board member, large, controlling shareholder and the original architect of the group [BAM] strategy.”
Dalrymple continued:
It would seem that BAM, likely led by Mr. Cockwell Sr. used company resources and influence over ADN [Acadian Timber] first to install Malcolm Cockwell as an Acadian board member, then to facilitate the sale of the 45% ADN stake paving the way for him to become chairman. The 30-year old PhD student was effectively given what is nearly a control position in one of Canada’s largest forestry companies.
The sale of Acadian Timber along with the antecedent actions look like an audacious display of nepotism involving two of Canada’s most prominent companies.
The relationship between Brookfield Asset Management and Acadian Timber is “both long and deep,” according to Dalrymple.
Who are Malcolm and Jack Cockwell?
Jack Cockwell is a mullti-billionaire Bay Street scion, who moved to Canada from South Africa. According to Forbes, he helped build the billionaire Bronfman family’s Edper conglomerate, “acquiring massive holdings in real estate, forestry and mining.”
Edper eventually morphed into Brookfield Asset Management, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, in which Jack Cockwell still has a large holding. (Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney left Brookfield to run for the Liberal leadership in January this year.)
Related: Taking on private equity, preventing American takeovers, and ensuring Canada is ‘never 51’
According to this 2020 Financial Post feature, Jack Cockwell’s son Malcolm went into forestry, started acquiring forest land, and now “oversees one of the largest private landholdings in Canada.”
If Macer winds up being the successful bidder for the Northern Pulp timberland assets in Nova Scotia, Cockwell companies will become the second largest private land owner in the province.
In 2006, when Scott Paper’s offshoot Neenah Paper started selling off the million acres in the province that Scott had acquired throughout the 20th century, U.S.-based Wagner Forest Management bought 500,894 acres of woodlands, or 1.4% of the province’s land mass for $155 million.[2]
Northern Pulp acquired the other half of the Neenah land in 2010 with that big loan from the Nova Scotia government.
Wagner holds the land under two separate companies, Atlantic Star Forestry Ltd. and Nova Star Forestry Ltd. One carves out and sells prize real estate parcels, and the other leases timberland to operators who mostly clearcut.[3]
Macer ‘affiliate’ Acadian Timber
Court documents refer to Macer Forest Holdings, where Malcolm Cockwell is the principal shareholder, as the “stalking horse bidder” for Northern Pulp’s timber assets.
However, the purchase agreement identifies Acadian Timber as an ‘affiliate’ of Macer.
Cockwell is both board chair and a major shareholder of Acadian, holding 49.2%of the shares, with a value of $159.5 million.
Acadian Timber has a Nova Scotia subsidiary, AT Timberlands (NS) ULC.
Acadian Timber Corp. structure from the company’s 2024 Annual Information Statement.
Acadian Timber was founded in 2006 by its CEO, Adam Sheparski, and is headquartered in Edmunston, New Brunswick. It describes itself as “one of the largest timberland owners in Eastern Canada and the Northeastern U.S. with a total of approximately 2.4 million acres of land under management.”
Acadian’s stated business strategy is to maximize cash flows from the company’s existing timberland assets, according to The Motley Fool investment analysts.
According to Simply Wall Street, Acadian Timber:
… together with its subsidiaries, provides forest products in Eastern Canada and the United States, and operating through New Brunswick Timberland, Maine Timberlands, and Environmental Solutions segments. The company offers timber products, such as softwood and hardwood sawlogs, pulpwood, and biomass by-products. It also owns and manages freehold timberlands in New Brunswick and Maine; and provides timber services relating to Crown licensed timberlands in New Brunswick. In addition, the company provides forest management and environmental solutions; and engages in real estate activities.
Simply Wall Street reports that Acadian Timber’s share price is 71.8% over-valued, with a high cash payout ratio to shareholders that are “not well covered by cash flows.”
Some familiar faces involved
Both Sheparski and Cockwell were on the line as “observers” at the August 21 court hearing in the British Columbia Supreme Court, where the stalking horse bidder was approved.
Cockwell is chair of a five-person board at Acadian. One of those directors is Karen Oldfield, who has been on the Acadian board since 2019, and who receives $56,000 compensation.
In 2021, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston appointed Oldfield interim president and CEO of Nova Scotia Health, a post she still holds today.
At the August 21, 2025 hearing, Maurice Chiasson represented the stalking horse bidder Macer Forest Holdings in the Northern Pulp CCAA proceedings in the British Columbia Supreme Court.
List of counsel representing various parties at the August 21, 2025 Northern Pulp CCAA case in the British Columbia Supreme Court. Maurice Chiasson was representing Macer Forest Holdings Inc.
Until mid-2022, Maurice Chiasson, together with Robert Grant, both from Atlantic Canada’s largest law firm Stewart McKelvey, were counsel for the province of Nova Scotia before Justice Fitzpatrick in the same case.
In March 2022, Maurice Chiasson and Robert Grant of Stweart McKelvey were counsel for the province of Nova Scotia in the Northern Pulp CCAA case being held in the British Columbia Supreme Court.
In their response to Northern Pulp’s application for forced mediation between Northern Pulp and the province, on March 18, 2022 Grant and Chiasson stridently and strongly opposed such mediation, saying it would be a waste of interim funding, and a detriment to the province in particular, “through the continued erosion of its security.”
Regardless of the province’s protests, Justice Fitzpatrick granted Northern Pulp what it wanted, and ordered mediation go ahead in April 2022.
By the time the court heard the case again on October 28, 2022, Maurice Chiasson and Robert Grant were no longer on the case, replaced by Sean Foreman and Debbie Brown as counsel for the province.
Now Chiasson is back in the same British Columbia court for proceedings of the same Northern Pulp CCAA case, but this time he is not representing Nova Scotia. Rather, he is representing the company — Macer Forest Holdings — that wants to buy a big chunk of Northern Pulp land in the province.
Which is, well, interesting.
There is absolutely no suggestion here of wrongdoing, but the optics are less than optimal for a skeptical Nova Scotian public that stands to lose so much because of the Northern Pulp court case.
Our call to Chiasson’s office was not returned.
Nova Scotia needs more Crown land
Which brings us to the biggest and perhaps most important question of all in this never-ending Northern Pulp saga: Why is Nova Scotia not buying the Northern Pulp timberlands assets itself?
The Northern Pulp timberlands account for about 1.2% of the province’s land mass. Recall that Nova Scotians forked over a $75 million loan to Northern Pulp to buy these lands, which they will never see repaid.
Joan Baxter In June 2017, clear cutting began atop one slope in Wentworth Valley on land belonging to Northern Pulp (purchased with a loan from the NS government).
The purchase agreement with Macer Forest Holdings is just $104 million for 420,000 acres of woodlands, plus renewable licenses on hundreds of thousands of acres of Crown land, and the tree nursery in Debert thrown in.
That looks like an incredible bargain, given that Premier Houston recently gave up nearly $40 million a year in revenue when he eliminated tolls on the Halifax-Dartmouth bridges, which mostly serve an urban population.
Nova Scotia has very little Crown land.
Unlike other provinces where the vast majority of the land is publicly owned, only about 30% of Nova Scotia is Crown land. Of all the 13 provinces and territories, only PEI has less publicly owned land.
In 2012, the NDP provincial government of Darrell Dexter bought 550,000 acres of Bowater woodlands, for $117.7 million. Unfortunately, the Liberal government of Stephen McNeil then handed half of this land over to industry, to the WestFor consortium, to “manage” and mostly to log to smithereens, despite the heroic efforts of citizens to have areas of it protected and managed sustainably for future generations.
Far short on protected land goals
Nova Scotia is far short of its legislated goal of protecting 20% of its land and water by 2030, with just 13.6% of the province protected. In 2024, Houston’s government listed 16 new proposed wilderness areas and nature reserves. So far, none has been proclaimed.
Lately, DNR has been issuing high production forestry (aka clearcutting) permits for harvesting on Crown lands with old growth and endangered species that are still awaiting official protection. More Crown land in the province could ease the pressure on ecologically sensitive areas, and hopefully, provide the impetus for the government to meet the 20% protection goal.
The COVID pandemic and the recent closure of woodlands because of extreme wildfire risks showed how much Nova Scotians appreciate parks and wilderness areas and need more of them, and how much they miss them when they are closed.
Looking for a happy ending
The addition of 420,000 acres of timberland would be an invaluable addition to the province’s Crown land bank.
The Northern Pulp saga has not been a happy one for Nova Scotia. It has been an egregious case of environmental racism. Nova Scotians have paid dearly — in dollars, in environmental damage, and in health costs to those who had to breathe the toxic emissions from the pulp mill. They are not finished paying — it will take many years before they have covered the costs of clean-up of Boat Harbour, and now also the mill site.
Next to the countless hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, grants, incentives, legal fees, and giveaways of resources Nova Scotians have lavished on mill owners over the decades, another $104 million dollars to buy a vast amount of precious forest land from Northern Pulp would be a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Last year, the province’s revenues were $16.5 billion.
In fact, were Nova Scotia to take ownership of this precious forest land — land it loaned a foreign corporation money to buy that never repaid it — it would be one positive outcome of this long and unhappy pulp tale.
If the government were able to acquire this valuable land in the province it governs, it could be an almost-happy ending.
The province has until November 20 to make a bid.
Endnotes:
[1] Joan Baxter. 2017. The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest. Lawrencetown, NS: Pottersfield Press. P 43
[2] Ibid. Pp 173-174
[3] Ibid. p 174
