Bruce Chapman

Sign at the entrance to the Pictou County pulp mill declaring Northern Pulp is a Paper Excellence company. Photo: Joan Baxter

Sign at the entrance to the Pictou County pulp mill declaring Northern Pulp a Paper Excellence company. Photo: Joan Baxter

This is how the “Friends of a New Northern Pulp” describe themselves on their website:

We are Nova Scotians who care deeply about our province, our forests, and our communities. We are the 36,000 Nova Scotians who own small and large woodlots.

So, just one line in and the BS begins.

The wording of the second sentence suggests that every one of the 36,000 small and large woodlot owners in the province is a “friend” of a “new Northern Pulp.”

If this statement were true, then I — as a woodlot owner — would count among the “friends” of the “new Northern Pulp.”

What is the “new Northern Pulp” anyway? If it’s the company they’re talking about, it looks an awful lot like the old Northern Pulp.

Northern Pulp’s recent submissions to the BC Supreme Court show it’s still the same old Paper Excellence company, one of whose declared “owners” is just an address in a popular tax haven (The Netherlands).

Corporate structure of Paper Excellence from Bruce Chapman 2020 affidavit to BC Supreme Court

Corporate structure of Paper Excellence from Bruce Chapman 2020 affidavit to BC Supreme Court

Continue reading Northern Pulp has a new set of “friends”

But the “friends” look familiar, and the “new” Northern Pulp sure looks a lot like the same old Northern Pulp.

Read more

This article first appeared in the Halifax Examiner on March 5, 2019.

Northern Pulp effluent flows into the Northumberland Strait at a dam called Point D. Photo: Joan Baxter

There is much to wade through in the documents that Northern Pulp submitted to Nova Scotia Environment on February 7, 2019, when it registered its “Replacement Effluent Treatment Facility” for a 50-day, Class 1 environmental assessment (EA).

Citizens who wanted to comment to the government on the proposal, as was their right, needed to slog through 1,586 pages in 17 registration documents, and they needed to do it quickly. The public was given only one month to comment. Environment Minister Margaret Miller had until March 29 to decide on the project. [Minister Miller’s decision is detailed here.]

Not surprisingly, the EA submission starts on a very encouraging note. In the Executive Summary, Dillon Consulting, which developed the project documents on behalf of Northern Pulp, provides a table indicating the “significance of project-related residual environmental effects” on 18 items, everything from the atmosphere to marine fish and fish habitat at every stage of the project, during construction, operation and maintenance, or because of accidents or malfunctions.

Every single one of them is assessed as NS, or “No Significant Residual Environmental Effect Predicted.”

Every. Single. One.

This could mean either of two things.

Continue reading Northern Pulp’s environmental documents – missing mercury, a pulp mill that never was, and oodles of contradictions

Read more

(This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on February 1, 2019.)

On January 31, 2019, Pictou Landing First Nation started counting down the days until Boat Harbour is closed to pulp mill effluent. Photo courtesy Matt Dort.

The children of Pictou Landing First Nation didn’t mince words when they addressed the standing-room-only audience that gathered in their school gymnasium on January 31, 2019 to mark the start of the one-year countdown to the legislated closure of Boat Harbour.

They “hate” Boat Harbour. It makes them “sad.” And “it stinks.”

Pictou Landing First Nationyouth council president Shyanna Denny (L) & PLFN Band Councillor Haley Bernard (R) distribute A’se’K (Mi’kmaq name for Boat Harbour) t-shirts at closure countdown celebration. Photo: Joan Baxter

Once the mill stops pumping its effluent — up to 90 million litres of the reeking stuff every day — into the lagoon that backs up against their Reserve, Alden Francis told the audience that “everything won’t stink really bad” any more. He said he can’t wait for the smell to be gone.

But it’s not just Boat Harbour that stinks. Continue reading “Everything won’t stink so bad”: The countdown to the Boat Harbour closure begins

Read more