Canada

Sign for Northern Pulp at the entrance to the Pictou County pulp mill declaring Northern Pulp is a Paper Excellence company. Photo from 2021.

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.

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(An earlier version of this opinion piece appeared in the Halifax Examiner “Morning File” of January 15, 2021.)

The “sample copy” of the newspaper landed innocently enough in our house.

On Tuesday, January 12, 2021, Canada Post delivered a “complimentary” issue of  The Epoch Times right to our door in rural northern Nova Scotia.

It came with a “limited-time offer” for a special subscription deal to what looked – if one knew no better – like a normal newspaper.

I was one of those, unaware that in the past year, investigative journalists had revealed The Epoch Times  to be a “shamelessly pro-Trump paper,” and a “global propaganda machine” that offers a “mix of alternative facts and conspiracy theories that has won it far-right acolytes around the world.”

A 2017 study in Germany found that The Epoch Times “disseminates antidemocratic false news and conspiracy theories, incites hatred against migrants and indirectly advertises for the AfD,” the country’s far-right political party.

Yet the masthead of the newspaper makes The Epoch Times sound benign as a newborn babe, a paper that stays “outside of political interests,” and is “dedicated to seeking the truth through insightful and independent journalism.”

Recipients of the free copy are invited to take advantage of a “$1 first month trial offer.” The “best deal” subscription is six months at $3.43 a week, or $89 plus tax. Subscribers get a weekly paper with 40 pages in four sections.

The Epoch Times, says the masthead, has readers in 36 countries and 22 languages, with a  Canadian English version that has been operating for 16 years, with a “loyal readership” in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, and Edmonton.

As for its origins, it says only that it was founded in 2000 by “Chinese expats in North America.”

As I said, benign.

Or so the mysterious people behind The Epoch Times would have us believe.

Dig a little, however, and the paper looks anything but benign.

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Canada and the world have lost a great medical researcher, and a remarkable man. In my life – and I’ve had a long one – I’ve met only a handful of people I admired as much as I did Frank Plummer. This is my tribute to him.

By Joan Baxter

February 6, 2020. When I heard this week that Dr. Frank Plummer had died, the loss hit hard, although I hadn’t seen him in two decades and knew him for only a couple of years when my family and I were living in Kenya.

That Frank had died suddenly while in Nairobi to deliver a keynote speech at the annual meeting at the collaborative centre for research and training in HIV/AIDS/STIs at the University of Nairobi – his old stomping grounds – made his passing somehow even more poignant.

Screenshot of the University of Manitoba web page in tribute to Dr. Frank Plummer, an alumnus and a U of M Distinguished Professor of medical microbiology, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former Canada Research Chair in Resistance and Susceptibility to Infections.

It was in Nairobi in the mid-1990s that I met Frank, a fellow Canadian. Through our kids and mutual friends, we met the Plummer family, and would get together at parties or for weekend outings in the Kenyan countryside.

At first, I had no idea  how renowned he and his work were, although he had been in Nairobi for more than a decade doing research on HIV/AIDS. It was through our mutual friends – not Frank himself – that I learned just who he was, a globally and highly respected microbiologist whose work had made world headlines in 1993.

At the time, I was working as a science writer for an international research organization headquartered in the Kenyan capital, and was eager for some writing projects that involved more creativity than did the mostly technical reports and academic articles that took up my working days.

Then one day in 1995, Frank asked me if I would consider writing a book about him and his work on HIV/AIDS. He said a European publisher had approached him and asked if he would be willing to pen an autobiography. He told me he wasn’t interested in doing that. Not then. He was too busy.

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November 18, 2019

Morila gold mine in Mali, West Africa, 2002. Photo: Joan Baxter

This book chapter is the result of a visit to the Morila gold mine in Mali nearly 18 years ago, and is excerpted from my 2010 book, “Dust from our eyes – an unblinkered look at Africa,” published by Wolsak & Wynn in Canada and worldwide by Fahamu Books, which was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2009. I decided to republish it here because I regret to say that based on the extensive research I’ve been doing on the gold mining industry in the past few years, it looks as if not much (if anything) has improved since then. I first wrote this story for the BBC, following a visit to the Morila gold mine when it was operated by South Africa’s AngloGold and Randgold. Today, the Morila gold mine is operated by Canada’s Barrick Gold, and is a “joint venture company held by Barrick (40%), AngloGold Ashanti (40%), and the State of Mali (20%).” The economic disparities, and the environmental, social and political havoc that such gold mines cause, are all contributing factors to the horrendous insecurity that now prevails in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger (where Canadian gold mining companies are so prevalent), causing widespread suffering – and death. If I were writing it today, I would probably entitle it, “Gold: all that glitters causes death and devastation.”

All that glitters … is taken away

… the very term investment badly distorts what’s really going on. Plundering, looting and exploiting the non-renewable resources of Africa is a far more accurate description. Gerald Caplan

In my fifth year in Mali, in late 2002, I finally obtained an invitation to accompany the country’s new minister of mines and a team of Malian journalists on a day trip from Mali’s capital Bamako to Morila, the country’s newest big gold mine.

On the short flight to the mine, I found myself seated beside a South African employee of the South African mining giant Randgold, who told me he and his wife had recently applied for Canadian citizenship and that he now lived in Toronto – when he wasn’t in Mali. He said things were deteriorating in South Africa, “if you know what I mean,” and that he and his wife, as white South Africans, felt their futures were in Canada.

He went on to tell me about the wonders I was about to experience at Morila, especially the man-made lake that was filled with water pumped 40 kilometres from a small river, a tributary to the River Niger. And as for the clubhouse, that was something to behold; he was very proud of it because he helped to design it. He called it the “Sahelian Club Med.” There were pleasure craft and a wharf on the man-made lake, he said, and lovely watered gardens, a fine bar and restaurant, with food, wine and other drinks flown in from South Africa. He said he often drove down from Bamako in his Land Cruiser to spend weekends there.

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This is the third in a series of four articles on the 21st-century push for mining and quarrying in Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast. Earlier versions of articles in this series appeared in May and June 2018 in the Halifax Examiner and the Cape Breton Spectator. (I am pleased to say that this series of four articles has been shortlisted for an Atlantic Journalism Award in Excellence in Digital Journalism: Enterprise/Longform.)

Part 3. Gold in the hills or clean water in the rivers? Citizens take on government geologists in northern Nova Scotia

Article 3 photo SuNNS no mining sign

The news broke in November 2017 on the front page of the free monthly community paper, The Tatamagouche Light, in an article written by Raissa Tetanish under the headline “Gold in the hills?”

“The hills” are the Eastern Cobequid Highlands in northern Nova Scotia, a mostly forested area of 30,000 hectares (74,132 acres), stretching from the Wentworth ski hill to Earltown.[1]

Tetanish reported that, not only did geologists from the provincial Department of Natural Resources (DNR) think there was gold in the Cobequid Hills, they had been prospecting there for six years. And now, reported Tetanish, DNR was preparing to invite mining companies from around the world to come and do more advanced exploration.

Screenshot taken from DNR geological map showing enclosure area slated for gold exploration in the Cobequid Highlands in Nova Scotia.

In 2016, the government had closed the area to any other prospecting while DNR geologists did their own hunting for gold. About half the enclosure area was the French River watershed, which supplies the village of Tatamagouche its drinking water. Concerns about the water supply aside, the geologists were “enthused” by what they’d found and “optimistic for the future,” reported Tetanish.

The article explained that there were plans to hold an “open house” to inform citizens about the findings, and the geologists said they would be promoting the “opportunity” at the next Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention, which would be held in Toronto in March 2018. After that there “could be a Request for Proposals (RFP) to see if there’s interest from mining companies.”

Garth DeMont, a geologist with the Geoscience Branch of DNR (which was moved to the Department of Energy and Mines in July 2018), was quoted as saying, “All we need is the discovery of one significant gold vein and the Cobequids will light up.”

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There’s a 21st century gold rush starting in Nova Scotia on Canada’s Atlantic coast, just as industrial gold mining is increasingly coming into disrepute around the world. It has been described as an “environmental disaster,” which often leads to contamination of water sources on which life depends. This is the second in a series of four articles on mining and quarrying in Nova Scotia. Earlier versions of these articles appeared in May and June 2018 in the Halifax Examiner and the Cape Breton Spectator. (I am pleased to say that this series of four articles has been shortlisted for an Atlantic Journalism Award in Excellence in Digital Journalism: Enterprise/Longform.)

Part 2. Going for gold

Screenshot of BNN interview of Atlantic Gold CEO Steven Dean (left) at the 2018 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) convention.

The CEO and chairman of Vancouver-based Atlantic Gold Corporation, Steven Dean, a man with a history of international coal and metal mining and former president of Teck Cominco, was being interviewed by Andrew Bell of the Business News Network (BNN).[1] Dean was talking up his company’s first gold mine, named Touquoy after a French miner who worked the deposit in the late 1800s, which had just gone into production in Moose River, Nova Scotia.

The interview was held at an ideal venue for Atlantic Gold to showcase its new open-pit gold mine, the first ever in Nova Scotia: the 2018 convention of the Prospectors and Developers Association (PDAC) of Canada in Toronto, the global mining industry’s “event of choice.”

Bell expressed amazement at the low cost – $550 – of producing an ounce of gold at the Touquoy mine. Dean told him the mine would produce about 90,000 ounces a year which, at current gold prices, would make it a “profitable mine” with about $90 million in “operating cash flow.” And, said Dean, Atlantic Gold planned to enter its second phase of operations by 2022, with more mines operating in the area, producing a total of 200,000 ounces a year.

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