STOP NORTHERN PULP MILL!! Enough Pollution !

Death of Boat Harbour (And surrounding areas )

Before the mill, locals enjoyed Boat Harbour. They could boat, fish and swim to their hearts' content.

"I learned to swim off a little island that was known as Pine Island," said Doug MacKay, who has lived in Pictou County for 75 years and has owned a house on land that borders Boat Harbour since 1958.

"Clams and shellfish abounded out there at that time," he recalls. "You know, it was common practice that people would dig a bucket of clams and have a fire on the shore and cook them right there with the salt water."

Mary Gorman's family has a cottage at Pictou Landing. She remembers when it changed. "All the waves that were coming in were dark brown and foamy, they were not like the ocean coming in, they were dark brown foamy waves," she recalls.

Nearly a trillion litres of wastewater have gone into the lagoon over the years. To see that much water go over Niagara Falls, you would have to watch it 24 hours a day, for two years. All that toxic water has a profound effect on Boat Harbour and the people who live around it.

When the mill was built, Pictou County needed its jobs more than ever. The coal industry was in steep decline and premier Robert Stanfield's government was searching for replacement industries. Enter Scott Paper.

Scott got a sweet deal. The province gave Scott cheap water, free water infrastructure, cheap wastewater treatment, property tax exemptions and a huge tract of crown land. The company paid $50 million to build the mill in 1965---that's $342 million in 2009 dollars, about the cost of Halifax's Harbour Solutions project.

Building the water infrastructure for the mill fell to the newly formed Nova Scotia Water Authority. The authority was created in 1963 to administer and oversee all water in the province.

Pulling the strings at the Water Authority was John Seaman Bates, a chemical engineer and a lifetime friend and employee of the pulp and paper industry. When Bates became the first head of the water authority, he had been chief chemist for mills in Quebec's Saguenay River Valley, was technical advisor to more than a hundred mills in the British Isles and had his own consulting firm that set up bleached kraft mills around Canada. Today, the Pulp and Paper Industry Association of Canada has two awards named after Bates.

The mill would need 112 million litres of water per day to produce its pulp. On the toilet end, the province needed somewhere to flush the waste. At first, Pictou Harbour was the dumping ground of choice. But Bates devised a plan that would protect the harbour at the expense of a tidal lagoon.

Later, in October 1966, Bates explained his views on pollution control to the technical section of the Pulp and Paper Association of Canada. Bates said of mill waste: "The used water carries solids, solubles and toxic substances, often in quantity and condition too staggering for polite conversation... bleached kraft effluent is the most dangerous in our industry."

Bates felt the dangerous waste better belonged in Boat Harbour, next to a native reserve, than in the open harbour.

On May 18, 1965, Bates outlined his big plans for Boat Harbour to the rest of the water authority and to premier Stanfield.

The place would go from natural tidal lagoon, to waste dump for both human and industrial sewage. The human sewage would be pumped in from the towns of Pictou, Westville, Stellarton, Trenton and New Glasgow. The industrial sewage would come from Scott Paper and any future industries on Abercrombie Point.

There was a hitch, though.

The minister responsible for the water authority, W.S.K. Jones, later pointed out federal government approval would be needed to use Boat Harbour. Boat Harbour borders the Pictou Landing reserve, and native affairs are a federal matter.

The Water Authority's general manager was given the job of getting the necessary approvals. At a meeting on Sept. 2 and 3, 1965, Armand Wigglesworth reported back about a meeting with the "Mic Mac Indians" of Pictou Landing. They raised "four major objections" to industrial waste in their backyard.

But Bates said using Boat Harbour was "absolutely necessary to clean up the entire Pictou harbour." Wigglesworth was told to get that approval. Wigglesworth worked fast; two months later he had approval from local, regional and federal native officials to use Boat Harbour. The band would get $60,000 as compensation for the loss of fishing and "other privileges" related to Boat Harbour. To approve this today would take years of environmental study. But this was the 1960s, when things were done differently.

We found out just how differently from Daniel Paul, a Mik'Maq writer and former Indian Affairs official. Paul says the chief and some band councillors were taken to an apparently similar site in Saint John to see what Boat Harbour would look like once Scott began dumping waste there.

"They get up there and have the engineer take out a little cup of his sack and take a drink of water and tell him, the band chief and the councillors, this is how pure the water is going to be," says Paul. "And then we discovered afterwards, at that particular place, the unit didn't come into operation for two years after that visit.

"The shenanigans that went on were almost criminal."

At a water authority meeting on March 9, 1964, Bates said "toxicity from bleached kraft pulp mills [like Scott's] is very high." This information hasn't been published until now. It comes from water authority minutes on record at the Nova Scotia archives.

By 1966, Wigglesworth and Bates had both left the Water Authority. Bates' scheme to pump industrial waste into Boat Harbour would have dramatic consequences shortly after the mill opened.

Bob Christie used to be an engineer with Canso Chemicals, a subsidiary of Scott Paper and another polluter of Boat Harbour. Now he's an environmentalist. He said the theory behind the Boat Harbour facility was sound. The scale was not.

"Rather than using a pile of treatment chemicals it would be a natural living machine," said Christie. "The environment would clean [the wastewater]. But the poor environment, it got hit in the face with a brick."

The mill opened on November 14, 1967 and the natural machine didn't work. Soon there was a foul stench that hung over the whole area. It didn't take long for residents, who were told the waste would be pristine, to start complaining.

To fix the Boat Harbour pollution, the Nova Scotia government brought in Rust Consultants of Montreal in December in 1969. Outraged residents, service clubs and fishermen wrote angry letters to the consultants. They wrote about foul smells, swarms of bugs and fears for the fishery.

"If just a few of us who were unlucky enough to live in the neighbourhood were the only ones affected, we could smile and think of all the money being spent in our community," wrote Cameron Garrett. "But, I say the price is too high.

"Our provincial government took the job of handling waste disposal. It isn't doing enough," he continues. "Must we as citizens, because our government is a soft touch for slick talking, allow ourselves to allow them to make a cesspool out of our environment?"

After talking with residents and reviewing other reports, Rust said there was a problem with Boat Harbour, but it was an aesthetic problem. To fix the odour, Rust recommended mechanical aerators to add oxygen to the water. The report also said raising and lowering Boat Harbour's water level would take care of the insect problem. Rust dismissed the lobster industry's concerns that mill waste was killing lobster larvae that spawned just outside Boat Harbour.

In the early '70s, the province and the mill spent several million of dollars on improvements to the treatment process, the first of many upgrades. The odour, insects and public outcry subsided somewhat, but in private, people were still angry.
The band bites back

By the 1980s, the band was fed up with the toxic waste. The leadership had been focusing their lobbying efforts on the provincial government. In the mid '80s Daniel Paul became involved. He felt the band should sue his employer, the federal department of Indian Affairs.

"[The province] couldn't have done anything unless they had the consent of the federal government. So those are the people you have to go after," says Paul. "If the federal government was acting in the best interests of the band at the time they would have refused it; it's as simple as that."

"I was looking out for the best interests of the band at that point in time," explains Paul of his complicated role. "Which was my responsibility as district superintendent of lands, revenues and trusts."

The case never made it to court, but in 1993 the band and the federal government agreed to a $35 million settlement.

The money dealt only with the federal government's failure to protect the interests of the band in the early '60s. The settlement did nothing to stop the provincial government treating mill waste in Boat Harbour, little to deal with the band's health concerns and nothing to clean up Boat Harbour. The communities' anger and health worries continued.

Health worries have fueled Jonathan Beadle's personal crusade against the pollution. He's a native man from Pictou Landing who has been protesting the Boat Harbour waste since he was a teenager in the early '90s.

"To see Boat Harbour the way my parents see it would be an awesome thing," he says. "I'd like to see it back to its original state."

Today, Boat Harbour is not pristine, but it's much cleaner than it once was---water flowing out of Boat Harbour and into Northumberland Strait is far cleaner than federal standards for pulp mills require. The people of Nova Scotia, however, are still responsible for all the waste dumped into Boat Harbour prior to 1995, after which mill owners Kimberly Clark leased Boat Harbour from the province.

The pre-1995 waste sits in sediment on the bottom of Boat Harbour. Repeated tests have shown the sediments contain some of the most toxic chemicals known to science: dioxins, furans, mercury and cadmium.