Pulp mill’s warm welcome to Pictou County sealed fate of Boat Harbour
The pulp and paper is still located on Abercrombie point. Photo: John Packman
Tuesday, Nov. 14, 1967 was a day of celebration in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. The Scott paper company was set to officially open a state-of-the art pulp mill. It brought 300 new jobs and millions of dollars a year in new economic activity to the area.
Employees gently laid white cloths over the tabletops, and set down trays of appetizers and dips for a celebratory luncheon. They placed a $90,000 scale model of the mill on a table. Men in white-collared shirts hovered around the model, fiddling with levers and tightening pipes.
At 11 in the morning, Premier George Isaac Smith and a long list of dignitaries would formally welcome Scott paper. They would then go on a tour of the $50 million mill.
It was good news for almost everyone. But not for those who lived or owned property near a little-known body of water called Boat Harbour. For them, life was about to change for the worse.
To produce pulp, the mill had to use 25 million gallons (112 million litres) of water a day. Once used, the water emerged from the back end of the plant as murky, liquid waste. It was the plans to treat that waste that would create for Nova Scotians an enduring toxic legacy, and seal the fate of Boat Harbour.
To find the roots of the story, King’s journalism students dug into the official records of the era, stored now at the Nova Scotia Archives. These included the personal papers of the premiers of the day, and meeting minutes of a long-forgotten body called the Nova Scotia Water Authority.
Robert Stanfield’s Conservative government created the authority in 1963 and gave it sweeping control over development of water bodies across the province. As one of its first acts, the authority set out to re-engineer the landscape around Pictou Harbour for the benefit of Scott paper. As well as turning Boat Harbour into a waste treatment lagoon, it dammed off the Middle River branch of Pictou Harbour to create a huge water reservoir for the mill.
Robert Stanfield. Photo provided by: Communications Nova Scotia
Bob Christie, a Pictou-area environmentalist, said the area’s economy was in deep trouble at the time. “The coal industry was dying, the steel industry after the Second World War was going and gone, and we had a guy called Frank Sobey who was part of Industrial Estates Ltd., the part of government that handed out money to bring in industry,” said Christie. “And the industry they offered here was pulp and paper.”
Boat Harbour wasn’t really a harbour at all, but rather a tidal inlet from Northumberland Strait. The water authority said publicly the treatment lagoon wouldn’t harm the environment, that residents could practically drink the waste. But the story in private was different.
Minutes of the water authority show officials knew the waste flow from the new mill would be acutely toxic, and that the authority used Boat Harbour to keep that pollution from flowing directly into Pictou Harbour and Northumberland Strait. Though primitive by current standards, the waste treatment plan was revolutionary in one respect –the other four mills in the province didn’t treat their waste at all.
The Water Authority’s first chairman, appointed with a salary of $10,000 a year, was Dr. John Seaman Bates. He was a chemist from the pulp and paper industry who helped set up mills across the country.