The first time I remember going specifically to New Glasgow was in 2016. I went to Glasgow Square in a car full of musicians. At some point on the journey along the highway the air changed; I could tell immediately that I was breathing in toxic chemicals. Someone else acknowledged the smell. “It’s the pulp mill,” someone else explained, “It’s polluting everything.” I was born and raised in Halifax, I’ve lived here for thirty of my (almost) thirty-five years of life, and this was the first time I had ever heard about the Northern Pulp Mill. After that, because of Dave Gunning and Ellen Page, I started to learn a bit more, and I added Joan Baxter’s book The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest to my reading list. When I saw that a documentary on the subject was slated as part of FIN I jumped at the opportunity to go and learn more.
David Craig’s documentary The Mill looks at the ecological and financial, environmental and economical, dilemma of Northern Pulp’s continued existence in Pictou County from both sides. What immediately strikes me about this documentary is the difference in the ways the people on either side of the issue chose to engage with Craig and to tell their stories. Firstly, Chief Andrea Paul of Pictou Landing First Nation speaks eloquently about the loss for her community of Boat Harbour. A’se’k, as Boat Harbour was known in Mi’kmaq, was once a flourishing tidal estuary where “the ancestors of those in the Mi’kmaq community of Pictou Landing First Nation once seasonally fished, clammed, hunted, played and prayed.” Over fifty years ago the Government of Nova Scotia tricked the Mi’kmaq people into letting them use A’se’k to pump in toxic effluent from the Pulp and Paper Mill, saying they would see no ill effects from it. Of course, that turned out to be a blatant lie and, instead, the water was poisoned and their way of life at A’se’k was completely destroyed. Paul speaks about this loss with genuine emotion, saying that an elder in her community likened the loss to that of losing a parent. Iain Rankin, Nova Scotia’s former Environment Minister, said the case of Boat Harbour was one of the worst in Canada of Environmental Racism.
Finally, after years of resistance and protest by Pictou Landing First Nation, a tentative victory came when the Provincial Government of Nova Scotia announced that the Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility needed to close on January 31, 2020, and that the Pictou Landing First Nation would then be able to begin the long process of cleaning up A’se’k. Of course, there is a catch. The Mill needs a place to pump their toxic effluent, it claims that it won’t be able to remain open to employ 10-12,000 of Pictou’s County citizens without it, and so the company has proposed that they will build a pipe to pump the poison into the Northumberland Strait instead.
We are then introduced to Pictou County’s fishermen, who are adamant that dumping this effluent into the Strait where they fish will be disastrous for their industry. The fishermen are passionate and firm in their stance: as far as they are concerned a pipe will not pump toxic effluent into the Northumberland Strait (#NoPipe). I was also struck by the fact that so many fishermen in the documentary speak with compassion and empathy directly to the employees of Northern Pulp and the other members of Nova Scotia’s forestry industry. They are very clear: they are not advocating for the closure of the mill, they don’t want to see anyone lose their job, but they are advocating for Northern Pulp to find a more environmentally sustainable and responsible way to conduct their business, and one that doesn’t require pumping poison into Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island’s water. We see the fishermen and the Pictou County First Nation come together in a beautiful show of allyship and solidarity with one common goal in mind: No Pipe.
Conversely, in Craig’s interactions with Northern Pulp they come across very clearly as cagey, dismissive, and secretive. From instances of blatant lies about a leak, to Craig having his camera barred from entering a meeting, it is clear that the company doesn’t want to engage in any meaningful or truthful way with members of the community. Any statement they do make sounds like it has been run through the Public Relations firm first. It’s obvious that they’re hiding the truth and trying to get away with business as usual, and that they are using the fact that they are so entrenched in Pictou as a way to hold the entire county hostage. The only genuine interactions from Northern Pulp’s side in this documentary are those in adjacent industries, those who work in forestry and trucking, who acknowledge both the complexity of the situation, but also that losing the mill would be devastating to their own livelihoods.
Craig’s documentary is a great introduction for people who are unfamiliar with the Northern Pulp Mill and its history in Pictou County; it really does a great job of presenting the various perspectives in compelling and dramatic terms, and showcasing how this David and Goliath story is continuing to unfold in our province and why it has become such a difficult conundrum for our Provincial government.
I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know about this level of pollution in Pictou County until 2016 and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t understand environmental racism until I read Daniel N. Paul’s We Were Not the Savages in 2017. As heartening as it is to see the Indigenous and non Indigenous communities rallying together and working together for cleaner water, land and air here, we should be standing against the destruction of communities, especially marginalized communities, whether the impacts directly affect us, our neighbourhoods or our livelihoods, or not. I agree with the fishermen and Joan Baxter in the film. I am not advocating for a loss of employment for thousands of Nova Scotians either, but I join them in asking a huge corporation, an entire industry, to find a way to employ these same employees without destroying our environment. This should not be a debate. The fact that it is highlights where we have lost our way as a species and how we have found ourselves in a global climate crisis of our own making. I hope that in shining the light on this one ecological disaster The Mill wakes Nova Scotians and Canadians across the country out of complacency and ignorance. If you haven’t seen the film yet, you can watch it on CBC here. Dave Gunning wrote these words in “Wish I Was Wrong” for his 2019 album Up Against the Sky that I keep coming back to, “We want a safe harbour, we want a clean shore, but you’d think it was the whole wide world we were asking for.” How has something so basic become so contentious and divisive? Why should one person’s job, one person’s harbour, one person’s backyard, one person’s beach be continually prioritized over someone else’s? “You’d think it was the whole wide world we were asking for.”
