06 Aug Northern Pulp running flat out – corrected

Aaron Beswick of the Chronicle-Herald yesterday confirmed a rumour I heard late last week:  even as it spews unusually thick clouds of noxious fumes over the Town of Pictou, the Northern Pulp mill has been running flat-out.

Northern Pulp’s top five most productive days since opening 57 years ago were all this year.

It set two production records in July alone, producing 979 air-dried tonnes of kraft pulp on July 17 and 972.9 on July 15, according to documents obtained by The Chronicle Herald.

Those records were set a month after a leak that sent untreated effluent into Pictou Harbour and just before a campaign by Pictou County businesses to have the mill shut down until it can get its emissions under control.

The rest of the story detailed the many local employers that depend on Northern Pulp, chiefly sawmills that sell surplus wood chips to the plant. It’s the classic Nova Scotia trade-off: accepting third-world-style environmental degradation in return for desperately needed jobs. The only question is whether, this time, the environment might win for a change.

I read Beswick’s story with a sense of deja vu. Nearly 50 years ago, G. I. Smith’s government made the fateful decision to take over the Sydney Steel Mill after its private owner, Hawker Siddeley, shut it down. Smith put New Glasgow industrialist R. B. Cameron in charge of the decrepit, 66-year-old plant, and for a time, everything looked rosy.

L to R: R.B.Cameron, Derek Hayson, G. I. Smith, Joe McIsaac, and an unidentified man.

The plant had been losing $3 million a month under Hawker Siddeley, but Cameron drove production to record levels, and in 1968, Sysco turned a 2.5 million profit. In 1969, the mill cranked out an all-time record one million tons of steel. Cameron said the results would justify a $50 million refit that would set it on a path to stable profits.

Before that could happen, though, Cameron’s frenetic production drove the aging plant into the ground. Here’s how Frank Murphy, a steelworker at Sysco’s open hearth furnace, described the results to Ron Caplan of Cape Breton’s Magazine:

Now, R. B. Cameron, when he came here, he was here a year or two. (This is after Hawker-Siddeley pulled out and the government took over.) We made a million tons of steel (in one year). We burnt the steel plant down doing it. Took it to the core. And what did R. B. do? He takes our Nail Mill to Dartmouth. (So) he’s got a Nail Mill up there, he bought it from the government. And he’s buying his steel from Germany–offshore steel, to make his nails up there in Dartmouth. He didn’t buy it from Sydney Steel. He gets it cheaper from Germany.

There are undoubtedly a million differences between a 67-year-old steel mill in 1968 and a 57-year-old pulp mill in 2014. One apparent similarity is that, to have a long term future, Northern Pulp will require huge capital investments. Is that what the mill’s Chinese Indonesian owners—a private family firm with vast pulp and paper holdings, untrammelled by the financial disclosure required of publicly traded companies—have in mind?

Or, a Pictou resident could be forgiven for asking, are they running the plant flat out in an effort to wring the last drop of value out if its aged assets?

A last gasp, you might say.