Community Consultation on Bowater-Mersey Land Is Optimistic. But Have We Been Down This Road Before?

By Jen Stotland

I was on my way to the eighth of nine community consultations for the recently purchased crown lands of Nova Scotia on Monday April 8th.

As I drove up highway 103, I could see the clear cut scars on land that had been owned until recently by the now-defunct Bowater-Mersey mill. Though the community base for the consultation was said to be Halifax, the open house took place in Black Point on the South Shore, an annoying commute for Metro denizens, but very much closer to the former pulp and paper lands themselves. The mood at Black Point Volunteer Fire hall was cautiously optimistic.

I met Bruce Nunn almost immediately, greeting people at the door. Nunn is a communications representative for the Dept of Natural Resources. He told me feedback to the open houses has been very good, with even small communities having turnouts in excess of 60 people. Indeed, by the time I left the Black Point volunteer fire hall had over 100 people, and cars had spilled from the small parking lot to line the gravel shoulders of St Margaret's Bay road.

"We are saying; this is your land, how do you want to use it? A lot of people want to have a say. This is their opportunity," says Nunn.

There are two processes going on at these consultations. One is for Parks and Protected Areas, and what portion of these lands is to be conserved. But these open houses are also meant to collect feedback on economic activity that can be generated from the forest; ecotourism, mineral exploration, maple sugar plantations, cranberry bogs, blueberry picking, peat-mining, cell towers, wind power, new products from cellulose such as aircraft paint, glass, cosmetics and rayon fabric, and community-owned forests. All in all, 1.5 million acres are in consideration.

“We were trying to get business interest in the land and, in Port Hawkesbury, and it worked (when the Newpage plant was bought by Pacific West with significant concessions and tax breaks from the public purse). But that didn't happen here,” says Nunn, referring to the area west of the Avon River. “The reason we bought the Bowater-Mersey land was to prevent it from being sold to foreign interests, and losing control over it.”

Julie Towers is a naturalist as well as Executive Director of the Department of Natural Resources. She tells me the province will be leasing land to community members rather than selling.

“Our crown land in Nova Scotia is just shy of 37%, which is only second lowest to PEI. Other provinces have between 80 and 90%, so we're not interested in selling. We've been acquiring more land over time.”

According to Towers, forestry is shifting away from pulp to non-timber products. There is more interest from province in closed-canopy, more uneven aged forest. Towers tells me, for example, that there is already small scale wild chanterelle mushroom harvesting. A new company in Nova Scotia is engaged in injecting spores into cut stumps for wild mushroom production.

I was encouraged to read government documents pertaining to new forest policy; The Path We Share document which can be seen on the DNR's website.

The information does, at first read, look very optimistic, and includes hopeful statistics such as; a reduction of clearcutting harvests from 96% of all tree harvests to 50% by 2016; a system of tracking harvests and requiring tree harvesters to submit a post-harvest report; $4.1 million to support non-clearcutting silviculture; $1 million to support small woodlot owners in silviculture,; an end to public subsidy of herbicidal chemicals in silviculture; and to favour development of value-added and non-timber forest products.

There has, however, been critical feedback from several people including forester Jamie Simpson of the Ecology Action Centre, who since rented a billboard at the MacDonald Bridge toll booths with his own funds to voice his disapproval of the NDP's forest policy.

The Black Point fire hall was filled with many highly detailed maps, showing data on everything from soil types and navigable rivers, to sensitive species and to the potential for extracting hydrocarbons. I found Bruce Stewart of Western Crown Land Planning in front of a map showing the potential for growing softwoods. I asked about growing hardwoods as a commercial activity.

Stewart brought up that hardwoods grow more slowly than softwoods, and more of our land is suited to growing softwood. Much of our forest land is poor and highly degraded from pulping industry he told me. The housing market is starting to rebound, but “pulpwood doesn't look too good right now does it?”

After the Bowater-Mersey land was put up for sale in June 2012, Geoff LeBoutillier organized an 82 member coalition called 'Buy Back the Mersey' in order to convince the province to bring the nearly 550,000 acres back into public ownership.

“We were more successful than we could possibly have imagined,” says LeBoutillier on the province's decision to purchase the Bowater Mersey lands and assets on December 10 of 2012. Some months before the purchase was announced, the coalition began to advocate for a more effective, community-run way to manage the forest – community forests.

LeBoutillier noted that among the crowd at Black Point was a heavy representation of ATV enthusiasts, as well as recreational canoeists, kayakers, hunters, fishers, hikers, botanists and biologists. These were among the hundreds of people who were were involved in the Buy Back the Mersey coalition and had joined the struggle to create community forests on the former Bowater lands.

“When you stand on Indian Hill at the south end of Panuke Lake, you can see rivers flowing north into the Minas Basin, Southeast into St. Margaret’s Bay, and Southwest into Mahone Bay,” says LeBoutillier. “That hill is one of the province’s most important connectivity links, and therefore biodiversity links, for wildlife moving from east to west. In the old days, they say, Chester hunters would take their gun and a chair up to the top of the hill and just sit there and wait for a moose to stroll by.

“We are uniquely placed near the city, none of the other proposals are near Halifax. So we can partner with universities for research and development. We are in conversation with Unoooweg, a Mi'kmaw organisation that provides start-up funds for Mik'maq entrepreneurs that also comes with business administration training. We want them to join our board of directors. In 20 to 30 years we'll see our kids coming back from the oilfields in Alberta because instead of having trees that are 5 cm in diameter they'll be able to harvest trees that are 40 cm in diameter.”