Forestry sector hopes for Northern Pulp revival

Neil Kenney is hopeful, but not optimistic about the future of forestry in Nova Scotia.

The owner of N.R. Kenney Logging in Pictou County likes the sounds of Northern Pulp’s new effluent treatment facility proposal which was made public on July 15, but fears it won’t be approved.

“The biggest obstacle now is the public opinion and mistrust of the pulp mill,” Kenney said. “How do you overcome something that’s been brewing for years?”

Northern Pulp closed in January 2020 when the provincial government mandated that the Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility it leased to Northern Pulp must close. Since that time, Kenney has been forced to diversify his business in attempts to mitigate the impacts that are being felt throughout the forestry sector in the province.

Northern Pulp’s absence has meant there is little market for lower quality wood and wood byproducts. Attempts to offset what Northern Pulp bought with other markets have come up short.

“If you’ve got no market for that, you don’t make enough off the good wood to make up for not getting anything for the poor wood,” Kenney said. “They were the only market.”

Jeff Bishop, executive director of Forest Nova Scotia, said the impacts have been widespread and are affecting everyone from landowners to sawmill employees.

“The closure of Northern Pulp has been a significant hole in the marketplace,” he said.

In some ways the increased demand for lumber during the pandemic has hidden the real impacts of the mill’s closure, Bishop said. With lumber prices higher than normal, it offset the money that sawmills were losing by not being able to sell their wood fibre at normal prices. But as lumber prices drop off, it will become more apparent, he cautions.

“It’s sort of a false economy,” Bishop said. “It’s very concerning to me what the impact will really be now.”

Even if the mill’s new proposal is approved, it will take several years before it’s operational.

While some in the sector have found other markets, Bishop said a lot of the wood that would have gone to the mill is simply being left in the woods.

Some ideas being considered including industrial and residential pellets as well as biomass, but they all take time to build up.

“There are different options that have been looked at. Unfortunately none of them you can flip a switch and make them happen today,” Bishop said.

Without the market, the supply chain falls apart.

“There are sawmills that are saying ‘we need more wood,’’’ Bishop said. “They need the bottom of the tree, but the landowner needs the market for the whole tree.”

Colin Hughes, owner of Colin Hughes Forestry in New Ross, has seen the impacts on his workforce and is hoping that Northern Pulp does get approval and opens as soon as possible.

“There are provinces around the world that would bend over backwards to have Northern Pulp/Paper Excellence on their doorstep willing to invest money,” Hughes said.

While Hughes recognizes he’s got a personal bias because of his business, he believes having a pulp mill would be in the best interest of the environment.

Right now, with no market for low-quality wood, he said those in the forestry sector are left with two choices.

One choice is to cut it and leave it on the ground.

“When you are in harvesting and you don’t have a market for that lower-end product, all that slash lays on the ground,” he said. “That’s the worst kind of fire trap there ever was.”

The alternative is to leave the poorer wood standing and just cut high-quality stands. But that too creates problems.

“When you’re taking the very best and leaving the very worst, those are the parents for the future,” Hughes explained.

So like Kenney and others in the forestry sector, Hughes will be watching with interest what happens with Northern Pulp’s new proposal.

“Forestry has been the backbone of our economy forever, to a bigger extent than what people realize,” he said. “We can’t afford to lose that.”