Region Archives: Canada East

FORT FRANCES, Ont. — Riversedge Developments has hired an international appraisal and auction company to sell the machinery and equipment at the Fort Frances paper mill. This will pave the way for potential demolition. Toronto-based Corporate Assets Inc. will hold a four-day auction of the mill assets beginning Aug. 31, 2020. On its website, the company described the auction as a “multi-million dollar” event. A partial list of the equipment includes three paper machines, a complete pulp mill, an assortment of machining and fabricating equipment, rolling stock and a wastewater treatment facility. …Riversedge acquired the mill from Resolute Forest Products in July 2019. The company’s asset manager in Fort Frances, Mitch Lepage, says Riversedge is still working on plans for the property once the machinery is removed from the buildings, and is not ready yet to make a public announcement.

Three weeks ago the province promised to defer all Northern Pulp payments on the $85 million it owes the taxpayer so long as it continues in an environmental assessment process the company claims is rigged against it.  …The letter, filed as part of a creditor protection application by Northern Pulp Nova Scotia Corp and a handful of affiliated companies, and its promise of a loan deferral worth millions were never announced by the province….Five days after receiving the letter, Northern Pulp did just that – announcing on June 8 that it was pausing its participation in the environmental assessment process for the effluent treatment plant it wants to build adjacent to its Abercrombie Point kraft pulp mill. …The company filed for creditor protection in British Columbia Supreme Court and received it on Friday.  [We respect the copyrights of the source publication – full access to this story may require a subscription]    

NOVA SCOTIA — It’s been six months since Northern Pulp was first ordered to shut down by the government. Since then, the Pictou county pulp mill has fully ceased operations and laid off staff, going into a hibernation mode. …But then COVID-19 hit the province in March, which Bishop says was salt on an open wound. …COVID-19 has made it difficult to tell which businesses are downsizing due to the pulp mill closure, and which are due to the pandemic. …But it’s happening across the province as contractors have fewer clients and fewer mills who will purchase their wood and bark chips. The Forestry Nova Scotia executive says he’s still uncertain about how COVID-19 will play out in the industry, but everyone is doing their best to stay in business.

A handful of companies who are jointly responsible for Northern Pulp and its timberlands were granted creditor protection on Friday by the British Columbia Supreme Court. 1057863 B.C. Ltd, Northern Pulp Nova Scotia, Northern Timber Nova Scotia and other related non-operating affiliates responsible for the Pictou County kraft pulp mill claimed that they would run out of money next month. Without creditor protection they warned that they wouldn’t be able safely idle the kraft pulp mill and contribute to its portion of the responsibility for cleaning up the Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility. …Even if [the mill] got the support of the province and the first nation that has been forced to live beside the mill’s pollution since 1967, the mill anticipates that it would take two years to build and commission a new effluent treatment plant once regulatory approval is received. [We respect the copyrights of the source publication – full access to this story may require a subscription] 

Read the full Press Release from Paper Excellence here

Tony Walker

There is little sign of pulp mill pollutants in sediments and marine life in the Northumberland Strait after decades of paper production in the area, according to a new study published in the journal Marine Pollution. The results show effluent treatment at the Boat Harbour site in Pictou County, N.S., succeeded in removing harmful mill chemicals before they reached the Northumberland Strait, says a co-author of the study. “It did its job,” said Tony Walker, a professor at the school for resource and environmental studies at Dalhousie University. In 2018 and 2019, researchers looked for contaminants in sediment, lobsters, rock crab and mussels at 16 sites near the outfall from the treatment facility that served the Northern Pulp mill. …”No evidence of significant impacts on sediments and biota in Northumberland Strait due to industrial effluents were observed,” the article concludes.

FORT FRANCES, Ontario — The government of former Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne released Resolute Forest Products from its obligation to repay a $23 million dollar contribution from the province’s Forest Sector Prosperity Fund, with virtually no conditions. However, it appears the government felt it was a reasonable trade-off for the even larger investments the company had made in the northwestern Ontario forest sector.  Through a Freedom of Information request, Tbnewswatch obtained a copy of the June 2017 waiver signed by then-Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry Kathryn McGarry.  The waiver relieved Resolute of the requirement to return the money the province agreed to provide, in 2007, toward the construction of a $90 million, 54 MW co-generation facility at the Fort Frances mill. The installation was completed in 2009.

DOAKTOWN, N.B. – J.D. Irving Ltd. says work will get underway next month on the $35-million modernization and expansion at its sawmill in Doaktown, N.B.  The project will add about 1,300 square metres to the mill’s footprint by bringing together the sawmill, planer mill and value-added centre under one roof.  The sawmill in the Miramichi region of the province is currently located on the other side of the road.  New technology will be installed.  The project will employ a team of 60 people during peak construction.  Irving is hoping to start up operations next spring.

Several newsprint manufacturers in North America are currently taking downtime as demand weakens. Resolute Forest Products has taken 40 per cent of its capacities from the market by halting two mills. The global publication paper market is struggling with significant excess capacity right now, as a spate of recent shutdown measures show – and North America is no exception. One company scaling back output is Canadian forestry group Resolute Forest Products, which has halted a considerable share of its newsprint production during the coronavirus crisis. The company has temporarily idled its Baie-Comeau and Amos mills in Québec, which can produce up to 322,000 and 194,000 t of newsprint, respectively. This equates to 40 per cent of Resolute’s total newsprint capacities of 1.3 million t, spread across six factories.

Gerry Byrne

CORNER BROOK, N.L. – Fisheries and Land Resources Minister Gerry Byrne announced $9.6 million in funding for the forest sector in Corner Brook on Friday morning. …The funding will be used to support employment in rural communities and help open new markets and products for renewable, resource-based businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes $5.7 million for forest industry development projects, $400,000 for secondary forestry processing innovation pilot projects, and $3.5 million to establish forestry biomass market opportunities. “We’re doing this not only in response, as an economic, a recovery response to COVID-19, but we’re also doing it as a recovery plan and an economic opportunity well after COVID-19,” said Byrne. He said there’s an opportunity that never goes away, and that is the opportunity to develop the forest products industry.

Three residential building stakeholder associations have released a study with 20 recommendations they say will encourage housing demand, boost building capacity and lead Ontario’s post-COVID-19 economic recovery. The Canadian and Ontario Home Builders’ Associations and the Building Industry and Land Development Association submitted the plan to the Ontario Jobs and Recovery Committee. …Proposed measures include eliminating security deposits for Ontario Land Transfer Tax on affiliated transfers, transferring mortgage tenancy to the date of occupancy for new condominiums and freezing municipal increases to property tax reassessment and development charges. The stakeholder associations also call for measures to replace traditional municipal agreements that hoard refundable deposits paid by developers with surety bonds, freeing up billions in potential investments that otherwise would remain parked. Another measure to encourage demand calls for introducing 30-year amortizations for insured mortgages.

The Canada Border Services Agency initiated investigations under the Special Import Measures Act respecting the alleged injurious dumping and subsidizing of certain decorative and other non‑structural plywood from China. For many years, China has sold large volumes of decorative plywood in Canada at very low prices. On April 21, 2020, the CHPVA, along with Columbia Forest Products, Husky Plywood, and Rockshield Engineered Wood Products… filed a complaint alleging that these goods are illegally dumped and subsidized, and have caused injury to Canadian producers and workers. …If CBSA issues a preliminary determination of dumping and subsidizing, provisional duties will be in force as of September 9, 2020. In exceptional circumstances, the Special Import Measures Act allows for the imposition of anti-dumping duties retroactively to today’s date.

After nearly two years of planning and construction, Windsor Mill’s newly reconfigured woodroom is now one of the largest and most modern in North America. The woodroom upgrade allows the mill to increase productivity while reducing fiber loss between the forest and the mill. The woodroom is where logs are debarked and processed into wood chips to feed the mill. The woodroom upgrade involved replacing two existing log-processing lines with one modern, state-of-the-art line. While the previous system could process only 8-foot-long logs, the new single-line system boasts more capacity and can handle logs that are 4 to 26 feet long. … The debarking process improvement will reduce fiber loss by 4 percent each year, allowing the mill to get more usable fiber from the same amount of wood. 

Blaine Higgs

Premier Blaine Higgs says the appointment of the same top civil servant to two seemingly distinct roles doesn’t create a conflict and shouldn’t pit two competing priorities against each other.  The premier was responding Monday of criticism that Tom MacFarlane, the deputy minister at the Department of Natural Resources and Energy Development, is now also the deputy minister at the Department of Environment and Local Government.    Environment is every department’s responsibility,” he said. “We feel it will work very well together.”  Critics said last week that MacFarlane’s two roles would be at odds with each other.  …But Higgs said Monday that all departments collaborate on environmental issues, so there’s no reason MacFarlane can’t play both roles.  …He also said the new appointment is not a permanent posting.

On Tuesday Northern Pulp paused its participation in the environmental assessment process for its proposed effluent treatment plant and filed an appeal of a ministerial order regarding its idling of the kraft pulp mill.  “We remain concerned that the environmental assessment, based on the current terms of reference, is ambiguous and would not result in a clear outcome. Instead, it could lead to more uncertainty, division, and disappointment among stakeholders,” said Graham Kissack, vice-president environment, health, safety and communications for Northern Pulp’s parent company, Paper Excellence Canada, in a news release.  “Pausing the assessment will provide time for us to further engage the community in discussion about the mill and its future, how we can best co-exist, and an appropriate environmental assessment process for the environmental improvement being proposed.”

Tom MacFarlane

The top civil servant overseeing provincial forestry and energy policies has been put in charge of the environmental rules that regulate those sectors, raising questions about how he can do both jobs at the same time. Tom MacFarlane, the deputy minister at the Department of Natural Resources and Energy Development, was recently named to the same top job at the Department of Environment and Local Government. “It’s terrible,” said Green Party Leader David Coon. “He will be in a direct conflict of interest.” …The cabinet order makes no mention of it being an acting or interim appointment. Shuffles of deputy ministers …are usually announced by the province…, but MacFarlane’s was not made public. …And in 2017, MacFarlane told the same committee his department still hadn’t implemented a recommendation by the auditor general to give private woodlot owners a more reliable share of the wood being sold to major forestry mills.

MONTREAL – Forest products giant Resolute Forest Products is celebrating its 200th anniversary this year. The company, started in 1820 by William Price to export lumber to England, now operates more than 40 pulp, paper, tissue, wood products and energy facilities across North America. Resolute’s revenues topped $2.9 billion in 2019. Resolute’s family tree includes Abitibi, Consolidated Bathurst, Canadian International Paper, Bowater, Ontario Paper, Donohue and Price. “Resolute’s roots spread out across two centuries, over 20 predecessor companies, multiple countries and hundreds of communities,” said Bradley Martin, chairman of Resolute’s board of directors. …Resolute’s history was chronicled in the book, “Resolute Roots,” written in 2016 by Martin Fairbank, a former Resolute employee. Resolute Forest Products maintains a company timeline commemorating its milestones.

CALGARY, Alberta — Canadian Pacific completed its previously announced acquisition of the Central Maine & Quebec Railway US Inc. Together with the earlier acquisition of Central Maine & Quebec Railway Canada Inc., this completes CP’s purchase of the entire CMQ network, which was first announced in November 2019. CMQ US and CMQ Canada will continue to operate in the U.S. and in Canadarespectively as subsidiaries of CP. …CMQ’s network links CP directly to the Atlantic Ocean port of Searsport, Maine, and to Port Saint John in New Brunswick through connections with Eastern Maine Railway and New Brunswick Southern Railway. …CP plans to invest as much as $90 million over the next three years to bring CMQ’s rail infrastructure up to Federal Railroad Administration Class 3 standards.

Iain Rankin

Nova Scotia’s Lands and Forestry Department is focusing all of its budget for buying land this year on people connected to the industry who might need help following the closure of Northern Pulp.  Each year, the department has $1.5 million to buy land from a variety of sources, but this year it will focus entirely on people in the forestry sector who have land to sell. The land must be appraised by an accredited third party and sold at fair market value.  Lands and Forestry Minister Iain Rankin acknowledged it’s a small step to help a reeling industry, but said it’s part of a broader effort.  “It may help with some businesses, it may not help with others,” he said in an interview.  The fact that land purchased through the program would become Crown land doesn’t mean it would automatically be designated for harvesting, said Rankin.