Speak Out in Solidarity
Partnership for the Sustainable Development of Digby Neck and Islands Society
All relevant information regarding the Whites Point Quarry and Marine Terminal Panel Review can be found on the CEAA website: www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca/010/0001/0001/0023/index_e.htm or Nova Scotia Environment and Labour at www.gov.ns.ca/enla
BACKGROUND ON PROPOSED BASALT QUARRY IN LITTLE RIVER
REFERENCE DATES:
April 30, 2002
• NSDEL (NS Department of Environment & Labour) gives approval to Nova Stone Exporters, Inc. for construction and operation of a 3.9-hectare quarry at White’s Point (no Environmental Assessment is required for a quarry below 4 hectares).
• 350 acres leased to Southern Stone by Linebergers & Johnsons, then leased to Nova Stone Exporters; Global Quarry Products is Manager of operations.
November 25, 2002
• Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) receives information that the Proponent plans to expand the quarry (Memo from B. Coulter, Reg. Dir. Halifax).
January 28, 2003
• Draft application to CEAA by Global Quarry Products for a 350-acre quarry and a marine terminal.
• Application refers to consultative meetings with representatives of NSDEL on June 14, 2002, of CEAA on July 25, 2002, and of both agencies on January 6, 2003.
June 26, 2003
• Federal Minister of DFO recommends to the Federal Environment Minister to refer the Project to a joint Panel Review.
August 11, 2003
• Press release announcing the joint Panel Review.
Excerpted from a CEAA Press Release, dated November 5, 2004:
Canada and Nova Scotia Establish Joint Review Panel for the Whites Point Quarry and Marine Terminal Project. HALIFAX – November 5, 2004 – The Honourable Stéphane Dion, Federal Minister of the Environment, and Kerry Morash, Nova Scotia Minister of Environment and Labour, have jointly established a three-member panel to review a proposal from Bilcon of Nova Scotia, Corporation for a basalt quarry and a marine terminal at Whites Point, Digby County. The panel members are: Dr. Robert O. Fournier (Chair), Dr. Jill Grant, and Dr. Gunter Muecke. Biographical information on each of the panel members can be found on the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency Web site mentioned below.
The panel was established on the basis of an agreement signed by the Ministers and made public today. The agreement, establishing the panel, sets out the rules for conducting the joint review process, the procedures for appointing panel members and the panel’s terms of reference.
May 8, 2003 Submission
for the Hearings of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans in Halifax
Environmental Impacts of Blasting for Stone Quarries near Bay of Fundy
(BoFEP Workshop Article)
Our Neck on the Line
Various Comments from local folks about the quarry issue
North Mountain at Risk - E.P.A.C. Article
Excerpt from: Environmental Planning and Assessment Caucus, CEN Issue 9, Fall/Winter 2004
Here is a list of some of the submissions regarding the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) Guidelines. Click on the name to see that person's submission. Individuals: Organizations:
Mike Corbett
Peter Duinker
Robert Keagle
Carol Mahtab
Brian Meeson
Danny Mills
Andy Moir
Don Mullin
Judith Peach
Kemp Stanton
Marilyn Stanton
Partnership For The Sustainable Development of Digby Neck and Islands Society
The Digby Neck Community Development Association
Enviro - Clare
Tourism Industry Association of Nova Scotia
The Bay of Fundy Inshore Fishermen’s Association
World Wildlife Fund
Sierra Club of Canada
Others:
Joint Review Panel Scoping Meeting #1 - 176kb, 145 page transcript.
Appendix
We included the following articles as part of our submission because we feel the writers have captured the nature of this place and the feelings of its residents.NATIONAL POST
Friday. August 2, 2002
Read Fog Magic before it’s too late
Children’s tale reminds us what Nova Scotia may be about to give away
Noah Richler on Books, National Post
Permit me the overdue discovery of an enchanting children’s book, Fog Magic, written by Julia L. Sauer in 1943 — and the dedication of this column to a trio of Nova Scotians who should read the book. They are the Nova Scotian Energy and Environment Ministers Gordon Balser and David Morse, and Robert Thibault, the Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.
Balser, it’s just possible, might already be familiar with the book. One suspects that the scrappy and contemptuous Tory minister, already brawling with New Brunswick over oil he’d rather sell south of the border, has long since forgotten the magic of childhood, but he just might remember the other landscape the Newberry Medal-winning children’s book commemorates — the Digby Neck — because he is also the provincial MLA here.
The Digby Neck, the thin spit of land on the Bay of Fundy that has splintered away from Nova Scotia’s southwestern shore, is a place of remarkable contentment, with somewhere around 1,000 year-round residents. The number swells considerably in summertime, when many families return — and many have done so for generations now — to the prettily kept, century-old white clapboard homes that run the length of the peninsula. Many are American, as Sauer was, and their ties here reflect the traditionally latitudinal relationships of Canadian provinces and American states. Boats from Nova Scotia took salt cod to the West Indies and came back with rum (and, more recent lore has it, lobster to Florida and marijuana on the way back). Some houses here have exact replicas, built by the sea captains who commuted between them a century ago, in Maine, Rhode Island, etc.
At four summers, my own bunch are still very much newcomers here, but we are no less welcome for it. Maritime hospitality is legendary. We stay in a charming, working fishing village halfway down the Digby Neck, in this part of Nova Scotia that has been generally overlooked. It’s hard to get to, for a start, and the swells stay down in Chester, Lunenburg and the other pretty villages on the south shore, where New Yorker writers and U.S.-based Canadian broadcasters go. No such action here. The Neck is known, by and large, for Fundy’s dramatic tides, the whale watching tours that locals run, and the scallops and lobster you’ll find in the bone-chilling waters here, the best in the world and the backbone of the local economy.
Little changes on the Neck, which is why we like it so. This trait was brought home to me all the more when a couple of concerned villagers dropped by and handed me a copy of Sauer’s beautiful Fog Magic. In the story, ll-year-old Greta of Blue Cove, obviously here, walks through the fog, typical in these parts, that divides our adult world from her childish, imaginary one. Greta’s unfettered imagination peoples the ruins of an erstwhile fishing village she discovers with sailors, their wives, odd characters and her otherworldly peer, Retha. When Greta turns 12, she learns she will no longer be able to cross the fog into these other worlds, though she is assured by Mrs. Stanton, Retha’s mother, that “none of the things you think you’ve lost on the way are really lost. Everyone of them is folded around you — close.”
On the Neck I have watched, with affection and wonder — no, relief! — as Sophie and Nathalie still cavort on Greta’s side of the fog. They swim in Fundy and the slightly less chilly waters of St. Mary’s Bay, hike rocks to watch for seals and whales, amuse themselves by picking berries in the meadows, or pass the time with their summer friends by — well, just sitting in it. Hanging around. Playing on the tires that hang from trees in a couple of the village yards, from pieces of weathered rope.
Television doesn’t come into it, nor any of the other psyche-blunting modern entertainments that make cities and commercial travel destinations uniform. Last year I listened with considerable amusement as Katie’s friend Diedra explained to one of her Sag Harbour pals — clearly anxious that her American friend just did not get it — that no, really, there’s nothing to do. It wasn’t a criticism. Far from it.
The Neck, you see, is just as it was in Sauer’s time, when “on a clear day – with the sea a deep blue, with a crisp wind fanning the excitement of living, with gulls whirling in vast circles and mewing faintly from their great height — on such moments in this place the idea of freedom became so real that you could grasp it in your two hands.” Why, even the names of the families are the same. What Anne of Green Gables is to Prince Edward Island, or Huckleberry Finn is to Mississippi, Fog Magic is to the Digby Neck, a signal that this bit of Canada is a national treasure.
And yet, true to the menace that lurks in most children’s worlds — and to the craven genuflection before America, in particular, of so many of the second-rate politicians who manage Canada’s resources and economy — the welfare of the Digby Neck is now under terrible threat. And it comes, as usual, in the guise of “economic development.”
The citizens of the Neck now stand at a crossroads, remarkably unified before a misconceived, avaricious plan of a trio of American companies to develop a massive basalt quarry at the hamlet of Little River that will throw all forms of life here into jeopardy and return next to nothing to local residents.
The basalt, whose massive column formations are a major tourist attraction of nearby Brier Island, will be transported by water across the Bay of Fundy to be used as American road and construction materials. At best, the quarry will generate a handful of mostly unskilled jobs, but also noise and dust and shattering environmental disruption. (Patterson Exploration of North Carolina’s initial press release promised 60 jobs. Later the number was cut down to 25-30. Comparison with other quarries suggests the number would be more like 12, three or four of these specialists imported from the United States.) Quite astonishingly, the rock will be mined — if local protests do not succeed in stopping it — without royalty.
It gets worse.
Sly complicity with provincial law means the 300-acre quarry, OK’d by the provincial government without any warning to locals (the procedure that, in America, is known as “Sunshine Law”) is to be mined 3.9 hectares at a time. In this way, the operation will be subject to no form of environmental review — as environmental procedures only kick in at projects over four hectares. This is an old mining company trick made even easier by the absence of any defensible zoning laws on the Neck — so far, they have not been required. But count on it. Once digging starts, the American company will be here to stay. Chapter 11 of the NAFTA agreement permits trans-border companies, prevented from operating by a change in the law, to sue for “lost” profits. Even American companies are up in arms about this clause.
Yet the quarry will avoid environmental review despite the clear fragility of the spectacular and unique land and marine habitat that draws the whales here, and the prospect of the gaping, rava ged scar that the operation will undoubtedly leave on a promontory that is, at various points, barely a kilometre wide.
What is remarkable about this story — and also not — is the contempt in which the ministers Morse and Balser appear to be holding their constituents. The municipal council, caught off guard, is rushing to amend the situation here— taking note, not least, of a recent petition against the quarry signed by more than 700 of the Neck’s 1,000 permanent residents.
But Morse, Environment Minister, is not interested in helping at all. He told the Digby Neck and Islands Committee of Concerned Citizens that the fault was entirely the municipality’s, as the laxity of their zoning laws meant that Nova Stone Exporters Ltd had, in effect, been accorded “full permission.” Balser, meanwhile — and it is impossible that he is not aware of the spectre of NAFTA’s Chapter 11 — wrote a slavering editorial in the Digby Courier urging residents to “give the idea a chance.”
Consider this scheme again: Nova Scotia is planning to give away 300 acres of basalt for nothing — and will be devastating the environment of the Digby Neck, and the fishing and tourist industries that depend on it, in the process. And for what? Fifteen jobs and the pleasure of putting another American company’s name on the province’s economic brochures?
In better moments, I think of the many other reasons the argument about the Little River quarry belongs in a literary column: the bevy of local characters, and all the stories of gullibility, duplicity and even treachery that are circulating here at the moment. But most of the time, I think of Digby’s Fog Magic, and how the politicians’ work has buried this peninsula in another kind of obfuscating cloud. It’s not too late to save the Neck.
Copyright 2002 National Post
THE NATIONAL POST
Monday, August 12, 2002
My Heart Longs for the Neck
But don’t ask me to tell you exactly where
Noah Richler
On Digby Neck
Oh dear, the traveler’s dilemma. I don’t want to tell you exactly where I’m writing, here on the Digby Neck, because I like it here too much. Still there are plenty of clues here – though I’ve changed people’s names – if you must insist on trying to locate the exact place I am talking about.
Take heart. The truth is you can make my story your own in any number of small villages and coves in Nova Scotia, North or South, on any shore . It is summer
family heaven, with joy to be found in the suggestions of its place names alone: Murder Point, Jew Cove, Whale Cove – and, I must note after my brother’s recent marriage, Delap Cove, a place to which I can now claim a tenuous family connection.
No doubt you can do the same if you try hard enough (or just 1earn to fib a bit). Nova Scotia was the first stop for many Canadian and American pioneers’ families, and is, today this country’s most pleasantly historical corner - unless, that is, you are a MacLeod, a miner, a neighbour to the ugly tar ponds, or some gormless university student who thinks that the world’s only ‘Sydney’ is in Australia, as two Britons did last week. (And we are worried about our own standards of general knowledge? I am hoping that Air Canada sent them on to Sydney, in B.C.)
Back to the Neck. Imagine, will you, a quiet fishing village built around the almost unbroken circle of a small bay on the Atlantic, fair shelter in any storm. Three or four lobster boats are tied to the wharf here, waiting for the season to begin again in November.
This is the St Mary’s Bay side of the Neck, a narrow spit of land that reaches out from Digby, and dividing the Southwestern Nova Scotian mainland from the Bay
of Fundy and New Brunswick. The promontory is an extension of the North Mountain, the ridge that runs along the high side of the Annapolis Valley, and whose most renowned, contemporary bard is the ebullient ‘Africadian’ poet George Elliot Clarke.
More than a century ago, local lore has it, a sailor once rowed to shore here from a clipper out on the water, with bloody stumps for legs and speaking in an incomprehensible tongue - though curiously, the rock that is named after him is on the beach on the Bay of Fundy side. Maybe, as my lot do daily, the old sailor
made a point of crossing over the hump of the Neck – at this, one of its narrowest points – to watch the sunsets over the herring weir.
It is one of the last on the Neck, a rather mesmerizing labyrinth of netting attached to high wooden poles. It is shaped like a large bass clef extending out from the rocky side of the beach. It lures the herring in at high tide and strands them there when the tide goes out again.
Marauding gulls hang about ready for an easy lunch. On most nights, we watch Minke, Right and Pilot whales pass, their spume coloured pink as they cross the path of the gloriously setting sun. Astonishingly, you can actually hear the snort of whales as they do this, even when they are a mile or two out.
Most of the pretty and largely well-maintained, century-old clapboard homes look over St. Mary’s Bay. Fundy is the ‘funkier’ side, says Stephen Kuzma, the spritely nearly septuagenarian New York painter whose wonderful house-cum-studio is about to fall into the sea at Whale Cove, just south of here. (“Well, so what,” said Steve when I asked him about this eventuality - you will recognize the house if you’ve seen the film Dolores Claiborne. “It’s the sea I paint, not the house.”)
On the Fundy side is where, if you were one of the lucky Children here, you would imagine Boo Radley, or whoever is your bogey man , to be living – perhaps in the old log cabin at the crest of the hill, or in the spectacular house that looks like a subject for an Edward Hopper painting, set as it is against a golden field of hay and a sky that is always, somehow, blue. Behind the cabin is the meadow known to all the village for its excellent wild blueberries, and the vegetable garden at the foot of it.
This garden is minded by an exceptionally goodnatured, nearly saintly local - we’ll call him ‘Paul’ – is, in effect, the village keeper. Paul lives in the old hotel.
(The Olde Village Inn is the one that’s functioning - and up for sale). Paul tends many of the houses and gardens when they are empty in winter. He is also the postmaster, and does shifts at the village Kwik-Way grocery store.
The Kwik-Way, whose owners I think we’ll call ‘Steve’ and ‘Penny’, doesn’t sell much of anything as far as I can make out. Still, Steve and Penny make their own fine sandwiches, you can get stove fuses here, and – if perhaps you were scouring eBay for some, I can tell you that diaper pins are still on sale here at 22 cents each.
But really, the point of the Kwik-Way is that you can get a cup of coffee for free and all the shoot-the-breeze conversation that comes with it. Even in January, Steve assured me, the regulars are out on the bench watching the tides come in and out and for any unusual developments. Just in case.
Most of the time, however, Paul, a (courteous, philosophical, and non-proselytizing) vegan, - and thus pretty well useless to his lobster- fishing family - is to be found at his vegetable garden, one that he tends with exemplary lassitude. Paul plants in the spring, and then he sits, drink in hand; Maria Callas playing on his cassette deck (to scare the crows, he says) and watches the plants come up, or not. He doesn’t even water, let alone spray the garden - unless of course, you count the garden parties that are now a fixture each Sunday afternoon.
These informal parties routinely stretch into evening, or until the mosquitoes become too much, and the local and summer residents who gather there discuss, somewhat boozily, the burning issue of the day - whether or not Grizzly Tracks or Razmattaz are the better flavours of Nova Scotia’s excellent ice-creams. (These are available at the Mariner roadside restaurant, where Debbie charges fairly heftily for fish and chips, but the size of her toppling cones is criminal.) And all the while umm, Peter - an American potter with a New England Quaker’s beard plays the fiddle from behind the potato plants.
Clearly, it must be noted, this method of watering works, for each year the garden sprouts forth a veritable cornucopia of peas, beans, lettuces, potatoes, carrots and cabbages, etc. And Paul, thrusting a plastic bucket your way with his one free hand, will insist that you take plenty.
His peas, and his lettuces, are a delicious accompaniment to the ‘unbelievably good scallops available in Digby ($8.50 a pound), lobster ($8.99 a pound) or the cod or haddock that - let’s see ‘Llewellyn’ brings to your back door on his occasional morning rounds. But if you’re feeling too lazy or are perhaps too sloshed to make your own dinner, an excellent chowder ($4), or scallop roll ($4.50 in a very white hot dog bun) is available at Petite Passage, the last stop at the foot of the Neck by the ferry to Long Island. Dianne Theriault runs the kitchen there, and her husband runs very reasonable whale watching tours ($30 for adults, $15 for kids for two or three hours), though you can also get a tasty scallop roll at Ed’s Takeout, in Digby, if perhaps you are shopping for secondhand clothes at Guy’s Frenchy’s - this, the Neck’s other great (and penny-wise) family entertainment.
These expeditions are just occasional, of course, because you need to have a very good reason to want to leave the village, whose name I still refuse to supply you. This might be whale-watching, or Guy’s Frenchy’s, a trip to one of the exceptional - flat, sandy, empty – beaches on the Acadian shore, or simply to stock up on groceries or rug hooking supplies for the children learning Maud Lewis’ craft. Or, lamentably, it might be because the day has finally come that we must go home again – this moment that Sarah, the kids and I regret for 50 weeks of the ensuing year. Oh, calendar come round again, and in the meantime here’s to ‘Paul’, to ‘Steve’ and ‘Penny’, ‘Judith’, ‘Audrey’ and all the others. Mind the store till we get back.
National Post
TORONTO STAR -
SATURDAY. JULY 26, 2002
DIGBY NECK ON THE LINE
Planned quarry threatens a scenic Nova Scotia area
Opponents say fishing and a way of life under siege
KELLY TOUGHILL
ATLANTIC CANADA BUREAU
WHITE’ S COVE, N.S.-More than 150 hectares of the most scenic shoreline in Nova Scotia may soon be ground into gravel under a New Jersey family’s ambitious business plan to pave more roads in the United States.
If members of the Clayton family have been here, they would have seen how the wind whips the wildflowers into a kaleidoscope of colour along the shore of Digby Neck peninsula, how the laurel and bluebells, the daisies and buttercups, thistle and clover cling to the grey rocks at the edge of a pounding blue sea. But the
rock is basalt, the sharp-edged remnants of a lava flow that is perfect for making asphalt and concrete paving.
If the Claytons get their way, and it looks like they will, one of the largest quarries on the East Coast will soon spring up near one of the tiniest - and prettiest - fishing villages in the Maritimes. The plan is to strip the trees from a section of coast the size of Toronto’s High Park, then blast, grind and ship about two million tonnes of crushed rock from the shore of the Bay of Fundy every year.
The quarry will provide no royalties. It threatens to destroy fishing grounds and create only mere jobs, but until recently, it looked like nothing could stop the bulldozers. The local member of the Nova Scotia legislature has taken a hand’s-off approach, as have the premier and the environment minister.
Two weeks ago, local residents fighting the project finally found an ally: Federal Fisheries Minister Robert Thibault requested a formal review of the project, which could delay blasting for at least a year.
The fight in Digby Neck has drawn together an unusual coalition of local residents who say not just their way of life, but their livelihoods are at stake.
Their fight has helped heal the rift between native and non-native fishermen who fought violent battles over lobster resources in nearby St. Mary’s Bay just two years ago, and forged new friendships between summer residents and those who count their time in the area by generations, not mere years.
Project engineer Paul Buxton says the fight is a classic one of change versus jobs, that the residents who now oppose the project will be its biggest boosters in just a few years.
But that’s not the way Rick Klein sees it. He says unlike many development battles, this project is going to cost the area jobs, not bring them more. Klein is a newcomer to Digby Neck. The former Washington, D.C. transit official fell in love with the area when a realtor refused to show him a listing because she was going out fishing. “Have you ever heard of a real estate agent refusing to show a property? Have you ever heard of a real estate agent caring about anything more than the almighty buck?” he asks as he bounces down a rough road toward the quarry in his old four-wheel-drive Chevy.
I knew right away there was something different about this place.”
It is different. Even by the high standards of the Maritimes, the skinny peninsula called Digby Neck in southwestern Nova Scotia is extraordinarily beautiful, and extraordinarily empty, populated by a string of small villages clustered on either side of a high hill that runs down the peninsula like a bony spine.
On one side is the Bay of Fundy, a vast bay with the world’s highest tides, summer home to endangered whales, which come to feed their newborn calves in its cold waters. On the other side is St Mary’s Bay, a shallow, warmer bay of clam beds and lobster boats. The quarry is slated for White’s Cove, an abandoned
fishing village at the end of a treacherous dirt road that snakes over the hill from Little River, a tiny town of 100-year-old homes clustered around a wharf built in the shadow of a high rock cliff.
Digby Neck doesn’t usually get much attention from the outside world. There are the tourists who come to see the rare right whales, the fishermen and their kin, and the virtual visitors who have read Fog Magic - a beloved 1946 children’s book set in the same abandoned fishing village where the quarry is slated to go.
It is a little eerie to visit White’s Cove after reading Fog Magic, to spot the cellar holes just as they are described in the magical tale, to see the thick steel rings driven into the rock that fishermen once used to haul their boats to land.
These days, the hill and clearing have already been stripped bare in anticipation of blasting and a sharp tang of spruce sap hangs over the cove, the Pungent reminder of thousands of trees scraped from the rock.
If approved, the quarry will cover 153 hectares, almost exactly the size of High Park.
It will ship three times more rock to the United States than the largest quarry in nearby Maine, which prides itself on its rock production. The only way the quarry makes economic sense is if the rock can be shipped by superfreighter.
That, says Buxton, is where Paul Martin’s old company, Canada Steamship Lines, comes in. In its official proposal, Global Quarry Products, the Nova Scotia company behind the quarry project, suggests using CSL to ship the crushed basalt to the United States. The former finance minister, who is almost sure to become prime minister, has no direct involvement any longer with CSL, but Buxton is careful to make sure all officials – and reporters – know there is a Martin connection.
“Of course we want to use a Canadian company he says. “We have talked to CSL, but nothing is signed yet.”
Buxton is a little touchy about the Canadian aspects of the project. Although the quarry project is spearheaded by a company registered in the province and Buxton is
the public face of the project, he says both ownership and control go straight back to the United States.
The land is owned by two couples from North Carolina and the Nova Scotia company is controlled by the Clayton Group, a privately owned web of companies that includes one of the largest concrete manufacturers in the United States.
No one from Clayton Group returned the Star’s request for an interview about the project.
Buxton accuses the quarry opponents of fear-mongering, saying their tales of a ruined economy, ruined environment and damaged water supply are poppycock. There are already several quarries on Digby Neck, he points out.
That comparison irritates his opponents, who point out that all of those quarries are tiny compared with the White’s Cove proposal, less than one tenth the size. So far, Buxton has found few public supporters on the Neck, where “Stop The Quarry” signs are prominent on driveways all along the major road.
Kemp Stanton has been setting his traps in White’s Cove all his life, just as his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather did before him.
If the cove gets a massive new wharf and huge freighters start moving in and out, the traps will have to go, he says.
If he moves his traps to another cove, that will crowd out other fishermen. More than 40 boats fish in the waters affected by the new shipping, he says, and those boats employ more than 120 people.
The quarry controversy is not a matter of jobs versus the environment, he insists, not at all. He argues - as many do here - that even if the quarry adds a few dozen new jobs, it will destroy hundreds more.
There are only two ways to make money on Digby Neck: One is to take tourists out to see whales in the summer; the other is to fish.
Whale researchers have warned that sound from the blasting could travel through the water and alter the migration pattern of the sound-sensitive whales.
Stanton believes the same thing will happen with lobster, that the underwater tremors caused by on-shore blasting will drive them away from the coast and spell
ruin for the hundreds of fishermen and crew who depend on the tasty crustaceans for their living. Buxton dismisses the fears of seismic Pollution, pointing out that the project will follow all federal and provincial regulations on blasting.
Then there is the issue of the wells.
Freshwater supplies are fragile on the Neck, with water filtering through the tiny cracks of the basalt mountain in unpredictable patterns.
Buxton says the company will drill a new well for anyone whose water supply is affected by the blasting.
Finally, there is the issue of royalties. Nova Scotia, unlike Ontario and some other provinces, charges no royalties on construction stone. Taxpayers won’t get a dime from the massive quarry project.
It is the never-again stuff that gets Stanton the most.
He lives in the home where he grew up, high on North Mountain, overlooking both the rugged open seas of the Bay of Fundy and the sheltered waters of St. Mary’s Bay.
“Anybody who enjoys hearing birds chirping, frogs peeping, you won’t hear that any more, he says. He worries that owls will no longer be able to hear their prey scurrying in the dark, because of noise from the quarry’s crushers, that silt runoff from the project will foul the seaweed, driving away the herring that are the
lure for whales.
He worries that the lobster will vanish, and he will be driven into poverty. “It is sad to me that when I’m done, anybody who comes after me won’t be able to see what I
have seen,” Stanton says.
“I could go out to the cove at night and hear the herring flapping, could catch a fish off a wharf. With the lights from the quarry, I won’t even be able to see the stars at night. If I walk along the cove, I have always been able to go to any stream and drink the water. It’s that pure.
“It’s this never-again stuff that gets to me. All this, never again.”
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