Partnership for the Sustainable Development of Digby Neck and Islands Society

• March 19, 2008 - News of the Tidal Power Programme for the Bay of Fundy

• March, 2008 - Core Values - Get it Right and Let's put it to rest!

• March, 2008 - Not Given a Chance to Express Opinion on Quarry? - Bullpucky!

• February 17, 2008 - Digby Neck quarry: enough is enough

• February 16, 2008 - Mining As A Toxic Issue

• February 13, 2008 - Digby Courier - Bilcon Sues

• February 13, 2008 - Environment minister stands by quarry decision

• February 13, 2008 - Digby Courier - Bilcon Sues

• February 10, 2008 - J. Meek, We Oppose It

• February 7, 2008 - Quarry group irks politicians

• February 5, 2008 - letter to editor on Community Values

• February 6, 2008 - Trade action doesn’t impress some locals

• February 6, 2008 - Fournier: Bilcon action groundless

• February 6, 2008 - Daily News - Bilcon Sues for $188 million

• February 5, 2008 - Herald - Bilcon Sues for $188 million

• February 5, 2008 - CBC News - Bilcon Sues for $188 million

• February 5, 2008 - letter to editor on Community Values

• February 5, 2008 - J. Meek editiorial

• February 5, 2008 - Quarry fans still digging for support

• January 24, 2008 - Stop the Quarry group named Eco-Heroes group of the year for 2007

• January 20, 2008 -  The fight for rural Nova Scotia , by Jim Meek

• December 18, 2007 - Government of Canada today announced that it accepts the joint review panel’s conclusions

• December, 2007 - Article by Noah Richler

• November 21, 2007 - Digby Quarry Proposal Dead! - more articles and opinion pieces

Sunday Herald - The Nova Scotian - February 17, 2008

Digby Neck quarry: enough is enough

There are come-from-aways on both sides of the Digby Neck controversy, so attempts to divide are unwelcome
By NOAH RICHLER

LAST MONTH I wrote Cindy Nesbitt, asking the Centreville resident and pro-quarry activist whether she would consider joining an ad hoc group of local residents and homeowners with a view to figuring out what job creation schemes might be contemplated for the area in the wake of Bilcon’s arrested scheme. She did not answer.

That was disappointing, though not entirely unexpected, as it seems the Bilcon bunch have been working hard at a "survey" of Digby Neck residents to see if they can overturn decisions at every level of government against their plans for a ‘mega-quarry’ and deep water marine terminal at White’s Point, outside Little River.

Well, not all residents. "Seasonal" ones, as I am, have been deliberately excluded. True to form, and despite the company’s populist pretensions, Bilcon simply strikes from the register those voices it does not want to be heard. So seasonal residents are excluded, but also, as my information indicates, those full-time residents who are known to be opposed to the project (and there are many).

None of this is surprising, as a survey is no simple matter and, as any observer of Québec politics knows, can be made to prove just about anything. I was once sitting next to the director general of the BBC when he was having lunch with the president of one of the U.K.’s leading polling firms. "Absolutely," the pollster said, as they discussed the viability of a survey to monitor audience satisfaction, "what would you like the answers to say?"

So, after most thought it was all over, Bilcon is having another go, the company’s tactics more divisive each time.

As they have been doing from even before the moment the true scale of their environmentally destructive scheme went public, in 2003, and smacked into the hurdle of community resistance, the Claytons, the New Jersey family behind the company, Paul Buxton, who has been running its various Canadian fronts, and Cindy Nesbitt, its shop floor agitator, have been striving to create social enmity where none previously existed. Hence a "survey" in which, despite ample and repeated evidence to the contrary at the Joint Environmental Review hearings and before, the explicit suggestion is that the interest of locals are at loggerheads with those of seasonal residents.

This is nonsense.

Seasonal residents are not rich folk blithely taking in the view and finding local poverty quaint, but people putting a lot of love and money into the region.

I can cite myself as an example. Five years ago, I bought a 150 year-old house on the Neck that was collapsing on its foundations and had not been lived in for well over two decades. At least a dozen local contractors and their aides have made a lot of money contributing to its restoration. Multiply the work my single "come from away" family has created by the number of seasonal residents along the Neck and you can account for several of the positions Bilcon’s debunked plan promised.

Seasonal residents contribute in other ways. I am, for instance, writing a book about the Neck. It may end up being good or lousy, bought or not, but at the very least it means I’ve been putting a few years of my creative life into the area.

The same can be said of Tom Sachs, the latest pensioner to fall prey to Bilcon’s litigators. Sachs has been working to develop sustainable methods for harvesting sea urchins, researching ultrasound techniques that would identify those that have the coveted roe without having to throw back all the ones that don’t, dead, as present methods require. Now, Bilcon has filed a defamation suit against Sachs over material he submitted during last year’s environmental review into the proposal.

What makes Bilcon’s "survey" even more laughable is that all that company’s major players are, in fact, ‘CFAs’. The Johnsons and the Linebergers, the two families that leased the 152-hectare property in Little River to the Claytons, are from North Carolina. The Johnsons own one of the Centreville houses that Cindy Nesbitt has described, so dramatically, as empty most of the year and contributing little to the economy. Nesbitt herself is from Ontario. Paul Buxton, Bilcon’s supposed champion of the working man, lives in a Deep Brook mansion overlooking the Digby Gut and more than 30 kilometres away from any potential blasting. He is from the United Kingdom, via Annapolis Royal. John Wall, the proposed quarry’s manager, is from New Jersey, as are the Claytons, his bosses.

Of course, none of this should be news to anybody. CFAs are a part of the region’s heritage. Today they are likely to be from Ontario, or coming soon, Alberta. But they have been coming to Nova Scotia, United Empire Loyalists first of all, since the days before Canada even existed. If today the descendants of these families are still visiting, then that is a good thing. As much as the Acadian ones they were once pitted against, their names are a part of the fabric, a part of the map.

Amusingly, the fact of American ownership also puts the lie to Bilcon’s $188 million lawsuit complaint that they were denied their quarry because of anti-Americanism. How does that work if one small but significant part of the resistance is also American? When one Digby developer showed me the Nova Scotia government’s geomatics map of the Neck that tracks ‘nonresident’ ownership, with sizable tracts of American-owned land coloured blue, he said, "You think you live in Canada up there, but you don’t."

A lot of this land was sold through stateside auction houses to anxious Americans after the Vietnam war and then the war in Iraq. Occasionally, in Nova Scotia, there is in-migration to speak of.

Personally, I am sorry that Cindy Nesbitt will not sit at a table and bang out ideas with a bunch of other residents. What such a bipartisan group might achieve is the pursuit of a few goals that would do a lot more to secure a prosperous future for the Neck than blowing it apart and hoping, for the interests of a few, that the region’s lobster fishers have a lousy season.

Noah Richler is the author most recently of This is My Country, What’s Yours?

Sat. Feb 16, 2008
Mining as a toxic issue

RALPH SURETTE

THERE WAS an editorial in the New York Times on Thursday describing a fight over uranium exploration permits just outside Grand Canyon National Park. The permits were granted with little public notice and no formal environmental review, provoking widespread outrage. It was done under an 1872 law, of which, said the Times, the "worst feature by far is that it elevates mining over all other uses of the land."

This introduces us briskly to Nova Scotia, where we don’t even need antique laws to elevate mining above all other uses of the land. We have an antique political culture to do that.

A case in point is the newly authorized Moose River gold mine, promising a five- to seven-year burst of 100-plus jobs, then leaving a toxic hole in the ground. To read the government’s announcement, full of praise for the controls and sensitivities of modern gold mining, you’d think this was actually a joyful day for the environment.

But the key here is that the company was allowed to hire a consultant to do its own environmental assessment. The kid glove approach was noted by none other than the Bilcon company, which had its Digby Neck gravel quarry turned down after being raked over the coals by a stiff formal review. That will be part of its argument before the secret panels of NAFTA, where it will be complaining of unfair treatment and suing for compensation. Its question is a logical one: If this gold mine can get away with it, why can’t I?

According to the Eastern Shore Forest Watch Association, which was instrumental in getting the province to protect the Ship Harbour-Long Lake wilderness area – the top lake (Scraggy Lake) of which borders the mining project – what the gold mine is getting away with is this: The company’s assessment was "limited to the mine site, completely ignoring the risk of environmental consequences downstream if the mine effluent, carrying cyanide, arsenic and even mercury, accidentally spills into Scraggy Lake," potentially contaminating a 30-kilometre watershed.

Further, "the company plans to pump a huge quantity of water from Square Lake, on Crown land, pollute this water with cyanide in the gold extraction process, then dump the partly cleansed effluent into Scraggy Lake." Along with a pit "deeper than Bedford Basin" and a "rubble mountain over 35 hectares, the height of a 15-storey building," there will be a permanent toxic legacy which will require virtually "perpetual care."

A rather excited gold prospector was quoted as saying that this project will "raise the profile" of 60 other gold-bearing areas in the province. If one can be slipped in without proper review, why not 60?

Plus, there’s the business of a new quarry approved at Upper Granville over local protests. It’s 3.9 hectares, just under the limit to trigger an environmental review. Bilcon, had it understood us better, could have had the entire North Mountain range to itself had it only cut it up 3.9 hectares at a time. Plus, there’s strip mining for coal in Cape Breton and a controversial new gypsum project behind Windsor, and renewed pressure to lift the moratorium on uranium mining.

The point is this: We’re a small province, with no hinterland to speak of, and watersheds everywhere flowing to the sea, already compromised by clearcutting and other activities. Mining can’t be a wild west cowboy show. The review panel on the Digby Neck quarry proposed that all quarry projects on the North Mountain be put on hold until a proper policy is developed, and proposed that a coastal zone policy be created to guide large coastal developments. Others want us to tally our limited and partly polluted groundwater resources in this context. And then there’s the demand that the province simply respect its own environmental assessment guidelines. Why is this too much to ask – especially in view of the MacDonald government’s incessant bragging about its environmental prowess?

The answer is no doubt the need to be perceived to be "open for business" – having been forced to kill the Digby Neck quarry, the idea is to give the mining industry something to take home.

Indeed, there’s an argument going around that I have trouble with – the notion that we’re getting a reputation for saying "no" to everything. It started with opposition to obstructing view planes in downtown Halifax, then the nixing of the Commonwealth Games, then the Digby Neck quarry, and no doubt I’ll be accused of joining in by asking for a proper regulation of mining projects. There’s a kind of blackmail in this. We’re being asked to say "yes" just for form’s sake, no matter how problematic the project.

But it’s peculiar how being "open for business" is a message that is crafted overwhelmingly for the mining sector. Do people who invest in ports, manufacturing, forestry, retail or whatever need convincing that we’re open for business, considering the grants and other incentives we’ve lavished on them for decades? Being "open for business," then, means primarily this: Come and take us. We’re easy.

( rsurette@herald.ca)

Ralph Surette is a veteran freelance journalist living in Yarmouth County.

(Editorial Digby-Courier – Feb.13, 2008)

Bilcon ups the ante

A certain amount of caution needs to be used in commenting on Bilcon. The New Jersey-based company and its Canadian representative have been known to react litigiously when they feel slighted—as is the case with the current intention to sue the Canadian government for damages.

Well, of course that's their right. And we wish them and their lawyer nothing but the fairest of treatment.

Actually, that's what we've wished all sides in this protracted story. We wished for jobs for those who wanted them, tranquility and environmental safety for Digby Neck, peace and freedom from hassle for those who took sides, and we even wished for clarity in the mass of confusion and contradictions that were stirred up in the environmental review panel.

That was obviously too much to wish for. Not everyone was going to be satisfied by whatever decisions the provincial and federal governments made. But what was curious throughout the environmental assessment—and which was commented on several times by the panel chair Robert Fournier —was that Bilcon was doing a less than stellar job of preparation.

In June, when the joint review panel held its hearings at the Pines Resort in Digby, Fournier pressed Bilcon, saying there were at least 50 places where specific information was requested and was only partially returned or not returned at all. He chastised the company for offering an environmental impact statement that contained many gaps.

Could it be that the company all along had a fallback position that involved the North American Free Trade Agreement?

We're left to wonder whether this isn't all just a high stakes poker game in which the company has put a comparatively small amount on the table, and is now upping the ante. Along the way the company is fueling the dreams of a group of people on Digby Neck, but providing no assurance that it looking for anything other than damages for lost profit.

That's not a promise of a future quarry.

Well, we still wish Bilcon the fairest of treatment, and we wish the same for governments federal and provincial that commissioned an extensive and thoughtful review.

February 13rd 2008 - DIGBY COURIER - NovaNewsNow.com
Environment minister stands by quarry decision
By Jonathan Riley

Nova Scotia’s minister of Environment has no intention of revisiting his decision on the White Points quarry.

“There is no process for an appeal, there is no legislative trigger and I stand by my decision,” said Mark Parent this week.

Parent denied provincial approval to a 150-hectare quarry on Digby Neck last fall. His decision followed the recommendations of a joint provincial-federal panel that carried out an environmental assessment on the project. The federal minister of Fisheries and Oceans, Loyola Hearn also accepted the panel’s decision.

Last week reports surfaced that people working out of the Bilcon office in Little River were surveying residents how they felt about the quarry. Then Bilcon announced it had filed a notice of intent to seek $188 million in damages under NAFTA from the government of Canada.

The Digby Courier contacted Parent specifically to ask him about the possibility of him overturning his decision.

“There’s no way I’m going to revisit that decision. I stand by it.

“I looked at the panel’s recommendation and the EA branch looked at it, and I determined there were unacceptable risks to the environment and to the culture. And we felt those risks couldn’t be managed in a way that would allow the project to proceed.

“I didn’t blindly follow the recommendations of the panel. I had officials in my department, who are well-versed in environmental assessment, go through the recommendations to make sure they provided me with all the research.

“And I didn’t even blindly follow the advice of my own department. I made an informed decision that this project carried unacceptable risks.

“And a month later the federal minister made the same decision but on the subject of the wharf. We both came to the same decision.”

There has been no suggestion from Bilcon that they want the quarry decision overturned. Bilcon lawyer, Barry Appleton did say last week that the NAFTA calls for mediation and consultation before the two parties appear at hearings.

He said that the damages in this case could be “significantly higher” than the $188 million set out in the notice of intent.

“So the governments will have to decide if there is something they can do to settle the issue.”

February 13rd 2008 - DIGBY COURIER - NovaNewsNow.com

Bilcon’s claim could exceed $188m
Importance of community core values not fully stated—lawyer

By Jonathan Riley

Damages sought by Bilcon in the wake of its rejected quarry bid could be more than the $188 million mentioned in its notice of intent to sue the Canadian government.

Barry Appleton, the Toronto lawyer representing Bilcon of Delaware and its owners, the Clayton family, would not say last week whether Bilcon wants a reversal of decisions by provincial and federal governments to deny permits to the company.

He would only say that the damages in this case could be “significantly higher” than the $188 million set out in the notice of intent that was filed Feb. 4.

“So the governments will have to decide if there is something they can do to settle the issue.”

Appleton says NAFTA calls for mediation and consultation before the two parties appear at hearings.

The Clayton family, owners of Bilcon, is claiming that under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Canada treated them unfairly in denying approval of their proposed 120-hectare quarry project on White’s Point on Digby Neck.

"For five and a half years, the Clayton family played by all the rules," said Appleton, "but the governments of Canada and Nova Scotia kept changing the rules, and then blindly followed the biased, flawed recommendations of an environmental panel."

Nova Scotia Environment Minister Mark Parent rejected the accusation.

“I had officials in my department who are well-versed in environmental assessment go through the recommendations to make sure they provided me with all the research.

“And I didn’t even blindly follow the advice of my own department. I looked at all the information at my disposal and made an informed decision that this project carried unacceptable risks.”

Appleton says that the panel didn’t make Bilcon aware how important community core values would be in its decision.

“It’s like moving the net after someone has already taken their shot.”

Don Mullin, vice-chair of the Partnership for the Sustainable Development of Digby Neck and Islands Society, says the issue of core values shouldn’t have been any surprise.

“This is clearly a legitimate area of investigation. No rules were changed.

“They may not know that in Nova Scotia, we have different provisions than in Ontario or federal legislation. ‘Enjoyment of life or property’ is a part of the Nova Scotia Environment Act under socio-economic impacts.

“The words the panel used were sense of place, sense of community, both historic and cultural – all those values shared widely by the people from this area.”

The Claytons claim in the notice of intent that Canada subjected Bilcon to treatment far less favourable than that accorded similar Canadian-owned investments.

"Honest business people who are invited to do business in Canada expect to be treated fairly when they come," said Appleton. "The NAFTA is designed to ensure they have a level playing field in Canada. The NAFTA entitles the

Claytons to be treated in an even-handed way when they are investing in Canada."

Now that Bilcon has filed a notice of intent to make a claim under NAFTA, Bilcon must wait 90 days before filing its formal complaint.

Chronicle Herald – 2008-02-10
Whatever it is, we oppose it
By JIM MEEK

WHEN THE DIGBY Neck quarry project was alive and kicking, local critics lined up to kill it.

Now that it’s deader than the Patriots’ chances of winning the Super Bowl, supporters are trying to revive it.

It’s hard to figure.

But it’s safe to say that no matter what’s going on in Nova Scotia — or not going on — someone’s going to get angry.

We’re like that. No one will shut up, even for a minute. In general, then, Nova Scotians are pretty good at open debate and citizen-led donnybrooks.

Heck, we could get into a scrap over the colour of the sky, even if we all agree that it is falling.

This helps explain why three women are conducting door-to-door surveys in the Digby Neck area.

They support the Bilcon quarry project, even though an environmental panel, Ottawa, and the province have all turned thumbs down to this big baby.

The band of revivalists is led by Cindy Nesbitt, whose family runs a gas station and variety store.

I’ve also heard, over the last few weeks, from Jennifer Young, whose husband fishes lobster, and from a third woman who moved east from Ontario to take a job at the Digby hospital.

The message here, in case you missed it, is that they are real people.

They’re trying to make their way, and make a living, in a part of Nova Scotia where the lobster fishery has headed south along with the summer residents.

Ah, yes, the summer residents.

As Nesbitt and her team go door to door, they’re making a point of interviewing "permanent residents" only, as if the summer crowd were still sticking around in February, hoping for one last round at the Digby Pines golf course.

Anyway, you get the message: Nesbitt and company represent the salt-of-the-earth folk who don’t winter in Palm Springs with Barbara Amiel and who have friends and relatives who need work.

The area women think it would be pretty neat if someone could gouge a gravel pit out of the Fundy coastline and haul away some of that infernal rock to the States. And the summer people be damned.

As grassroots movements go, this isn’t a bad one. After all, it never hurts to do battle against the rich in this province.

But there’s still a problem here.

You see, the Digby Neck and Islands are also inhabited by a great number of non-wealthy year-round residents who oppose the gravel pit.

I had no trouble finding Bilcon critics last spring, when I ventured to the area to cover this story. Heck, you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting an anti-quarry sign.

Still, the Nesbitt survey is great fun — and effective enough that it has annoyed both the local MLA (Junior Theriault) and the local MP (Robert Thibault.)

Both sounded huffy, puffy and pompous when our reporter Brian Medel reached them this week. Thibault objected that the survey "obviously wasn’t done by professional pollsters.

"But I suspect he was more upset that the survey asked a few simple questions like, "Are you satisfied with the performance of your MP, Robert Thibault?"

The nerve of those women, asking people about their views of their elected representatives. Next thing you know, they’ll be running for office themselves.

Anyway, this Digby Neck thing is one juicy story, now that the concrete kings who own Bilcon — the Claytons of New Jersey — are seeking $188 million in damages from Canada under the North America Free Trade Agreement.

Like the Claytons, Cindy Nesbitt and her sisters-in-arms are zeroing in on the issue of core values in the community. It was on the basis of these values, in part, that the review panel asked governments to reject this quarry proposal last fall.

The petitioners seem determined to prove that the panel never did understand community values — that jobs are just as important as a pristine coastline.

None of this will bring the quarry back, though. At least I’m pretty sure it won’t.So once again, Nova Scotians are engaged in the fight of their lives, and they’re fighting over nothing.

(jmeek@herald.ca)

Published: 2008-02-07
Quarry group irks politicians
Local MP, MLA question tactics

LITTLE RIVER — A survey about quality of life, economic decline and what a big rock quarry would mean for Digby Neck is underway in the area.

It’s a questionnaire prepared by locals for locals.

But local MLA Harold Theriault doesn’t like it. And local MP Robert Thibault says it clearly isn’t a professional job.

Cindy Nesbitt heads up a group of three women who are going door to door collecting responses to the survey, which even solicits the views of Digby Neck residents about their politicians’ effectiveness.

The group supports a proposal for a basalt quarry in the area that the provincial and federal governments both rejected last year on the recommendation of an environmental review panel.

But the supporters are not giving up. They feel a quarry would be a good fit for the area.

They are interested in the views of permanent residents only and won’t be surveying seasonal residents this summer, said Ms. Nesbitt, who owns a gas station with her husband.

"It’s very hard when you count 23 vacant homes in Centreville and 52 in Sandy Cove," she said. "It’s so hard to sustain communities with part-time populations.

"Now lobster catches are down, and forestry and tourism are down, she said.

"Those were the eggs that were in our basket," Ms. Nesbitt said. "So looking at diversification is very, very important.

"The survey contains six questions, the last two of which ask about the performance of elected officials.

"We wanted to know if people in the area were satisfied that they were being represented the way that they believed they should be, with respect, really, to all issues," Ms. Nesbitt said. "It was just a general question.

"Junior Theriault made it known that he wasn’t a supporter of the project.

"That made it difficult for people to speak to their MLA about the quarry because his mind was made up, she said.

"I just can’t understand it," Mr. Theriault said Tuesday about his name being in one of the survey questions.

The MLA, a lobster fisherman, has been elected twice, partly because of his strong anti-quarry stance, he said. He won by more than 300 votes in 2003 and by three times that margin in 2006.

"I still stood against the quarry and I gained a thousand more votes," Mr. Theriault said.

"They’re only surveying on Digby Neck and the islands, and that’s where 80 per cent of the people voted for me both times.

"That quarry was in the middle of both of those elections.

"The other politician named in the survey is West Nova MP Robert Thibault.

"We don’t see him here very often," Ms. Nesbitt said.

Mr. Thibault, reached in Ottawa on Wednesday, said it’s not true that he is seldom in the area.

"I haven’t been hidden," he said. "It’s a huge riding."The Liberal MP said people have a right to conduct surveys but it’s clear this one is being done with a purpose in mind.

"This isn’t a professor of sociology doing a study," he said. "This is obviously not done by professional pollsters.

"The rural Municipality of the District of Digby also opposed the quarry proposal but survey respondents are not being asked if they are satisfied with their municipal councillor.

"I think that the municipal warden and the councillor for the area will have their answer on Oct. 18," Ms. Nesbitt said, referring to this fall’s municipal elections.

"We asked about the provincial and federal representation because we thought that it was quite pertinent. The municipal council . . . made a decision on the quarry far too early when they didn’t even have enough information to make such an assessment. We know where they stand.

"Ms. Nesbitt said people in the area weren’t given a chance to express their opinion of the proposal before it was rejected. "So the people who go to the door are asking people their opinions. Everybody’s opinion counts," she said.

"Most people are quite pleased to finally be asked their opinion.

"The survey group has been hitting doorsteps for close to two weeks."We have two people doing the surveys so we can make sure the answers are correct and that procedure is properly followed," Ms. Nesbitt said.

The surveyors record the answers in writing and then pass the sheet back to the respondent for review.

"If they’re satisfied with what has been put, then they sign their name," Ms. Nesbitt said.

Both surveyors also sign their names. The survey sheets will be held in a lawyer’s trust when the job is finished, she said. "We will interpret the data and make it known," she said.

The situation with quarry proponent Bilcon suing the federal government over the proposal’s rejection hasn’t affected the polling, Ms. Nesbitt said."People just . . . want to have their say," she said.

( bmedel@herald.ca)

© 2007 The Halifax Herald Limited

http://www.thechronicleherald.ca/Search/1036341.html
2008-02-06, Business
Trade action doesn’t impress some locals
By BRIAN MEDEL Yarmouth Bureau

DIGBY — News of Bilcon’s trade action against the federal government was disturbing to some Digby Neck residents Tuesday.

"You get the impression that they were disappointed," Bruce Cunningham of Sandy Cove said of the proponents of a proposed basalt quarry that both the provincial and federal governments rejected.

He said he doesn’t think Bilcon will win over people’s hearts and minds with such a strategy.

Bilcon of Nova Scotia and its American parent companies wanted to develop the 152-hectare quarry at Whites Cove on the Fundy shoreline. But after two weeks of public hearings in June, an independent review panel recommended that the project be rejected outright, and the two levels of government accepted the recommendation.

The environmental review process was very stringent, said Mr. Cunningham, who made his opinions known to the panel during the hearings.

"It would be very bad for Canada if the Free Trade Agreement is interpreted in such a way that a process like this is considered unfair," he said.

Bilcon of Delaware is seeking a US$188-million compensation package under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Don Mullen of Freeport on Long Island thinks the trade action is unfounded.

"It’s disappointing because it’s going to keep the issue alive for a couple of years," he said.

"In the meantime, the community is going to be at odds between those who want the jobs and those who don’t think it’s a good development."

A NAFTA expert testified at the panel hearings last June, said Mr. Mullen, who regul-arly attended the sessions.

"It was his professional opinion that the panel was free to make its decision on environmental grounds and that it would not then be subject to challenge under NAFTA," he said.

"I don’t know what more you could expect from the panel."

A Bilcon lawyer has said a gold mine project at Moose River underwent a review in just 11 months whereas the quarry review took more than five years.

"To point out that the gold mine at Moose River got an expedited process is just comparing apples to oranges," Mr. Mullen said.

The gold mine review was a provincial matter and not a joint federal-provincial review as the Digby Neck hearings were, he said.

"It’s a false comparison to compare those two projects," he said.

( bmedel@herald.ca)

http://www.thechronicleherald.ca/Search/1036279.html
2008-02-06, Front
Fournier: Bilcon action groundless
By DAVID JACKSON Provincial Reporter

A company seeking more than US$188 million in damages related to the government rejection of its Digby Neck quarry proposal doesn’t appear to have a leg to stand on, says the chairman of the environmental review panel that recommended the project not go forward.

The chairman, Dalhousie University professor Robert Fournier, said Tuesday he doesn’t think the panel’s report, released in October, is grounds for the challenge that Bilcon of Delaware and four individual owners of the company — members of New Jersey’s Clayton family — have launched.

Bilcon claims in its notice of intent that the joint federal-provincial environmental review process was unfair and treated the U.S. company differently than a Canadian company would have been treated. Both levels of government rejected the quarry proposal after receiving the panel’s report.

Bilcon lawyer Barry Appleton of Toronto also told The Chronicle Herald that the panel stepped outside its jurisdiction, factoring "community core values" into its decision.

Mr. Fournier said the panel got advice on the NAFTA implications from a federal international trade official and from Gilbert Winham, an expert from Dalhousie, during the panel’s hearings last June.

"We feel that we took that advice and that our document doesn’t lend itself to this kind of lawsuit," Mr. Fournier said.

"I just think it’s without merit."

Mr. Fournier said he didn’t want to get into a back-and-forth on Mr. Appleton’s allegation that the panel didn’t ask questions of Bilcon’s expert witnesses.

"That’s not going to be helpful here," the Dal prof said. "As I said, I read your article in the paper this morning, and . . . I didn’t find that his comments really had a great deal of merit to them.

"I’m not moved by his arguments."

As for Mr. Appleton’s claim that the panel went outside its mandate by considering "community core values," Mr. Fournier said it was well within the panel’s mandate to look at how the project could affect the area in ways that weren’t strictly environmental.

The definition of "environmental effects" in the panel’s terms of reference included any effect a change in the environment would have on "health and socio-economic conditions (and) physical and cultural heritage."

The federal and provincial governments also said the scope of the assessment should include "the socio-economic effects of the project."

Mr. Fournier said that should answer those people who have criticized the panel for straying from its mandate.

"We were asked to consider natural environmental things, like the physical environment, the biological environment and so forth, but also distinctly included was socio-economic issues related to this project, and I don’t know how more explicit you have to be than that," Mr. Fournier said.

Bilcon launched its challenge under Chapter 11 of NAFTA. That section lays out rules for foreign investment, including the requirement to treat foreign investors the same as domestic ones — fairly and equitably.

Mr. Winham’s submission to the panel said there have been 15 completed cases of investors challenging governments. In 10 of those, the government "won" when the complaint was dismissed, he said.

Bilcon is supposed to file its formal complaint within 90 days. A tribunal would then look at the case, and a decision would come in about two years.

Janet Eaton of the Sierra Club of Canada said this challenge will add more fodder to the argument to get rid of NAFTA.

"To me, this is just another reason why all of those voices that are calling for rescinding NAFTA may start to mount into something that would be an election issue, would be something that average citizens might want to pursue," said Ms. Eaton, the Sierra Club’s international liaison for corporate accountability.

Nova Scotia Environment Minister Mark Parent said he couldn’t offer much response to Bilcon’s harsh criticism of the process in its notice of intent. The minister said he hadn’t seen the document and that the action is directed toward the federal government.

Mr. Appleton has complained that the review process for Bilcon took more than five years, while other projects got a decision much quicker. He cited last week’s provincial approval of a gold mine in Moose River after a review that took just 11 months.

"Every project is different and evaluated differently," Mr. Parent said. "Certainly, I’ve expressed in the past that we want to do things in a timely manner, but each project is different."

Mr. Parent wouldn’t comment on the process in the Bilcon case but he said he stands by his decision to reject the quarry proposal. The panel found that Bilcon didn’t provide enough information on several environmental matters, including protecting water and species like whales in the Bay of Fundy.

As for the possibility that Ottawa could come looking to Nova Scotia to share the cost of a potential court award to Bilcon, Mr. Parent wouldn’t comment.

Michael O’Shaughnessy, spokesman for the federal International Trade Department, said officials are assessing Bilcon’s challenge and will consult the province on it.

Bilcon’s proposal was for a 152-hectare basalt quarry in Whites Point. The company planned to operate it for 50 years, maintaining 34 jobs.

Liberal MLA Harold (Junior) Theriault, who represents the area, said he’s been elected twice on an anti-quarry platform. He said he wasn’t sure what to think about Bilcon’s challenge but that the panel pretty well had to reject the quarry after hearing mostly from people who opposed it.

NDP environment critic Graham Steele said the challenge shows free trade has led to a loss of Canada’s sovereignty.

He said Bilcon has a legitimate complaint about the length of time it had to wait for a decision, but he sees no evidence that the company was treated differently because it is American.

(djackson@herald.ca)

Daily News 06/02/08 

Bilcon sues over decision barring it from developing Digby Neck quarry
Rejection violates NAFTA: company

RACHEL BOOMER 

The New Jersey company denied permission to build a basalt quarry at Digby Neck claims the decision was unfair and anti-American, and they're looking for more than $188 million in damages.

The Clayton family, which owns proposed quarry developer Bilcon, believes Canada's approval process violated the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In papers filed in Ottawa yesterday, it claims a Canadian company wouldn't have had to undergo the complex federal-provincial environmental review that recommended against the project last October.

Lawyer Barry Appleton, who represents Bilcon and the Claytons, says that review panel, led by Dalhousie University professor Robert Fournier, wrongly considered "community core values" as a reason to reject the quarry.

"They thought this would be about the environment, and they found out it was all about politics. They could never compete because they came from somewhere else," Appleton said yesterday, from his Toronto office.

He said similar projects, such as a Moose River gold mine approved last week, have been decided in far less time.

If Bilcon wins its claim before a three-member NAFTA tribunal, Appleton says Nova Scotia would likely be on the hook for half the damages and legal costs.

The proposed quarry and marine development was to be built on 152 hectares at Whites Point, Digby Co., and would have shipped two million tonnes of rock a year for 50 years to pave U.S. highways. It would have created 34 local jobs.

Opponents complained it would hurt local fishermen, tourism and the environment.

Kemp Stanton, chairman of the Stop the Quarry group that fought the project, said he's annoyed the company won't accept its loss and move on.

"You've got to set an example that no really does mean no," Stanton said, adding he hopes government stands up strongly for its decision not to allow the quarry.

"If they cave in on this one, they'll have to cave in on every one afterwards."

Fournier said yesterday his panel considered NAFTA in its deliberations, and he believes it acted fairly.

Gil Winham, who teaches international trade law at Dalhousie University and advised the panel on its NAFTA obligations, said there have been 47 complaints since the trade agreement was signed in 1992. Of the 15 decided, 10 have been won by governments and five by the complaining companies.

"It's not a cakewalk in any case for the complainants," Winham said.It will take about two years for the case to be decided.

From Halifax Daily News – February 06, 2008

2008-02-05, Halifax Herald, Front
Bilcon seeking $188m in damages
Would-be quarry developer eyes compensation under NAFTA for 'regulatory failure'
By JIM MEEK / EXCLUSIVE
Tue. Feb 5 - 2008

THE COMPANY that wanted to develop a quarry on Digby Neck will seek damages of at least US$188 million for the way Canada handled its environmental review of the project.

In a notice of intent to be filed today in Ottawa, Bilcon of Delaware is seeking a massive compensation package under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

And be warned, folks: If Canada loses this trade action, Nova Scotia will end up coughing up a lot of cash.

Under international trade law, Bilcon has to name the federal government as the respondent in this dispute. But sources say Ottawa would go after Nova Scotia as a key player if compensation is awarded to the firm.
# RELATEDQuarry fans still digging for support

Bilcon is part of the Clayton family empire, a New Jersey concrete conglomerate, that is arguing — in essence — that the environmental assessment of this project uncovered anti-Americanism.

"This is perhaps the worst example of regulatory failure that I have ever seen," said Toronto trade lawyer Barry Appleton, who is representing the Claytons in the NAFTA dispute.

The notice of intent alleges that Canada violated NAFTA by taking "discriminatory" actions against Bilcon — imposing "treatment far less favourable than that accorded to similar Canadian-owned investments."

Asked to elaborate on this, Mr. Appleton referred to the new gold mine project at Moose River, which he says was reviewed and assessed by the province in 11 months.

The review process for the Whites Point quarry took 5 1/2 years.

"That’s a tremendous difference of treatment," Mr. Appleton said in an interview. "The Clayton family was treated significantly less favourably."

Mr. Appleton said other odious (or unfavourable) comparisons will be cited when Bilcon tables its formal complaint under NAFTA after a 90-day waiting period.

Today’s action triggers a process that should take about two years to complete, he said. After adjudicating the facts, a NAFTA tribunal would award appropriate compensation — or not.

Last October, environmentalists heaped praise on the work of the federal-provincial environmental panel that reviewed the proposed Whites Point quarry.

The panel, chaired by Robert Fournier of Dalhousie University, called on the federal and provincial governments to reject the project. (Both governments did just that.)

Mr. Fournier’s panel also suggested Nova Scotia should put in place a comprehensive management plan for coastal development. More dramatically, it cited community values as a key factor in its decision.

At the time, the use of core community values was praised as precedent-making.

"We are making history here in Nova Scotia," said Gretchen Fitzgerald of the Sierra Club of Canada.

But neither the Claytons nor their lawyer were impressed.

Mr. Appleton, a veteran international trade litigator who has written books on NAFTA, said Monday that the "wheels fell off" this regulatory process.

The Fournier panel "included novel, non-scientific criteria" in its decision, Mr. Appleton said.

"They used this concept of community core values, which they had no authority to invoke. Bilcon was never informed of these community core value criteria so it could address them."

Mr. Appleton says, in essence, that the Fournier panel stepped outside its jurisdiction.

In the notice of intent, Bilcon also says the panel ignored favourable submissions from government departments, including Transport Canada, Natural Resources Canada and the Nova Scotia Department of Environment and Labour.

Mr. Appleton’s comments make it clear that the Claytons also expected a warmer reception from the province. Nova Scotia promotes international investment, he said, but you sure wouldn’t know it from the treatment that Bilcon received here.

"It takes a lot of beautiful tourism advertising to try to overcome this kind of international investment record," he said.

Are there other signs that this dispute is turning bitter, if not personal?

My impression is that the Claytons are determined to get a fair hearing at NAFTA, after they feel they were denied one by a Nova Scotia government they see as hypocritical. (Politicians here got behind the project, until the opponents started winning the war for hearts and minds.)

And then there’s the personal and symbolic stuff. Sources say at least one government minister cancelled a meeting with members of the Clayton family. They also say the photograph of the supposed quarry site, on the cover of the panel’s report, missed the target by several hundred metres.

Are they bitter?

Maybe not. But Clayton family interests will clearly argue that the loss of "aggregate" from the quarry and a flawed regulatory process will cost their companies a fortune — at least $188 million, I guess.

In short, the real battle is just beginning. In all likelihood, Bilcon will never develop a quarry on Digby Neck. But it might just grab the Nova Scotia government by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shake, instead.

( jmeek@herald.ca)

CBC.ca News
Bilcon appealing quarry decision under NAFTA
Tue Feb 5, 2008 

The American company that was refused permission to develop a quarry near Digby is looking for $188 million in compensation.

Bilcon of Delaware, a subsidiary of New Jersey-based Clayton Concrete, Block and Sand, has filed a complaint under NAFTA rules that allow companies to go after foreign governments if they can prove they have been unfairly treated.

Bilcon claims a joint federal-provincial environmental review panel was both unfair and discriminatory when it rejected its plan to set up a quarry at Whites Point in Digby County.

"This is not about sour grapes. It's about having a fair process," said Barry Appleton, lawyer for Bilcon.

Appleton said "community values" were at the core of the review, which he said was a change from the original criteria on which the company based its environmental assessment.

"They had the Bilcon people filing all kinds of environmental reports. They filed the reports, then [the panel] changed the criteria. It's like changing the goal posts for the Super Bowl. You're not allowed to do that," he said.

Bilcon had proposed to develop a basalt rock quarry on approximately 120 hectares of a 150-hectare site. The company had planned to employ 34 people to help ship two million tonnes of rock a year for the next 50 years to the United States.

In October, the review panel rejected the proposal, stating the project would undermine and jeopardize the community's vision and expectations and lead to undesired changes in the quality of life.

Gil Winham, an international trade expert at Dalhousie Law School, said the terms of the environmental assessment included socio-economic impacts. 

He said the company's strongest argument may be one of discrimination and why the quarry's review process took much longer than one to open a mine owned by an Australian company at Moose River.

"Mr. Appleton referred to a new gold mine that was assessed in 11 months, whereas the procedure for Whites Point quarry took five and a half years. I would say that is something you would look at," Winham said.

Winham said there have been 15 cases in which foreign companies have sued NAFTA countries for unfair treatment, 10 of which have been ruled in favour of government while five were in favour of the companies.

"And I must say, in five cases that were won by the companies, I thought they had reasons to win," Winham said.

Nova Scotia's minister of environment is declining to comment until the complaint has been heard, a process that could take up to two years.

Copyright © 2008 CBC 

Letter to The Advertiser - February 15th 2008

Community values are critical

To the Editor:

In the arguments surrounding the Digby quarry dispute, frequently “core community values” are discussed in opposition to sound science (e.g., “Bilcon seeking damages”, Chronicle-Herald, Feb. 5, 2008).

An example is the claim by NAFTA apologist Barry Appleton, who charges the Fournier (review) panel “included novel, non-scientific criteria” in its advice to the government to reject the quarry project.

First, there should be nothing novel about the inclusion of community values. It is well recognized in development theory and action any change process that bypasses community members in the planning stage and then fails to consider and address community wishes is doomed. Local residents should be consulted and included at every stage in the decisions that directly involve their lives and futures.

Second, the definition of “science” has changed profoundly to include, in addition to facts about animate and inanimate objects, values held by humans. The very foundation of science, once considered to be its “objectivity,” now includes a recognition that subjectively held human values are deeply embedded in all research. This is evident, for instance, in the questions asked by scientists, and those avoided.

If community input violates NAFTA, it is time we reconsider the value of this international trade deal.

Carol E. Harris
Wolfville

Bilcon seeking $188m in damages
Would-be quarry developer eyes compensation under NAFTA for 'regulatory failure'
By JIM MEEK / EXCLUSIVE
Tue. Feb 5, 2008

THE COMPANY that wanted to develop a quarry on Digby Neck will seek damages of at least US$188 million for the way Canada handled its environmental review of the project.

In a notice of intent to be filed today in Ottawa, Bilcon of Delaware is seeking a massive compensation package under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. 
And be warned, folks: If Canada loses this trade action, Nova Scotia will end up coughing up a lot of cash.

Under international trade law, Bilcon has to name the federal government as the respondent in this dispute. But sources say Ottawa would go after Nova Scotia as a key player if compensation is awarded to the firm.

Bilcon is part of the Clayton family empire, a New Jersey concrete conglomerate, that is arguing — in essence — that the environmental assessment of this project uncovered anti-Americanism.

"This is perhaps the worst example of regulatory failure that I have ever seen," said Toronto trade lawyer Barry Appleton, who is representing the Claytons in the NAFTA dispute.

The notice of intent alleges that Canada violated NAFTA by taking "discriminatory" actions against Bilcon — imposing "treatment far less favourable than that accorded to similar Canadian-owned investments."

Asked to elaborate on this, Mr. Appleton referred to the new gold mine project at Moose River, which he says was reviewed and assessed by the province in 11 months.
The review process for the Whites Point quarry took 5 1/2 years. 

"That’s a tremendous difference of treatment," Mr. Appleton said in an interview. "The Clayton family was treated significantly less favourably." 

Mr. Appleton said other odious (or unfavourable) comparisons will be cited when Bilcon tables its formal complaint under NAFTA after a 90-day waiting period.

Today’s action triggers a process that should take about two years to complete, he said. After adjudicating the facts, a NAFTA tribunal would award appropriate compensation — or not.

Last October, environmentalists heaped praise on the work of the federal-provincial environmental panel that reviewed the proposed Whites Point quarry.
The panel, chaired by Robert Fournier of Dalhousie University, called on the federal and provincial governments to reject the project. (Both governments did just that.)
Mr. Fournier’s panel also suggested Nova Scotia should put in place a comprehensive management plan for coastal development. More dramatically, it cited community values as a key factor in its decision.

At the time, the use of core community values was praised as precedent-making. 
"We are making history here in Nova Scotia," said Gretchen Fitzgerald of the Sierra Club of Canada. 

But neither the Claytons nor their lawyer were impressed.
Mr. Appleton, a veteran international trade litigator who has written books on NAFTA, said Monday that the "wheels fell off" this regulatory process.
The Fournier panel "included novel, non-scientific criteria" in its decision, Mr. Appleton said.

"They used this concept of community core values, which they had no authority to invoke. Bilcon was never informed of these community core value criteria so it could address them."

Mr. Appleton says, in essence, that the Fournier panel stepped outside its jurisdiction. 

In the notice of intent, Bilcon also says the panel ignored favourable submissions from government departments, including Transport Canada, Natural Resources Canada and the Nova Scotia Department of Environment and Labour.

Mr. Appleton’s comments make it clear that the Claytons also expected a warmer reception from the province. Nova Scotia promotes international investment, he said, but you sure wouldn’t know it from the treatment that Bilcon received here. 
"It takes a lot of beautiful tourism advertising to try to overcome this kind of international investment record," he said.

Are there other signs that this dispute is turning bitter, if not personal?
My impression is that the Claytons are determined to get a fair hearing at NAFTA, after they feel they were denied one by a Nova Scotia government they see as hypocritical. (Politicians here got behind the project, until the opponents started winning the war for hearts and minds.)

And then there’s the personal and symbolic stuff. Sources say at least one government minister cancelled a meeting with members of the Clayton family. They also say the photograph of the supposed quarry site, on the cover of the panel’s report, missed the target by several hundred metres.

Are they bitter?

Maybe not. But Clayton family interests will clearly argue that the loss of "aggregate" from the quarry and a flawed regulatory process will cost their companies a fortune — at least $188 million, I guess.

In short, the real battle is just beginning. In all likelihood, Bilcon will never develop a quarry on Digby Neck. But it might just grab the Nova Scotia government by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shake, instead.

( jmeek@herald.ca)

2008-02-05, NovaScotia
Quarry fans still digging for support

LITTLE RIVER — They answer the phone by saying "Quarry Start Central" at their headquarters on Digby Neck, near the site of a proposed basalt quarry that the government recently rejected.

This small group of volunteers says the quarry concept is not dead, that the quarry is needed.

Jennifer Young is one of them.

Economic sustainability for Digby Neck is a big reason for her zest for the quarry project, she said Monday. She feels strongly enough about it to help with a new door-to-door survey.

"It’s a survey of what people in the community are feeling," Ms. Young said.

The 152-hectare basalt quarry was proposed by Bilcon of Nova Scotia, a subsidiary of Clayton Concrete Block and Sand of New Jersey.

The quarry site at Whites Cove on the Bay of Fundy shoreline is near the village of Little River. The site included a 2.6-kilometre portion of Fundy shoreline where a marine terminal would have been built.

After two weeks of public hearings last June, a three-member federal-provincial panel reviewing the project ruled that it was too risky to the environment to be allowed to proceed. The provincial and federal governments accepted the panel’s findings.

Now, a short, six-question survey is being done one house at a time, with only permanent residents being surveyed. It should be finished in a few weeks, said Ms. Young, who wouldn’t reveal the six questions.

"We’re not out and out asking people if they are supporters of the quarry itself," she said. "What we’re trying to get at is what people’s feelings are. If they thought (the quarry) would be good, bad or if they don’t really know.

And Ms. Young said she doesn’t know what will be done with the survey results.

( bmedel@yarmouth.ca)

http://www.novanewsnow.com/article-177297-Ecoheroes-on-Digby-Neck.html
DIGBY COURIER  Article online since January 24th 2008

Eco-heroes on Digby Neck Quarry group gets ‘pat on the back’
by Jonathan Riley 

The Stop the Quarry group has won an environmental award for doing what they thought was right.

The Nova Scotia Environmental Network named them the Eco-Heroes group of the year for 2007.

“They won a huge victory,” said Tamara Lorincz, NSEN’s executive director. “This was a small group of individuals working long and hard to protect their environment. We really felt we needed to pat them on the back.”

The Stop the Quarry group is formally known as the Partnership for the Sustainable Development of Digby Neck and Islands Society. They spearheaded the fight against a proposed 150-hectare quarry for White’s Cove on Digby Neck.

A joint provincial-federal panel recommended in October 2007 that government not approve the project.

“Not many panels have said ‘no’ to industrial development,” says Lorincz. “They usually attach conditions but this panel said outright ‘no.’”

Lorincz was also impressed that the panel suggested the environmental assessment process itself be improved, something she says everyone involved has been asking for for years; and that the panel recommended Nova Scotia develop a coastal zone management plan.

“Their victory didn’t just serve Digby Neck, it served the whole province,” said Lorincz.

Don Mullin, vice chair of the Partnership, says the five and a half year fight was exhausting.

“But I never again want to hear that you can’t fight big business or government,” he says. “This demonstrates when you are on the side of right, you have to fight.”

Mullin says the group felt an obligation to protect the environment of the Neck and Islands.

“People live here because it means something special to them. It’s a special place with special bonds and special meaning. You could say it soothes their soul.

“When you tear a place like that apart, you can’t build it up again.

“And that is what made it such an overwhelming feeling to win – because we felt an obligation to try and keep it that way.”

Mullin says the “constellations lined up” for them in a way he’s not sure could happen again.

Three levels of government (the local MLA, the municipal council and the federal MP) all opposed to the quarry.

The community supported the group in excess of $100,000. They found knowledgeable and dedicated people to help them.

“And above all, this was a very strong and principled panel, that perhaps set new standards for future environmental assessments.

“Social values will play a much bigger role in future assessments.”

Mullin says the Partnership has not celebrated because of the painful rifts the quarry fight has left in the community.

“We’d like to see the community accept this decision and get on with finding economically and environmentally sustainable jobs but I’m afraid this is going to remain a point of conflict for a long time here.”

NSEN formed in 1991 as an umbrella group for environmental and health organizations in Nova Scotia. Last year, in celebration of their fifteenth anniversary, they presented three Eco-hero awards. This year, seven, including an award for political will to MP Bill Casey.

How does Mullin feel about the Partnership’s Eco-heroes award?

“We’d almost prefer to downplay it – you know, why keep the tension and conflict out there in the community?”

Walrus Magazine Digby Neck pictures

Exerpt from Noah Richler's "Rock Bottom" article

Monday, January 7, 2008 

Rock Bottom

With the seas nearly barren, should Digby Neck, Nova Scotia, settle for selling the earth?

by Noah Richler

The red Stop the Quarry signs begin outside the town of Digby, Nova Scotia, and continue all the way down the Neck.

The long southwestern arm of the North Mountain, the Digby Neck is the extension of the worn and forested ridge to the west of the Annapolis Valley, which, including Long and Brier Islands, runs for some sixty kilometres before sinking into the sea after Westport. Just over two kilometres wide, the Neck divides the Bay of Fundy from the more tranquil, sheltered waters of St. Mary’s Bay. The peninsula is like a great wharf reaching into what was once one of Nova Scotia’s most fertile fishing grounds. Whales of all kinds still travel here for Fundy’s cool waters and an easy feed of plankton, northern shrimp, and herring, so that some lobster fishers use their boats for whale-watching tours in the off-season.

Subtle differences in the character of the villages along the Neck have played into an extraordinary dispute that started five years ago now, concerning a mega-quarry that an American-owned company, Bilcon of Nova Scotia, wants to build at Whites Point, outside Little River on the Fundy shore. Sandy Cove, a village at the Neck’s narrow midway point, is a salubrious place where many Canadians from out of province visit or — as my wife and I do — keep a summer home. American families also come here, many able to trace their ties to the days before the modern nation existed, when land grants were accorded to United Empire Loyalists. The area was once home to summer camps, inns, and a schoolhouse, and still boasts handsome white houses and churches that nestle around Sandy Cove’s protected wharf, on St. Mary’s Bay, and on the short road over the ridge to the village’s Fundy side and the only sandy beach on the peninsula. In summer, brave children jump off the wharf into Fundy’s freezing water, as others lie on the sand by Jerome’s Rock, named after the sailor who, in 1863, was washed ashore, unable to speak, with his legs amputated above the knees. Few want the quarry here.

Centreville, a little farther north, conjures a darker mood. Perhaps this is because Little Arthur, a bootlegger, used to sell liquor here to men who could not afford the trip to Digby, or to fishers who wanted a drink on Sunday. Or perhaps it is because Centreville is home to the Johnsons, one of two families from North Carolina who made the Little River purchase with a view to building the quarry in the first place. Or maybe it’s because Randy and Cindy Nesbitt, the decent, hard-working couple who run Wilson’s on the Neck, a gas station and dry goods store, wore those Bilcon of Nova Scotia baseball caps and even erected a great big billboard saying A Step Forward: Start the Quarry.

If Sandy Cove is a community Bilcon could not penetrate and Centreville is the company’s unofficial seat, then Little River, about three-quarters of the way down the Neck, is where the battle for the pockets and minds of locals has been most divisively fought. Like Sandy Cove, the village is a picture-postcard-perfect community of white clapboard homes dating back to the arrival of the Loyalists, and newer ones belonging to prosperous fishers who stack their hundreds of lobster traps along their asphalt driveways in the off-season. At the junction with the 217, there is a Baptist church, a small post office, and a whale-watching kiosk. Travel the east road along to the wharf, and you will pass a series of fishers’ sheds, warehouses, and a lobster pound. Take the road to the lookout on the western side, and you will feel colder, stronger breezes and see the boats that work the Bay of Fundy — the lobster fishing season here starting in November and working through the bitter, surf-whipping storms of winter. You will be standing on a bluff made of basalt and looking across ocean pathways over which, nearly four centuries ago, Virginian colonists travelled in order to plunder Champlain’s original Annapolis habitation. These two factors — the abundance of basalt here and its proximity to deep water — have pitted neighbour against neighbour, father against son, and have brought the region to the precipice of a radically different tomorrow.

Bilcon of Nova Scotia is the fully owned Canadian arm of Clayton Concrete Block and Sand, a large New Jersey–based aggregate producer also known as Clayton Block. It is impatiently waiting to begin construction on what could eventually be one of the largest quarries in Canada. Its plan is to blast the approximately 150 hectares of land it owns at Whites Point to as low as ten metres above sea level, then load the crushed basalt onto container ships for transport to New Jersey and eventual use from Massachusetts to Florida. The 40,000 tons of aggregate Bilcon plans to export each week is more than any quarry on the Neck produces in a year, and will dramatically alter the appearance and ecosystem of this delicate, environmentally sensitive region. Quarries already exist on the Neck, but it is the scale of Bilcon’s project and the permission it gives to other companies that many residents of the Neck and the Annapolis Valley legitimately fear. In the absence of any local zoning laws or a provincial coastal management policy, there is nothing to stop Clayton Block — or any other company in its wake — from exploiting the North Mountain in its entirety. Applications have already been made for other quarries, at Upper Granville, and Victoria Beach, nearer Annapolis.

Founded in 1951, Clayton Block is the largest producer of concrete and crushed stone in New Jersey. It employs 850 people and is one of the last such companies in the state to be family owned and operated. But in the past decade, mergers have led to a situation in which Clayton Block now competes with consolidated companies that control 90 percent of the lucrative New York City market, and also supply much of the 1.5 million tons of aggregate it requires to meet its own manufacturing needs. This, and other exigencies of economic globalization, has put considerable pressure on Clayton Block to find its own secure source of aggregate. Markets for aggregate tend to be close to the source, as the single highest cost is often truck transport to the cities, highways, and building sites where their product is required. So when Mark Lowe, a Canadian from Nova Scotia, approached the Claytons with information about a huge amount of high-quality basalt that could be shipped annually by sea — ocean transport reduces the cost of aggregate dramatically — the family was very, very interested.

“This is a business for profit, which is not a dirty word in here,” said Bill Clayton Jr. We met in the boardroom of his company’s offices in Lakewood, New Jersey, in July 2007, ten days after the public hearings in Digby for the project had ended.

The Claytons’ involvement in the quarry began in 2002; five years on, the project still had not been approved. The public hearings were the culmination of a joint federal-provincial environmental review, and the panel’s report was to be submitted in mid-October. Pending its conclusions, the provincial and federal governments would deliver the necessary permits — or not. The New Jersey family was waiting. Testily.

“Your government talks about being ‘open for business,’ and we believed that,” said Bill Jr. “We go there, we’re told by the departments that work these things that they’re very interested in mining, they’re very interested in business, and that in fact mining is an allowed use in the area.” Clearly, the man was pissed off.

“Which department are you talking about? ” I asked.

“Natural Resources,” Bill Jr. said. His father was also at the table and nodded his agreement from time to time. So was John Wall, a quarry manager with no quarry to manage yet. Wall, a strong, stocky man with a barrel chest, was anxious for the project to start. Only now a bunch of upper-class dilettantes was getting in the way, obstructing a quarry that had the chance to be massively profitable and modern. “State of the art,” said Wall.

“When you’re a visiting geologist [in Nova Scotia], the government puts you in a helicopter and shows you potential sites. Try to get that in New Jersey,” he said. “They might take you up in a helicopter and push you out.”

Bill Jr. laughed at his own joke, but his sense of betrayal was evident. Nova Scotia’s Department of Natural Resources advertises a “One Window Process,”in which it hastens investment by arranging for representatives of the relevant government departments — primarily Natural Resources, Environment and Labour, Fisheries and Oceans, and Transportation — to be present and see the issues resolved, only now the window had been muddied, and the view on the horizon was unclear. Still, Bill Jr.’s bearing was that of a pugilist ready, even eager, for the fight’s deciding rounds.”

The opponents are allowed to say anything,” he said. “The most outrageous statement, accusation, lie gets in the paper and is accepted as being fact . . . I mean, I’ve heard everything: the employees are going to be American; they’re going to impregnate all the women on the Neck and then leave behind the war babies and the war brides.”

“I really believe that the greatest opposition is from [Americans] who are there two months a year,” added Bill Sr.

Quarrying is not a pretty business, I said, then asked if they were used to resistance.

“What we do is heavy industrial mining, and we go through this every time we want to open,” Bill Jr. said. “Down here, typically, you have to place things where they are zoned to be placed, which is what we thought we were doing . . . New Jersey is probably the second-toughest state in the country to operate a business in, certainly one of the toughest states to operate mines in. This is an extremely environmental state . . . it’s much more difficult to operate a business here than anyplace in Canada. 

When I asked if being a quarry company with a guaranteed supply of 2 million tons of basalt a year might make them an attractive takeover target, Bill Jr. shrugged. “I’m not going to say it won’t,” he said. Then I asked the Claytons how they would feel if they were to find themselves in the vicinity of such a controversial project.

“It wouldn’t happen,” Bill Sr. said. “The history here has been that there’s no new quarries open since ‘65.”

The storm over the Whites Point Quarry and Marine Terminal — a project its American owners evidently know New Jersey would not tolerate — started in April 2002, when the Towle family of Little River noticed a drilling rig heaving its way up a seldom-used road that led behind their house and over the ridge to an unremarkable cove on the Bay of Fundy. There had been an attempt to start a quarry at Eastern Head, on the St. Mary’s Bay side of the Neck, about fifteen years before, and so the incident had the ring of déjà vu, and consternation spread quickly.

Inquiries to the Department of the Environment revealed that a permit had been issued to Nova Stone Exporters, the first incarnation of a shell company that became Global Quarry Products, then Bilcon of Nova Scotia. The permit was for a quarry of less than 3.9 hectares — the ceiling below which no environmental review is required. David Morse, the provincial minister of natural resources, professed that his hands were therefore tied, doing nothing to placate alarmed residents. “He’s issued a permit out of one side of his mouth and is denying it with the other,” said Tony Kelly, then the principal of the Digby Neck Consolidated School at Sandy Cove, who had formed the Committee of Concerned Citizens after learning the true extent of the quarry from a press release received at the school. The release directed inquiries to Russ Patterson, CEO of Patterson Exploration Services, the North Carolina company that was doing the drilling, and announced the intent of “a Nova Scotia aggregate exporting company” to create a 150-hectare quarry and adjacent marine terminal. The worrying information was inadvertently confirmed when Gordon Balser, the local Conservative MLA, told Kemp Stanton, a Whale Cove lobster fisher, “We weren’t getting no money to fix our wharf, because we could fish from the wharf that was being put in for the quarry.”

Following such revelations, a coalition called the Partnership for Sustainable Development of Digby Neck and Islands organized a series of chowder supper fundraisers, and a campaign of emails, letters, newspaper articles, bumper stickers, and, above all, highly visible Stop the Quarry signs, which quickly appeared along the length of the peninsula. The ensuing battle pitted a remarkable collection of fishers, townspeople and villagers, year-round and summer residents, old and young, Acadians from the French Shore, as well as citizens of the Neck and the Valley, against Clayton Block and its Canadian front men: Mark Lowe, who was forced out by the spring of 2004; Paul Buxton, an English expatriate engineer from Deep Brook who had been involved in a number of government-subsidized restoration schemes in Annapolis and Bear River; and Gordon Balser, who urged his constituents to give the idea of the quarry a chance, and assured them the project could be halted if that decision was deemed best for the community. David Morse persisted in characterizing the quarry as a municipal matter and declared that all his department could do was see that regulations were followed.

And yet, in November 2002, the Municipality of Digby voted against the quarry, and 1,200 people, including more than 700 of the approximately 1,100 permanent residents of the Neck, signed a petition that was presented to the Nova Scotia legislature. The Digby vote and the petition were ignored by Balser and the province’s Department of the Environment. Said Ian Thurber, an Annapolis County resident involved in the movement, “It’s almost turning into a fight for democracy now.” Balser, nicknamed Gordon Basalter by then, continued, like Morse, to adopt a stance of judicious impartiality, even as his assistant, Kristy Herron, was busy generating resumés for potential applicants. “The day I stop helping people find jobs,” said Herron, “is the day I walk off this job.” Six months later, she did just that — joining Paul Buxton at Global Quarry Products as the company’s communications officer.

Neither was the region’s federal representative much help. Robert Thibault, the Digby-born Liberal MP for West Nova, also the minister for fisheries and oceans, was similarly mute. But then, in January 2003, the application for a deepwater marine terminal was finally made; that June, Thibault wrote David Anderson, the federal minister of the environment, requesting an environmental review.

Two months later, during the August 2003 provincial election, explicitly fought over the quarry in this riding, Balser lost his seat to Harold “Junior” Theriault, a popular former lobster fisher who had repeatedly come out against the quarry. Not one to prevaricate, Theriault never pretended that an aggregate company with access to 150 hectares only intended to mine four. The following year, Thibault, no longer the minister of fisheries and oceans, was vying for re-election, and he finally voiced his concerns about the quarry’s “inappropriate development,” promising to oppose it at the impending public hearings. In November 2004, a panel of three experts — Robert Fournier, Jill Grant, and Gunter Muecke — was appointed to a joint federal-provincial environmental review; over two and a half years later, in June 2007, the two weeks of public hearings finally took place.

The panel heard presentations from the proponent’s team; ten provincial and federal government departments weighed in, as did local municipal groups and political parties, more than a dozen NGOs, and more than forty private citizens. Objections to the quarry included concerns that the lobster and scallop fishery, the region’s lifeblood, would be fundamentally damaged (not least by ballast water containing invasive species); that whales — specifically the endangered right whale — would be killed or injured by an increase in marine traffic; and that local flora and fauna (humans, most of all) would be adversely affected by the noise, dust, augmented road traffic, and prospect of diminished groundwater in an area where dry wells are a constant anxiety. Astonishment was also expressed that no royalty whatsoever would be payable to the province, as basalt is not classified as a mineral. Most important, the project’s critics argued that the quarry would actually subvert more jobs than it would create. The sixty jobs announced by Patterson Exploration were reduced by Gordon Balser to fifty. By the time of the public hearings, they had become Bilcon’s “thirty-four.”

From Digby to Yarmouth, there are 968 lobster licences, with each boat employing roughly four people. In 2006, the lobster fishery in this area accounted for approximately $300 million in revenue. Tourism in Digby County accounted for another $37 million and roughly 1,000 jobs. By Robert Thibault’s own calculations, the ten lobster licences in the immediate vicinity of Whites Point alone account for thirty-five jobs. This figure does not include others harvesting sea urchins, herring, and groundfish, and still others working in whale-watching. Nor does it address the issue of what local jobs the quarry might destroy or prevent from being created.

Global issues that are abstract in the cities and settled at a distance are heartfelt and deeply personal in rural areas, where overwhelming and inexorable forces visit themselves upon some unexpecting corner with remarkable intensity — and are acted out and eventually resolved at the level of village affections, enmity, and gossip. Ostensibly local, an argument concerning the destiny of a hitherto unremarkable cove of worn basalt and the few lobster fishers who set their traps close to it quickly showed itself to be a universal story about globalization and its effects on regional authority, the struggle between cities and the countryside, and the trade-off between the environment and jobs. Most of all, it became a drama about community — about who’s in charge. If the community in question consisted of the residents of the Neck, its will — expressed in a petition, then in the second plebiscite of an ousted MLA — had been denied. The message being relayed was that the Digby Neck exists only in relation to the greater economies and needs of the province, the country, or the megalopolises of the northeastern US seaboard.

There is, however, the nagging sense on the Neck that globalization has already altered the place, perhaps beyond reckoning.

Today, three-quarter-ton pickup trucks barrel up and down the 217 on their way to the big box stores that have replaced old village shops. At these anaesthetizing places, there are jobs at the cash or on the shop floor for wives and children who used to band lobsters, bait traps, or fillet their husbands’ or fathers’ catches. Although the scallop and lobster harvests are remunerative, there is no inshore ground fishery to speak of anymore, and the ocean draggers are having a harder and harder time of it. There are some conservation measures — the rotation of harvested areas, a minimum size for lobsters, and the jettisoning of females — but the stocks of scallop and lobster are being depleted, and boats need to travel farther or work other fishers’ grounds, and the people know it. You don’t have to read the schooner captains’ logs or peruse the old photographs of the flakes and fish plants along the Neck to see that fish were once plentiful and large; you can speak to residents in their forties who remember how easy fishing for cod, pollock, haddock, and mackerel was at the end of the wharves in Digby, Sandy Cove, and Little River. There was even tuna in the Bay then.

Fishing, not just here but all over the world, is conducted as a kind of mining, not farming, and as a result more and more of it is a dead concern. The connection to be made between the depletion of stocks and overfishing — of the destructive practices of the draggers that are still permitted to wreck seabeds and the breeding habitats of countless species as fishers clumsily, wantonly haul in their catches, or of the New Brunswick seiners that draw nets in a circle and suck out the herring that draw the bigger fish and sea mammals to the Bay — is simply not made, because it requires acknowledging, alongside the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ notoriously ineffective (and unenforceable) management, that fishers’ practices have played their part in the region’s economic crisis.

Today the fishery is prospering in terms of the overall value of its catch, but it is trawling well down the food chain and employing fewer people than it ever did. And whether you live in Digby, Little River, or Westport, if you’re not one of the lucky ones working at the fish plant or driving a truck for D. B. Kenney Fisheries, if you don’t have the several hundreds of thousands of dollars required to buy a lobster or scallop dragger’s licence, if you’re not making a couple of hundred bucks a (long) day baiting traps on somebody else’s boat, then you are left out, and your kid will likely end up on ferry rides to Digby to work at Sobeys, the Atlantic Superstore, or Wal-Mart, or hitchhiking to Alberta, or depending on UIC and welfare — or, worse, crime.

Last winter in Sandy Cove, there was a spate of robberies in which burglars wrested copper radiator pipes from unattended summer homes and caused thousands of dollars of damage for a meagre few hundred dollars’ return. In Digby, during the summer, I had lunch at the Hungry Hollow, a now-closed café (so often the story). The RCMP entered, and Tara, the owner, complained that the same local kids had broken into her restaurant three times. One of them had subsequently applied for a job — it would have been funny were the situation not also serious. In September, a fifty-five-year-old named Wayne Doucette was assaulted by a youth with a gun. Robbery was the motive. The next night, a seventeen-year-old girl and two brothers tied the same man to a chair in his Plymouth home and beat him to death with a baseball bat.

The sorry truth of decades of overfishing is that almost no one on the Neck really believes there will be a healthy fishery in the region in twenty years — and that rock-bottom schemes such as the quarry at Whites Point are being entertained as a result.

“To have this turned into a gravel pit for the United States, it just blows me away,” said an impassioned Harold Theriault at his constituency office. “There’s basalt rock in Maine, there’s basalt rock in Massachusetts, but they can’t touch it. So they’re coming here. It’s easy to get and cheap to get. We took from the ground fishery just like [the quarry] will take from our land. We didn’t think fish could come to an end, but they did, because we just took, took, took. We’ve got to bring our fishery back, and manage it in a way where we can sustain those communities again. Sustainable jobs are going to come from producing tidal power, and wind-generated electricity from the Bay of Fundy, and we won’t be doing that by giving the Neck away.”

In Little River, I waited for Paul Buxton at what used to be the Towles’ house. It was early spring, and Stop the Quarry signs were still in abundance in this hamlet, where others along the Neck had faded. Behind the house Bilcon had purchased in 2005 — upsetting many locals, as the intrusion appeared so brazen — Stop the Quarry was spray-painted on a storm drain at the foot of the gravel road leading over the ridge to Whites Point. On the front lawn, Buxton had erected a large Bilcon sign, but only the billboard’s stump footings remained. The sign had been vandalized twice, so he had temporarily removed it.

Buxton arrived in a beige pickup truck. A big man with a white beard and a ruddy, pockmarked face, he wore a Tilley hat and spoke with an English accent. “I don’t know how far we’ll be able to get,” he said. “There’s been a lot of rain, and the road may be too soft.”

The road climbed gently. The top of the ridge had been cleared, and on the other side of it we walked along a sodden path to a clearing above the point. About 100 metres out from shore, three lobster boats were tending their traps, exactly where the terminal would be built to load the freighters and ship the basalt out. Buxton reacted angrily as we passed boulders onto which locals had painted white crosses, signifying the possibility of pioneer gravesites. (The company, insisting none existed, had launched a bullying “slapsuit” against the Little River grandmother who originally suggested as much.) He dismissed the anti-quarry movement’s anxieties, then, in a sombre manner, put forward his own.

“I have grave concerns about rural Nova Scotia,” he said. “We are losing population to the extent that our services are going to diminish — schools, hospitals, ferry services, perhaps — and I believe that unless family-sustaining jobs are provided around here, that this trend will be irrevocable. We can’t survive with minimum wage jobs here. The groundfish are not here. The scallop has been very poor recently, and the fleet has been largely tied up. The lobster industry is typically cyclical, so that we’re going through a very good period at the moment, and let’s hope that it continues that way — but if it does not, what happens to the area economically?” 

Earlier, in Bilcon’s Digby office, Buxton had urged me to read Anthony Davis’s study of declining fisheries, Dire Straits, though he couldn’t find a copy, as he had handed all of his out. Piled on a desk by the door were sheets advertising hourly rates for different jobs, and copies of a spurious letter, purporting to be anonymous, in support of the quarry. What Buxton and his confederates knew was that approval for the quarry would be much more likely if they were able to portray Bilcon as the champion of downtrodden locals’ right to work, and the project’s opponents as a mostly patrician class of summer residents and retirees draining a diminishing local tax base. The strategy was effective, for what bona fide argument can legitimately be made against the wealth even thirty-odd jobs would bring?

The problems of the Digby Neck are those of rural areas countrywide, as workers and their families — and, most of all, youth wanting what they believe to be a more interesting and exciting life — leave parts of the country where the mechanization of farming, the decline of fishing, or the diminution of other extractive industries has dramatically reduced the number of available jobs, while the car and big box stores have radically altered the nature of retail. Who needs local shops anymore? Who needs local anything? The psychological load is heavy, the situation of Digby and the Neck that of Canada in miniature: hewers of wood, drawers of water, and now, quite possibly, blasters of rock.

There is little of the pride here that comes from the manufacture of things, or from merely showing the place off — with the sort of branding prevalent elsewhere around the Bay, as in the “Maine” lobster (much of which originates in Nova Scotia), or New Brunswick’s “Fundy Trail,” or “Bay of Fundy salmon.” Digby is a gem, but locals don’t always seem to know it, mostly because the economy isn’t telling them so. Sarah Haliburton is the owner of Bluefin Pottery and Hand Creations on Water Street and regularly convenes with the town council’s tourism committee. “People don’t know why anyone would want to come here,” said Haliburton. “It’s a hard fight.”

Sustenance here has always been achieved by taking things — from the sea and forest and the land itself — and the worker gives away a little piece of himself each time he takes from them. The hills and forests of the peninsula, rugged and beguiling as it peels away in a series of receding coves, the high tides revealing muddy russet flats and the high red bluffs at Rossway remain the casualties of a community that is still essentially maritime and too hard working to be thinking of conservation much. There are no managed trails on the Neck at all, even though the one that leads to the Balancing Rock on Long Island — a column made of basalt — is one of the region’s main tourist attractions. Aside from the whale-watching outfits, no entrepreneurs offer, say, bicycle, kayak, scuba diving, or sailboat tours. Only now, possibly too late, is there the sense that something must be done about what Michael Corbett, a local sociologist, has described as the “economic potential in the natural beauty of the area.” Many of the quarry’s opponents, among them Harold Rowe, have been arguing for as much, knowing, beyond any arguments about jobs lost as others are gained, that the only truly incontestable response to a corporation promising thirty-four jobs is to prove that other kinds of development augur more.

But conservation and sustainability, the pillars on which ecotourism rests, are only recent imperatives along the Neck, where extraction, its nemesis, is still widely regarded as a right. Here, a person buys a wood-burning stove knowing that a lot of cheap land provides fuel and takes him off the grid — that the wood is money not spent. In the battle of the classes as it may exist on the Neck, the worker is the one with the ATV and the Tim Hortons cup. The land here is his to roam, the sea his to exploit, the gas his to burn, the timber his to fell, the trash his to dump off the end of the wharf, because the alternative is to have to wait for government pickup and be charged for it. Conservation here is considered an imposed, gentrified idea that means a lesser haul of fish, and therefore less income and more that other boats, provinces, or countries can subsequently take. It is in the nature of fishing to grab what you can — take everything allowed and plumb the rich seam.

In the summer of 2007, fishers working in the off-season were trawling for dogfish, a part of the catch once considered a nuisance. Now the going rate is sixteen cents a pound for a permitted weekly haul of 10,000 pounds, averaging out to $1,600 a week for work that requires a couple of paid crew, a boat, and gasoline, the sum of which will be taxed. The prospect of a bit of stolen copper pipe starts to look attractive.

“The quarry is supported by people who are desperate,” said Laurence Outhouse, a retired engineer from Tiverton. “It’s about people who have lost all hope.”

By the end of the fourth year, the Stop the Quarry movement was beginning to tire. The domino effect of land sales around Little River had come to pass, and the quarry’s opponents were being painted as part of the problem, rather than concerned with the best economic future for the Neck. The signs and billboards Bilcon aggressively provided, some of them appearing on the lawns of absentee landlords, read A Step Forward: Start the Quarry, and Start the Quarry, Save Digby Neck, against a sly background wash of the requisite pro-environmental green. Despite the distrust that had initially prevailed, it appeared that Buxton and his colleagues had succeeded in making the idea of the quarry a cause.

The issue of the quarry was clad in the costume of class conflict, but it remained, at its core, about the power of a community to define and defend itself. During the public hearings, issues concerning the environment were used by both sides to defend the physical integrity of the Neck and the Bay, but also to wage the battle about community by proxy. The environmental concerns tabled, covering everything from the spawning habits of lobsters to the effect of increased nitrogen in quarry runoff, were, on the one hand, about the species themselves, but on the other about the impassioned, desperate measures of locals wanting to wrest some of the power away from governments and corporations and put it back into their own lives.

Bilcon, too, was aware of the clarion call of the times, its bit of bad timing that green anxiety was raging as its environmental impact statement was being prepared. So it used, wherever it could, the green lexicon. In the statement, which was sent back for more information, then during the hearings, the quarry repeatedly described by Bilcon and its phalanx of consultants as a model of sustainable development when it is no such thing. The rock, a surprisingly exigent panel pointed out, existed in massive but finite quantities. No pushover, the panel called them on this point and — concerning measures that might be necessary in the face of rising sea levels and other vagaries of climate change — on its frequent but unsubstantiated use of the term “adaptive management.”

Most illuminating was the moment when, on day two, responding to a question about the stress the quarry posed to endangered flora, Ruth Newell, representing Bilcon, replied that “a lot of stresses are on them already, and they are probably all ready to cope with some stress or perhaps extra stress.” It was another way of saying that the humans on the Neck, unemployed and impecunious, could suffer the kind of stress that whatever untoward effects the quarry might engender because they, too, were under “a lot of stresses” already: low employment, poor services, crime, out-migration, and so on. 

This patronizing, insulting inference appears in a variety of guises throughout the tens of thousands of pages of documentation Bilcon submitted to the panel leading up to the hearings. In its “Valued Environmental Component Impact Summary,” the mining and exporting of 2 million tons of rock a year for fifty years is described as being without “significant negative aspects” in seventy-six measures covering air quality, noise, land contaminants, human health, heritage, tourism, land value, social relations, and aesthetics, among others. Remarkable, really, given that the environment in question would be almost entirely removed. 

In the battle being fought about the nature of home, the speaker Bilcon authentically feared, the man who had been such an unexpected impediment to the company’s advance, was Kemp Stanton, a seventh-generation lobster fisher who lives in Whale Cove.

“K-e-m-p,” the fisher said, distinguishing himself by spelling out his first name, after everyone else had spelled their last. Since 2002, Kemp had put the views of concerned residents who still draw their living from the sea so articulately that he became chair of the Sustainable Development of the Digby Neck and Islands Society and the lyrical popular voice of the anti-quarry movement. He could not be assailed as elitist or “come from away,” without knowledge, or as someone not contributing to the economy and society’s coffers.

Kemp’s family had been fishing off the Neck for 275 years. He’d wanted to be an archaeologist, but remembered how his teachers had treated him as a fisherman and made him feel stupid. More than forty years later, he was aware of the irony of academics and bureaucrats, at the seminars to which he now found himself invited, crediting him with “traditional knowledge” — as if it was theirs to give. What Kemp had been saying for five long years was that a life, no matter how small a statistic it might seem to government, to universities, or to a foreign corporation, is significant, does suffer “adverse” effects.

I asked him if, given the long history of the fishery’s decline, residents should be more accepting of the few jobs the quarry might bring. “No,” he replied. He spoke haltingly but with great emotion — as one who’d not been called upon to speak publicly until recently, and who was not quite used to the authority of his own voice. “I’ve been accepting of a lot of things all my life,” he said, “and I’m ashamed as hell of it. Forty-three, forty-four years ago, when I started out, Jesus, the Bay was full of life. Some days, you’d go to shore, and you’d have to talk really loud because there were so damn many gulls hollering, picking stuff out of the water . . . Everywhere you’d look, there was something going through the water. It was alive.

“Now it’s like a museum piece: the Bay’s still there, it’s on display, but it’s dead. And that’s happened during my lifetime — and I allowed it to happen. And I didn’t participate. I thought I was smart, and I said I wouldn’t go aboard a dragger when it was away from the wharf. I never went aboard a seiner, and I’ve never done anything in the fishery that I was really ashamed of . . . I thought I was being smart and good, but I’ve never done anything to stop anybody else. And if this quarry is going to help finish off what little life is left in the Bay of Fundy, goddamn, I’m not going to let them do it. I let them kill most of the stuff off, and I let the experts” — he sighed — “dictate to me, and make me believe that I was stupid, and make all these predictions, and I found out I’m a hell of a lot more ‘expert’ than they are. For all the damage I’ve allowed to happen during my generation — damn, I’ve got to do something before I die to help put back a little bit. I’ve lived good, and my family’s lived good out of that Bay. And we owe it to — well, most people would call it the planet, but it’s the Bay to us.”

In Halifax, a highly placed source at Nova Scotia Environment and Labour told me that the quarry issue would be settled strictly on the basis of environmental concerns. The province has often stated its intent to be a net exporter of environmental technology (tidal power in the Bay of Fundy — another quarrel around the corner); has been at the forefront of recycling initiatives; and has engaged in a number of sizable conservation pacts with timber companies. “Nova Scotia,” said Mark Parent, the minister of environment and labour, in September, “is a coastal province, and we’re known for our coastline. It’s imperative that we have well thought out, proper policy on coastal protection.”

And yet residents of the Neck were aware that jobs — no matter how few — remain the foremost issue in Nova Scotia and that in intra-governmental power struggles the Department of Natural Resources is the most powerful. The question, they knew, is whether or not the government sees the remote and underpopulated Digby Neck as a part of its green plan, or as a region that is environmentally expendable and good for making a point about employment. And while the opponents hoped that the panel review might use the opportunity of the hearings to put in place some kind of zoning laws or coastal management policy, they understood that the most likely outcome was for the quarry to go ahead, with a host of mitigating measures unlikely to be ennforced. (Gordon Balser, to local derision, had suggested that the rehabilitated quarry might be a good place for a spa.) When I met with Raymond Plourde, the wilderness and public lands co-ordinator of the Ecology Action Centre, Nova Scotia’s most prominent and astute environmental NGO, he said that to his knowledge no environmental review in the province has ever stopped a project from going forward.

All this said and done, the environmental impact hearings were not a waste of time. Influencing government or not, they were a way for the community to get to know itself, a sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission before the fatal blow — the advent of a quarry, a limited one, or none at all. Each outcome was bound to injure some. The overwhelming evidence was that the majority did not want the quarry — the Digby town council, the rural Municipality of Digby, Digby MLA Harold Theriault, MP Robert Thibault, the Digby Neck Community Development Association, the Western Valley Development Authority, and the Municipality of Annapolis all spoke out against it. But the abiding sense was that the battle was done, and that on both sides, in fact, the ammunition was spent. Whatever the outcome, the time had come for healing.

After the eleventh day of hearings, Andy Moir, a former CBC producer who ran a bed and breakfast in Freeport for a while, sent out his nightly email missive. “I hope some of the anger we’re feeling towards one another will dissipate,” Moir wrote. “We need to control ourselves, all of us. And then, when the gavel goes down, get back to our lives.” On day thirteen, Father Daniel Mills implored the community, in the hearings’ concluding address, to be at peace with itself. “Tonight I will go home, and I will remove my Stop the Quarry signs — not because I’ve changed my mind, but I think the battle that’s been fought, the battle that’s b