Northern Pulp continues work on closure plan for Pictou County site

Northern Pulp’s closure plan for its mill site in Abercrombie Point, N.S., is still not complete, but a B.C. court heard Tuesday that the plan could soon begin coming into focus as the company’s creditor protection process continues to play out.

According to documents filed by the court-appointed monitor, the work in the coming months will include:

• Ditching around one of the mill’s landfills to reduce the amount of groundwater entering the leachate system.
• Undertaking a hazardous material assessment of the mill site to facilitate building deconstruction.
• If economically feasible, repairing the rail line on the mill site to allow for the removal of deconstruction material.
• Removing any waste chemical and petroleum products.
• Deconstructing and removing buildings with the goal of returning the mill site to “normally acceptable industrial land use.”
• Undertaking a Phase 1 environmental site assessment to evaluate, collect and report on required information as per provincial regulations for contaminated sites.

Because the plan is not final, the monitor notes in its report that it’s subject to change. The report says the company will explore options for the mill site and remaining property, which could include trying to market it to sell.

Failing that, however, demolition is expected to begin in November.

The court also heard Tuesday that the sale of the company’s timberlands to a company owned by billionaire blueberry mogul John Bragg is expected to be complete in the coming days. That sale, worth $235 million, will generate money for the closure plan, the mill’s creditors and to wind up the company pension.

The court was told that the final amount of money that could go toward pension costs is still being calculated, but as a contingency following correspondence with Nova Scotia’s superintendent of pensions the reserve estimate has increased to $49.5 million from $37.1 million.

The new number is considered an “outside” estimate that the superintendent is comfortable with as a maximum, the court was told.

Justice Shelly Fitzpatrick approved the change and also signed off on an extension of the creditor protection process through April 2027 to allow enough time to wind up the remaining business.

The process has been playing out in B.C. because that’s where Northern Pulp’s parent company is headquartered.

Earlier this month, Fitzpatrick granted a request to amalgamate Northern Pulp and Northern Timber into a single entity known as Northern Timber Nova Scotia Corp.

The mill shut down in 2020 after Northern Pulp officials failed to secure approval from the provincial government to build a new effluent treatment plant and the lease for the site it was using at Boat Harbour were terminated early.

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