The Ontario government thought it was doing the right thing when it allowed Canadian International Paper to pile wood waste at its Hawkesbury waterfront property. Too bad no one thought ahead to what happens when the mill closes.
Twenty-three years after the shutdown of the CIP pulp and paper mill, the question of what to do with the waste, and the land it sits on, hangs over the town. In fact, when the weather warms up, the smell of the CIP lagoons literally hangs over the town of 10,300, reminding people of their mill-town legacy.
It also hangs over the election. The Green party candidate in the riding, Bonnie Jean-Louis, has raised the cleanup of the Hawkesbury CIP site as a top local environmental project. And Rene Berthiaume, the federal Liberal candidate who is running to succeed longtime Liberal MP Don Boudria in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, says the federal government has a role to play when rivers need to be cleaned up and he would press for a commitment if elected.
“That land has been an eyesore, it’s been certainly an odour sore for our community in Hawkesbury,” says Mr. Berthiaume, who lives on the Ottawa River waterfront and has a family business in Hawkesbury.
“It has hampered economic development, and all of that because, in those years, when CIP closed down, government almost let the companies go away scot-free, without having the commitment to clean up the mess that they left.”
NDP candidate Jo-Ann Fennessey says she doesn’t know enough about the issue to offer a well-informed opinion. Conservative candidate Pierre Lemieux says he needs to be briefed on the issue before he commits to a position on the mill cleanup.
CIP was the town’s second largest employer when it shut operations at its 84-year-old mill in 1982. Government officials, keen to save the more than 400 jobs and $700,000 in annual property taxes, did backflips to keep the old mill operating, then scouted frantically to find another company to take over the mill when it finally shut the doors.
CIP, which produced pulp for cellophane at the waterfront mill, had been discharging wood waste into the Ottawa River for years. The Ontario government—which also tangled with CIP over air-pollution problems at the mill—told the company in the 1960s to stop dumping wood waste into the river and instead put the waste in lagoons, which the company did.
The company approached the government about using a 25-acre piece of property the Ministry of Natural Resources owned next to the mill. The government, anxious to stop the dumping into the river and keep the jobs, agreed, leasing the land to CIP so it could establish the lagoon. Lagoons were the environmentally progressive thing to do.
But the officials who drew up the lease with the company didn’t include any provision for the mill’s closing, outlining what would happen to the site when that day came. The company got a certificate of approval from the provincial government for the “wet lagoon” in 1965. When that lagoon filled up with wood waste fibre and started to go dry, they’d haul the waste out and dump it into some above-ground “dry lagoons” on company property next door.
The Ontario government thought it was doing the right thing when it allowed Canadian International Paper to pile wood waste at its Hawkesbury waterfront property. Too bad no one thought ahead to what happens when the mill closes.
Twenty-three years after the shutdown of the CIP pulp and paper mill, the question of what to do with the waste, and the land it sits on, hangs over the town. In fact, when the weather warms up, the smell of the CIP lagoons literally hangs over the town of 10,300, reminding people of their mill-town legacy.
It also hangs over the election. The Green party candidate in the riding, Bonnie Jean-Louis, has raised the cleanup of the Hawkesbury CIP site as a top local environmental project. And Rene Berthiaume, the federal Liberal candidate who is running to succeed longtime Liberal MP Don Boudria in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, says the federal government has a role to play when rivers need to be cleaned up and he would press for a commitment if elected.
“That land has been an eyesore, it’s been certainly an odour sore for our community in Hawkesbury,” says Mr. Berthiaume, who lives on the Ottawa River waterfront and has a family business in Hawkesbury.
“It has hampered economic development, and all of that because, in those years, when CIP closed down, government almost let the companies go away scot-free, without having the commitment to clean up the mess that they left.”
CIP was the town’s second largest employer when it shut operations at its 84-year-old mill in 1982. Government officials, keen to save the more than 400 jobs and $700,000 in annual property taxes, did backflips to keep the old mill operating, then scouted frantically to find another company to take over the mill when it finally shut the doors.
CIP, which produced pulp for cellophane at the waterfront mill, had been discharging wood waste into the Ottawa River for years. The Ontario government—which also tangled with CIP over air-pollution problems at the mill—told the company in the 1960s to stop dumping wood waste into the river and instead put the waste in lagoons, which the company did.
The company approached the government about using a 25-acre piece of property the Ministry of Natural Resources owned next to the mill. The government, anxious to stop the dumping into the river and keep the jobs, agreed, leasing the land to CIP so it could establish the lagoon. Lagoons were the environmentally progressive thing to do.
But the officials who drew up the lease with the company didn’t include any provision for the mill’s closing, outlining what would happen to the site when that day came. The company got a certificate of approval from the provincial government for the “wet lagoon” in 1965. When that lagoon filled up with wood waste fibre and started to go dry, they’d haul the waste out and dump it into some above-ground “dry lagoons” on company property next door.
Mr. Lalonde says the fact that an old mill site in the centre of Hawkesbury could be left in such a state for decades shows that Eastern Ontario really was a forgotten part of the province politically.
“This has been dragging on for years,” he says.
He finally got some action last year when he got Natural Resources Minister David Ramsay to drive up to Hawkesbury when he was visiting Cornwall. Mr. Ramsay looked at the site with Mr. Lalonde and agreed to a $280,000 engineering study that will set a plan for a cleanup.
This week, ministry staff and consultants were on the site, shovelling snow in a search for test wells so they can evaluate the water quality. The study work also includes survey work and a review of three previous studies into the land.
It’s possible that the scale of the environmental problem could just be the vast quantities of wood waste. If that’s the case, the material could be hauled out and spread on farmers’ fields to enrich the soil, or simply left on the site and capped. In that case, the land might be turned into a waterfront park.
But there’s a nagging worry: When the mill buildings were demolished in the 1980s, much of the material was dumped in the lagoon on the government’s property. The concern is that toxic chemicals from the mill may have been dumped into the lagoon as well.
So the ministry is doing tests to determine the soil quality. “We want to be thorough,” says Mr. Blake, of the Ministry of Natural Resources. “We only want to do this once.”
If the wood waste must be hauled out of the lagoons the costs will be large. But if there is a serious toxic contamination issue, the costs of salvaging the site could be huge.
One report estimated the cost of such a project at Hawkesbury could range from $1.5 million to $80 million. (The National Capital Commission recently spent tens of millions of dollars cleaning up LeBreton Flats before it could be built upon.)
If the Hawkesbury project gets into the tens of millions of dollars, the Ontario government would almost certainly turn to the federal government for financial assistance.