Disaster at Westray

This is the sixth of a six-part auto-biographical series about the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) by Gerald Wright, who was from 1989 to 1992 a senior policy advisor to the federal minister responsible for DEVCO.

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Tragedy struck at 5:18 a.m. on Saturday, May 9, 1992, when a methane-ignited coal dust explosion shook the Westray Mine. I was immediately sent on a fact-finding mission to DEVCO’s head office so that if questions were asked in the Commons about the safety of workers in the government-owned mines the minister would be ready with answers. Executives met me with a list of rules and procedures in force at the company. They made it clear that, as far as they were aware, many of the same rules and procedures were being flouted by Westray. 

A DEVCO submission to the governments of Canada and Nova Scotia in December 1987, arguing against going ahead with Westray, had stated that the Pictou coalfield’s “seams have given off large volumes of gas and (have) proven extremely liable to spontaneous combustion.”[1] The owners’ rush to production had sounded more alarm bells. Throughout 1991 there were reports from provincial inspectors and private consultants expressing concern about methane gas levels, improper storage of flammable materials and the use of unauthorized equipment.[2] A vigilant union should have forced more attention to safety, but the United Mine Workers had lost a bid to organize Westray workers and the United Steelworkers were just two weeks into an organizing drive at the mine.

The inquiry into the disaster would later conclude that it was “a story of incompetence, of mismanagement, of bureaucratic bungling, of deceit, of ruthlessness, of cover-up, of apathy, of expediency, and of cynical indifference.”[3]

DEVCO, July 19, 1990.

A matter of hours after the explosion, four of DEVCO’s mine rescue experts were on the scene. They were followed by six teams of DEVCO’s draegermen[4] and a technical support team. Finance Vice-President Merrill Buchanan became my hourly briefer. At times I was transmitting information to the Minister on Parliament Hill, who would see that it was passed to the Prime Minister. There was still hope that the twenty-six miners entombed underground would be recovered alive.

In the end, however, hopes were dashed. As Thursday, May 14 dawned, there was no sign of life in the mine and dangers were mounting for the draegermen. The world stood still as I heard the decision to suspend the search, with sixteen bodies recovered or identified[5] and ten men still missing.

A TRIBUTE TO BILL PARENTEAU: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF HIS WORK TO NEW BRUNSWICK HISTORY

This tribute originally appeared in the Journal of New Brunswick Studies. Reprinted with permission.

Mark J. McLaughlin

It is a daunting task to attempt to assess the impact of someone’s body of research, amassed over the entirety of an academic career. It is especially so when the scholar in question was your PhD supervisor, colleague, collaborator, and (most importantly) friend. Bill Parenteau passed away in mid-October 2023.[1] Others, including Bill’s sister Kerry Pascetta and his friend Daniel Samson, have expounded upon what made Bill an incredible person.[2] I will be limiting my comments to the importance of his work to New Brunswick history, but I echo the sentiments that Kerry and Daniel expressed so well.

My comprehension of Bill’s research and its contribution to our understanding of New Brunswick’s past is shaped by having known him for more than 20 years. I first met Bill during my undergraduate studies at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton (1998-2003). After two and a half years of exploring options in combined arts-science and science degrees, I discovered the joy of studying history (based upon the advice of Peter Kent, another great scholar who we lost in 2023).[3] At first, I was one of those students who loved to learn about the world wars. Luckily that all changed when I took Bill’s courses on the pre- and post-Confederation history of Atlantic Canada. Bill’s honours seminar on environmental history later introduced me to the historical field that would form the basis of my own academic career. A mentor from early on, it was Bill’s advice that helped guide me to Memorial University of Newfoundland for my MA in history (under the supervision of Sean Cadigan). After seeing me present some of my MA research at the 2005 meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Bill offered to be my PhD supervisor, if I chose that path. From 2006-2013, Bill and I worked closely together as I inched toward the completion of my PhD, a time filled with lots of deep discussions, the occasional butting of heads, and “meetings” at the grad house. Bill was there, in one capacity or another, when I secured my SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship (Trent University, 2014-2015, with Stephen Bocking), was hired at the University of Maine (2015, started in 2016), and was eventually awarded tenure (2023). Needless to say, I would not be where I am today without Bill Parenteau.

One of the first things to understand about Bill’s body of research is the context from which it emerged. Bill did his MA in Canadian-American history at the University of Maine (UMaine), under the supervision of Richard Judd, from 1984-1986, on the contractor system in the Maine pulpwood industry in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.[4] From there (and after a brief stint working at a deli in New York City), he moved on to UNB, where he worked on his PhD in Canadian history until 1994. It was during this time in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the next generation of the “Acadiensis School” was being trained, with Bill being one of them. The Acadiensis School was a group of scholars who, starting in the late 1960s and 1970s, promoted the study of Atlantic Canada as being as valid as other Canadian regions that more often formed the bulk of the “national” historical narrative. They were instrumental in the founding of the journal Acadiensis and the biennial Atlantic Canada Studies Conference.[5] UNB was one of the epicentres of this Atlantic Canadian promotional effort, with the likes of Phillip Buckner, David Frank, E.R. “Ernie” Forbes, T.W. Acheson, and Gail Campbell leading the way. It was under the tutelage of David Frank, his PhD supervisor, and Ernie Forbes, and from many hours of debate with his fellow graduate students, including friends (and fellow members of the next generation) Daniel Samson and James Kenny, that Bill developed a passion for the history of Atlantic Canada, and especially that of New Brunswick. “The Project,” as Ernie liked to call it (the promotion of the study of Atlantic Canada), would help shape Bill’s research for the remainder of his career. He consistently asserted that historical events in smaller provinces like New Brunswick were part of national and international trends and processes to the same degree as more populated places like Ontario.

DEVCO and the Community

This is the fifth of a six-part auto-biographical series about the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) by Gerald Wright, who was from 1989 to 1992 a senior policy advisor to the federal minister responsible for DEVCO.

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The Cape Breton community possessed many heart-warming, uplifting and beguiling attributes but hard experience had indelibly marked its psyche. The official unemployment rate was reported to be 17.8%[1], but a presentation of the Cape Breton Industrial Board of Trade to a Senate Committee placed it at closer to 42%.[2] The region had already been abandoned by the offshore owners of Sydney Steel followed by its drastic downsizing, combined with the closure of two heavy water plants and other enterprises. DEVCO’s dismemberment, with the mooted closure of Lingan, was taken as another example of outside influences gnawing away at the island.

Mining had been a major occupation in Industrial Cape Breton for so long that it had come to be seen as a way of life more than a business, government support being its natural mainstay. Even after considerable downsizing, in excess of three thousand workers, their families and many pensioners depended on DEVCO, the largest single employer in Cape Breton, and the economic health of the region was identified with its prospects.[3] Local politicians, municipal leaders, clergy and local journalists, among others, instilled in their listeners and readers the idea that DEVCO’s highest priority was the safeguarding and betterment of the community.[4]

Cape Breton’s public discourse thus struck notes of dependence and beleaguerment and too, of rancour that could be attributed to a recent past in which optimism had been overtaken by bitter disappointment. Cape Bretoners were scarred by failure and too much inclined to look for salvation in a thunderbolt from the blue. One of their own identified a “starvation of the spirit” among his fellow citizens, accounting for the number of young people fleeing to the mainland.[5]

DEVCO, July 19, 1990. I believe, after a conversation with Merrill Buchanan, former VP of DEVCO, that the transportation can be described as a man-carrying trolley, July 19, 1990.

Searching for an explanation of their plight, many found it in a failure of responsibility on the part of the federal government. Angus MacDonald, Managing Editor of the Cape Breton Post pronounced a grim diagnosis. “Ottawa is dismantling our island bit by bit and if it doesn’t soon stop, we might as well cut the causeway (linking Cape Breton with mainland Nova Scotia) adrift.”[6] The prospect of privatization energized the formation of a community group calling itself Cape Breton Coal 2000, seeking a say for Cape Bretoners in the future of the coal industry.[7]

Any intervention from outside, no matter how high-minded its purpose, was bound to come up against these entrenched attitudes. The Hockin strategy was no exception, provoking strong criticism. “Unbending and callous,” Russell MacLellan, a Liberal M.P. and future Nova Scotia premier, called the minister.[8] The president of St. Francis Xavier University, albeit from the mainland but expressing a view that would resonate on the island, argued that Cape Breton should not be subjected to “the inexorable dictates of economics”.[9] 

The Consolidation of the Rule of Law in the “New Dominion”

The following is an excerpt from Michael Boudreau’s article that was published in the latest issue of Acadiensis. To read the full article please click here and subscribe.

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ON 22 JULY 1904 GEORGE GEE WAS EXECUTED in Woodstock, New Brunswick, for the murder of his cousin Millie Gee.  The question of Gee’s guilt was not necessarily in question since he had confessed to the crime. Nineteen-year-old George Gee and eighteen-year-old Millie Gee had been “keeping company” and George had become “much attached” to Millie, so much so that he believed that they were husband and wife.  But when Millie left George to live with her brother-in-law, Benny Gee, George Gee was “much aggrieved” by her desertion. Gee obtained a rifle and two bottles of rum and paid a visit to Benny Gee’s home.  Over the course of the evening, they drank and played cards.  In the early hours of 13 March 1904, in Homesville, Carleton County, shots were heard echoing throughout the Gee residence.  It was soon discovered that Millie Gee had been shot in the stomach, and she later died after doctors had operated on her in a desperate attempt to save her life. When George Gee was taken into custody by Deputy-Sheriff Albion Foster, Gee expressed little remorse for his actions and announced that the only thing he regretted was not shooting Millie Gee through the heart. The jury took 45 minutes to return with a guilty verdict.  Upon hearing the jury’s decision, George Gee smiled and quipped that it was “all he could expect.” In passing sentence on Gee, the presiding judge, Chief Justice Tuck, stated that the jury’s finding of guilt for this “fearful crime” was correct in light of the Crown’s evidence.  If Gee, or his defence counsel, clung to any hope that his death sentence would be commuted, Tuck quickly dashed their aspirations: “I can hold out no hope to you of pardon [for] this foul deed.” And the dominion cabinet, in its review of the case, concurred with Tuck’s recommendation that Gee’s death sentence should be carried out.[1]

The fact that George Gee was executed should not come as a surprise.  As the authors of the impressive A History of Law in Canada, Volume Two: Law for the New Dominion, 1867-1914 note, during this period New Brunswick (along with British Columbia, the North-West Territories, and the Yukon), recorded more hangings than pardons.[2]  Gee’s execution is a vivid example of the rule of law and “justice” in macabre action in the early decades of the “New Dominion” of Canada.  Moreover, executions were a dramatic reminder to Canadians that the law, whether civil or criminal, permeated their lives.  Indeed, as Jim Phillips, Philip Girard, and R. Blake Brown perceptively note, the law “was everywhere, as both derivative of political and social change and economic transformation, and as a contributor to them” (4).  The law, in other words, became a potent symbol of the state’s power and authority.  Similarly, during the 1867 to 1914 period, as this book makes abundantly clear, the rule of law and the regulatory state were consolidated as a cornerstone of civil society.

Phillips, Girard, and Brown are prodigious scholars in their own right, and their collaboration on this three-volume set of the history of law in Canada will further cement their reputations as being among the leading figures in Canadian legal history.  Indeed, when the third volume is published (tentatively scheduled for 2025), all of these books – Volume One: Beginnings to 1866 (which appeared in 2019 and was reviewed in Acadiensis in 2020) and Volume Two: Law for the New Dominion (reviewed here) – will collectively make an indelible mark not only on the field of Canadian legal history but Canadian history generally.[3] Relying primarily on secondary literature, legal decisions, federal and provincial statutes, and annual reports from government agencies, Law for the New Dominion explores Canada’s three legal traditions (common law, civil law, and Indigenous law) along with the gradual marginalization of Indigenous law as “British justice,” and the notion of  the rule of law, solidified its prominence by the eve of the First World War. The authors also address the important theme of the law in theory versus the law in practice, notably with regards to Indigenous peoples and communities and how the tension between theory and practice often had negative consequences for Indigenous peoples and Canadians generally.

DEVCO and Unions

This is the fourth of a six-part auto-biographical series about the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) by Gerald Wright, who was from 1989 to 1992 a senior policy advisor to the federal minister responsible for DEVCO.

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We knew from the start that the unions were the major roadblock in our way.[1]Their members earned modest wages (annual pay packets in the vicinity of $30,000 – $35,000 were common) and laboured in harsh and dangerous conditions, a recipe for continual labour strife. The illegal strike in 1990[2] was the thirteenth stoppage since 1976, including one twelve-week strike in 1981 and a thirteen-week strike in 1989. The 1990 strike was provoked by management’s decision to contract out its coal-hauling operation, a move which entailed not a single lay-off of the twenty-five workers employed there but raised the spectre of privatization. The UMWA, in particular, was a tightly knit brotherhood that channelled the miners’ fears and their longings. Decades of being buffeted by circumstances that, as they saw it, were beyond their control, had left them combative, suspicious of outsiders and bereft of vision.

Moreover, the miners or, more likely, their fathers, had witnessed a change from private to public ownership in the sixties as coal was being phased out. At least fourteen coal mines closed on Cape Breton between 1950 and 1966.[3] This period of decline was followed on its heels by the Yom Kippur War, the 1973 Arab oil embargo and a complete turnabout on the part of the federal government, privileging the exploitation of coal reserves over newly expensive oil. Now the miners were experiencing yet another turnabout. Employment in the mines was steadily declining and they were beginning to realize that their livelihoods were tied to a resource once again falling rapidly out of favour.  

Hon. Tom Hockin, July 19, 1990.

The unions did not take readily to a disciplined approach. Their highly charged rhetoric contributed mightily to a fraught atmosphere and frayed nerves. Confronted with the implied threat of Lingan’s closure, they complained of “blackmail”, “blatant interference” and having to negotiate with a gun to their heads.  One union leader went so far as to lament that DEVCO was turning into a dictatorship just as the countries of the disintegrating Soviet Bloc were opting for democracy![4] Demonstrations triggered by the firing of three miners were held outside the Ernie Boutilier’s home and, in the summer of 1990, miners stormed his office. The strike that followed threw out a budget projection of a $21.2 million surplus for 1990-1991.

DEVCO’s fortunes appeared to have reached a nadir. Then, quite suddenly, in the winter and early spring of 1991, relations between management and unions were set on a new and more promising track. Having first insisted that joint management-workers’ committees didn’t work, the UMWA, with assistance from John Banovic, their International Secretary-Treasurer, agreed with the corporation to bring in William Hobgood, a former United States Assistant Secretary of Labour, to design such a process.

Land Rich, Cash Poor: The Settler-Colonial Beginnings of the University of New Brunswick, 1785-1829

The following is an excerpt from Richard Yeomans’ article that was published in the latest issue of Acadiensis. To read the full article please click here and subscribe.

RICHARD YEOMANS

IN FEBRUARY 1844 NEW BRUNSWICK’S HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY first read Lemuel Allen Wilmot’s bill for the amendment of the charter of King’s College Fredericton, a collegiate school that had been in operation since 1829 but conceived during the late 18th century. Though debate was short, Wilmot bluntly remarked that since the school was first incorporated in 1800 by provincial articles of incorporation “forty five thousand pounds had been paid for its support – a sum which would have educated every one of its students at Cambridge or Oxford.”^[1] Wilmot was convinced that the school was anything but a going concern, and proposed changes including the removal of the colony’s lieutenant governor and members of the provincial Executive Council from being allowed to assume positions on the College Council as either chancellor or president of the institution, respectively.^[2] These measures were a direct response to years of woeful mismanagement by the colony’s political elite of the college’s provincial and royal monetary endowments, and the roughly 6,000 acres of land granted in support of the school at the start of the century. Wilmot’s actions and words were also indicative of a long and drawn-out struggle over control over collegiate education in New Brunswick between the appointed and elected houses. Challenges to the school’s land ownership, program of settlement, and the desire of politically elite white settlers to exploit and leverage unceded Wolastoqiyik lands and waters for the maintenance of a collegiate institution in New Brunswick exacerbated this struggle. In an effort to build “the most gentleman like society on earth,” the fraught formation of what was to become the present-day Fredericton campus of the University of New Brunswick became central to the development of the settler state in Britain’s most lucrative timber colony.^[3]

Members of New Brunswick’s political elite first proposed using land as foundational capital for a collegiate institution in 1785, while also designing their college to benefit only the children of the most affluent. For the political refugees of the American Revolution, the expense of sending the children of Loyalists away to England to complete their education cost more than most land was worth in New Brunswick in the late 18th century. Moreover, colonial leaders expressed concern that individuals who attended college or university in the newly independent United States might return corrupted by dissenting republican ideals.^[4] Ward Chipman, born in Massachusetts and trained at Harvard College before becoming New Brunswick’s first Solicitor General, feared that his own son, in “looking beyond some of these Provinces for his future, . . . will never be contended to starve, as I have done, in this part of the Country.”^[5] New Brunswick offered little in the way of upward mobility or educational prospects for children, regardless of their parentage, and colonial administrators sought to “localize the universal culture taught in British Universities” as a means of preserving the social order to which they had become accustomed and which they sought to reproduce in New Brunswick.^[6] For more middling refugees, the potential leveling influences of British-style higher education did not supersede their immediate concerns with the lack of rudimentary education, such as reading and writing, mathematics and geometry, which was compounded by the serious backlog in petitions for land grants. The colony had too few surveyors with the necessary math skills to survey land for distribution amongst perspective settlers, and this deficit exacerbated problems with restive settlers such as squatting and conflicts with the Wolastoqiyik, Peskotomuhkatiyik, and Miꞌkmaq.

Loyalist refugees of all ranks were in close agreement about the need for an established system of education in new settlements, albeit for different purposes, and rested their hopes in education as a harbinger of peace, as a disseminator of liberal British values through Christian institutions, and as a generator of future industry.^[7] Benjamin Marston, another Harvard-educated refugee and chief surveyor in Nova Scotia, was particularly frank about the need for unanimity between education and religion in one report he sent off to London at the height of his efforts to settle refugees in Shelburne in 1783. Marston observed that such combination required “particular care” by restricting who would be allowed to shape “Colleges & such like Public Seminaries of Education so far as Clergymen were concerned,” and that they “should be committed only to the care of those who were [Church] of England men.”^[8] Marston, however, was also quite critical of the lack of any “sufficient portion of men of practical education & abilities” among the refugees expected to occupy and permanently settle in the post-revolutionary northwest Atlantic.^[9] Despite there being numerous college-educated refugees in Nova Scotia, in Marston’s view far too few had the practical education necessary for cultivating land for resettlement. Practical education, at least according to Marston’s interpretation while he attempted to survey plots of land along peninsular Nova Scotia, was “useful knowledge” – knowledge thoroughly independent of any kind of theoretical or abstract thought that did not also improve upon the use of a quadrant. In Britain, the link between science and practical education had been well established since the 17th century and proved fertile when put into the service of empire.^[10] In Nova Scotia, the link between expanding commerce and practical education was not lost on Marston, who, at the end of 18th century, believed the region needed practitioners and not philosophers. The system of education, once implemented, needed to produce competent settlers and loyal subjects who would quicken the occupation and opening of the land and not question either the actions or authority of the Crown’s representatives in Nova Scotia or, after 1784, in New Brunswick.

Governments and DEVCO

This is the third of a six-part auto-biographical series about the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) by Gerald Wright, who was from 1989 to 1992 a senior policy advisor to the federal minister responsible for DEVCO.

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Though DEVCO was a crown corporation wholly owned by the federal government, the company was tightly bound to the Nova Scotia government. DEVCO mined coal which was owned by the province and paid the province a royalty for so doing. Another circumstance colouring the relationship was that the company’s main customer was the provincially owned Nova Scotia Power Commission (NSPC), which generated 65% of its power in coal-fired plants. The NSPC held most of the cards. In particular, it possessed the flexibility to become more reliant on oil, depending on the price. At the same time, it was under pressure to bring down industrial power rates in the province. Renegotiation of its contract in 1989 had reduced DEVCO’s revenue by $20 million but that did not stop critics from contending that unjustifiably high rates, accountable to the NSPC’s support of Cape Breton’s coal industry, hampered the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector.[1]

For reasons that transcended, and certainly conflicted with, our strategy, the high command in Ottawa deferred to Premier Buchanan. The Cape Breton Development Corporation Act, for example, stipulated that two of the company’s seven directors be provincially appointed and that the province be consulted on the appointment of the chairman and president. In practice, the Mulroney government cleared even its own nominations with the Premier. He vetoed a federal government nomination at least once.

Moreover, Nova Scotia governments used DEVCO as a means of systematically milking the federal government. Leave aside the constitutional division of responsibilities and tortuously developed fiscal arrangements. My experience uncovered subterranean rivulets of federal subsidy never publicly acknowledged. One was a hospital tax that could be raised at the will of the province. Another was a decree of the Nova Scotia legislature that any loss of lung function by a long-working miner, regardless of how that might have been caused (for example, by heavy smoking), was DEVCO’s problem, requiring it to pay out substantial sums in workers’ compensation benefits. In the end, the federal government footed the bill.

Gerald Wright, Senior Policy Advisor to Tom Hockin with Joe Burke, President of District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America, July 19, 1990.

John Buchanan himself supplied the first stumbling block we encountered. A Cape Breton native with a capacity to charm, he was highly sensitive to voter sentiment in the region and bent on rescuing his, at that time stuttering, career. Buchanan did not demonstrate the slightest understanding of what we were trying to do. In fact, when the miners went on an illegal strike in the summer of 1990, he publicly endorsed their action!

Dealings with the premier were seldom by the book. His views were normally conveyed to us not through official channels but by Michael Cochrane, a Toronto businessman, DEVCO director and later chairman of the DEVCO board. With the approach of a crucial provincial by-election in Cape Breton Centre, a riding populated by Lingan miners and their families, we began to see and hear more of Buchanan himself. Tom Hockin and I met with him in a Montreal airport hotel room. A consummate constituency politician, he took us up and down the streets of Cape Breton Centre, recounting how each householder had voted at the previous election, not forgetting the name of one resident who had been unable to cast her ballot because she was visiting a friend in Boston. We were being softened up.

A New Direction

This is the second of a six-part auto-biographical series about the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) by Gerald Wright, who was from 1989 to 1992 a senior policy advisor to the federal minister responsible for DEVCO.  

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The Mulroney government took office in 1984 promising to build a strong, competitive national economy and re-order government’s place within the economy. Ministers were tasked with piloting major initiatives, such as sales tax reform, financial institutions reform, free trade with the United States, deregulation and the privatization of pubic corporations, together with a hoped-for measure of deficit reduction. The policy environment did not favour propping up struggling companies.

DEVCO was clearly struggling, beset by continual deficits, a low level of coal production, declining international prices, acrimonious relations with unions, an apathetic workforce prone to absenteeism (out of a workforce of 3,000 approximately 400 were off the job every production day), a large unfunded pension liability, some of which dated back to the days of private ownership, and uncertainty over the fate of the aged Lingan Mine, which then employed 1,350 men. Politicians and union leaders battled for the continuance of Lingan, though it had been so extensively mined that miners spent a good part of their day just travelling to and from the coalface.

Group of DEVCO employees with the Hon. Tom Hockin on the right. Tom was Minister of State (Small Businesses and Tourism) and was responsible for DEVCO, July 19, 1990.

DEVCO’s operations were conducted under the sea, which raised its costs and made it impossible to meet and compete with world prices that were trending lower. A surplus was forecast for the Company’s 1988-1989 fiscal year, but flooding in the Phalen mine and a twelve-week strike on the part of the railway employees, forcing the company to lay off the entire workforce, turned that into a deficit of $29.7 million. By 1989 DEVCO had absorbed nearly $1.4 billion in federal government funds, to finance operating losses and new capital expenditures.

DEVCO’s difficulties were by no means unique. In early 1991 The Economist reported that since 1984-1985, the year of a strike led by Arthur Scargill to oppose colliery closures, 102 out of 170 collieries had shut down in the United Kingdom. The workforce had been cut by two-thirds. Having to sell coal at prices that were low in relation to costs, British Coal was a constant drain on the public purse.[1]     

Battling for DEVCO

This is the first of a six-part auto-biographical series about the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO) by Gerald Wright, who was from 1989 to 1992 a senior policy advisor to the federal minister responsible for DEVCO. [1]

I’ve Been Down Under Ground

Cabinet shuffles engender anticipation mixed with apprehension. In the aftermath of the 1989 shuffle, Tom Hockin, the federal minister for whom I had been working since March 1987, acquired new responsibilities. I scanned the list, my eye fastening on the Cape Breton Development Corporation (DEVCO).

DEVCO had been established in 1967 by an Act of Parliament, both to manage Cape Breton’s coal mines and to pursue industrial development for the region. Shortly before we came on the scene the Industrial Development Division was transferred to Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation, a regional development agency. In the late eighties the corporation was operating three mines: Lingan, the oldest and least cost-efficient, near New Waterford; Phalen, 400 feet underneath Lingan, a “gold-plated mine”, replete with the latest advances in mining technology; and the Prince Colliery, located approximately sixty kilometers distant at the northeastern tip of Boularderie Island.

Certificate of an Honorary Coal Miner, having spent a day underground, 19 July 1990

DEVCO produced metallurgical-grade and thermal-grade coal for both domestic and export markets. The corporation’s competitive disadvantage was the high percentage of sulphur in its coal but the coal retained customer appeal on account of its high calorific value and low ash content.    

Coal had been mined in Nova Scotia as early as the 1720s. The French fortress of Louisbourg was heated by coal. In the not-too-distant past as many as twelve thousand men had been employed in the mines. The coal mining culture was deeply rooted, infectious, and tinged with tragedy. No one could remain unmoved attending a Davis Day event every June 11, commemorating those who had lost their lives to coal mining, or hearing old timers tell of the explosion in Glace Bay’s No. 26 Colliery in 1979, in which twelve men were killed. Nor could anyone be immune to the appeal of The Men of the Deeps, the coal miners’ chorus, as they sang about what was in their blood. At the same time, the purchase that coal mining exerted on the emotions was partly responsible for the unreality of much public discourse about the industry.

The Disappearance of the Brunswick News Archive

By Ronald Rudin

Over the past few years, I have been working on a book exploring the 1959 Escuminac Disaster, which saw the death of 35 men when a hurricane struck the salmon fishing fleet just outside Miramichi Bay, which empties into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in northeastern New Brunswick. In developing this project, in pulling together a research grant application, and in the early stages of writing, I became heavily dependent on (really addicted to) the amazing Brunswick News online archive, a searchable database that made it possible to dig into the content, sometimes stretching back over a century, of English-language newspapers across the province that formed part of the Brunswick News empire. With one click, I was able to find references in several newspapers to people and subjects connected with the Escuminac Disaster.

Much, of course, has been written about the consequences of having all the province’s English-language dailies as well some weekly publications in the hands of the Irving family. See, for instance, Julian Walker’s Wires Crossed: Memoir of a Citizen and Reporter in the Irving Press (Victoria: Friesen Press, 2021). Nevertheless, the existence of Brunswick News as an independent corporation with the financial wherewithal and the interest in providing (as part of a monthly subscription) an online database, was no small matter for researchers. Unfortunately, those same researchers, including me, are now going through withdrawal following the removal of the archive from the internet in November 2023, a direct consequence of the acquisition of Brunswick News by Postmedia eighteen months earlier.

As is the norm in such cases of newspaper consolidation, the acquiring company looked for ways to rationalize operations, reducing or eliminating print publications, and transforming the Brunswick News online presence. While previously there had been links that led to the various local newspapers, such as the Miramichi Leader which was important to my research, now there is only a single newspaper referenced online, the (Saint John) Telegraph-Journal, which offers coverage to subscribers pertinent to the various regions of the province, but without any indication that there are (or once had been) local newspapers.