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.
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]
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.
Ironically there was one more end run to Ottawa. No sooner did I hear news of the suspension than the chief of staff of Nova Scotia Minister Elmer MacKay telephoned me. Probably prompted by Clifford Frame, chair of Curragh Inc., he asked that the suspension order be reversed, that the search be allowed to continue. Armchair quarterbacks nearly fifteen hundred kilometres distant from the site had no business overruling decisions taken by managers on the ground. Knowing that did not save me from a tortured hour until Merrill Buchanan phoned to say that Frame & Co. had finally bowed to superior judgement, bolstered by tragic evidence that there was no point in continuing.
Finale
The Westray disaster drew the curtain on my years with DEVCO. Shortly after, I left Tom Hockin’s staff for a new position. (He remained the minister responsible for DEVCO for another year.) Burning issues remained unresolved. The federal government’s annual funding was still required, absenteeism and accident tallies were still unacceptable and the Cameron government’s decision to privatize the NSPC probably meant that there would be further downward pressure on coal prices.
A new and improved regime for Cape Breton’s coal mines, promising steady employment and consistent support for the local economy, was not hard to envisage. That would have taken a joint planning process involving the Nova Scotia government, the NSPC and possibly also New Brunswick, along with DEVCO. DEVCO had to be able to factor the provincial government’s positions on utility costs, energy conservation and environmental protection into its planning and, above all, it needed the NSPC to stick to a set of long-term requirements and conclude pricing agreements for longer than five years. Only then could DEVCO rationally schedule its capital expenditures. As a 1991 ISTC memo to Minister Hockin stated,
The large amounts and long lead times that are required in this industry, coupled with its precarious financial position, make it essential that its major customer become part of the planning process and commit in the long term.[6]
The saddest conclusion that could be drawn from our experience was that the trust required to make such collaboration possible was just not forthcoming. A lion’s share of the blame for this could be laid at the door of the Nova Scotia’s government and politicians.
Nevertheless, I thought that I was leaving DEVCO in better condition than when I had taken up the file three years earlier. The union-management joint committees were still in place, productivity had improved, saleable production had increased (Phalen had just set a production record) while export orders were up by 300,000 tonnes over the year before (especially good news was a $60 million sale to Denmark[7]) and the installation of a radial boom at the international pier would enable loading coal on ships without the necessity of moving them at dockside. There were new customers on the horizon. New Brunswick’s Belledune power station and Nova Scotia’s Point Aconi, already committed to taking its coal from Prince, were soon to begin operations. Moreover, DEVCO was a leaner company. Whereas there were 3,301 employees at the end of fiscal year 1988-1989 after Lingan closed the number was expected to be 1,960.
Ministers (and their staffs) are frequently not in place long enough to see whether their efforts have met with success or failure. Thinking back on those days, the success we could claim was not in the realms of policy or politics, but rather in how we challenged an entrenched regional mindset. Union leaders and management took charge of their own destinies for a brief moment, assessed the circumstances confronting them realistically and acted cooperatively. We had to admit, however, that this was change on the part of a few. The idea of a streamlined, competitive coal company was at war with the culture of Cape Breton and that might well have told against us in the long term.
We were not given the chance to see how DEVCO would manage in the long term because its misfortunes soon resumed. Production at Lingan ceased altogether in 1992, one year early, as a result of flooding and roof-falls. The target of self-sufficiency by April 1,1995 was not met. The joint committee process languished in 1994-1995, though it was to recover later. Flooding and roof-falls at the Phalen Mine helped to push DEVCO out of the export market. A new contract with Nova Scotia Power left the corporation in an even more precarious situation. Furthermore, it was DEVCO’s fate to be swept up in the Chrétien government’s mission to restore fiscal stability. In early 1999 Ralph Goodale, the Minister of Natural Resources, announced that the government was getting out of the coal business. The Prince Mine, the last to stay open, closed on November 23, 2001.
Abandoning coal mining would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier. One part of me recognized that a gutsy decision had finally been taken that broke decisively with the shibboleths and supposed certainties that had encrusted coal mining in Cape Breton for generations. The other part regretted that a region and a way of life had temporarily lost their backbone, the reason for the people’s stubbornness and their pride, maddening though they could be with their uncanny ability to tug at human emotions.
Notes:
[1] “Doomsayers proved right,” Cape Breton Post, May 11, 1992.
[2] “Records show ‘concern’ over safety,” The Chronicle Herald, May 14, 1992.
[3] Justice K. Peter Richard. The Westray Story: A Predictable Path to Disaster. Report of the Westray Mine Public Inquiry. Government of Nova Scotia, 1997.
[4] Draegermen are members of a crew trained for underground rescue work. The name comes from Alexander Bernhard Dräger (1870-1928), a German engineer, industrialist and inventor of a combined gas mask and oxygen inhaler used in rescue work.
[5] One miner’s body could not be retrieved from the mine.
[6] Memo from J.C. Mackay to the Honourable Tom Hockin, May 14, 1991, Hockin Papers.
[7] “DEVCO lands major coal deal,” Cape Breton Post, November 23, 1991.
Acadiensis 