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.
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.
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