We should take a lesson from the new census showing that two-thirds of our rural counties are in decline while Halifax and some regional centres are growing.
It hurts those left behind but it’s natural for people to seek out greener pastures. We try to find reasons for them to stay, but apart from EI, we don’t offer them handouts to stay home until the economy turns around.
We should adopt the same approach to industrial development. But instead, we continue to give handouts to paper and pulp mills, for example, so they can remain competitive in an oversupplied market and an increasingly paperless world.
Now, it seems the province may be poised to grant even more subsidies to this sector by reducing stumpage fees for fibre harvested on Crown land, as reported this week.
We should just let them pack their bags and leave every time they threaten to do so because we are creating an artificial kind of competitiveness that prevents the natural economic cycle of creation and destruction.
That’s where new, innovative and productive ideas come from to sustain a "greener" economy.
Take our province’s historic gypsum industry, which has been in a state of flux during the economic downturn in the United States.
Nova Scotia provides about
60 per cent of the gypsum imported into the U.S. The decline in the construction industry there has taken its toll on gypsum quarries and wallboard plants here.
One of them, in Port Hawkesbury, was reopened last year, under the name Cabot Gypsum, to supply the local building trade. And a slow recovery forecast for construction in the U.S. may revive other gypsum operations.
Yet gypsum miners face competition from a synthetic form of gypsum that now comprises 20 per cent of the raw gypsum used in the United States.
This product, which offers an alternative to strip-mining for rock gypsum, is the result of environmental pressure to reduce emissions of sulphur dioxide from power plants. Made from sulphur and limestone, it is a byproduct of the "scrubbing" process used at some coal-fired power plants to purify the combustion of coal.
Synthetic gypsum — used for agricultural fertilizer, manufacturing cement and making drywall — may limit the demand for rock gypsum as the U.S. economy recovers. But as one industrial opportunity dies, another is born.
We should also heed the lesson supplied by Viridis Energy Inc., the new owner of a wood-pellet mill in Upper Musquodoboit, which is preparing to ramp up its shipments of bulk wood pellets to Europe to meet the demand for greener power generation.
The province pumped millions in loans and land deals into the mill formerly operated by MacTara Ltd. and later Enligna Canada Inc. But the mill didn’t need bailouts to keep it alive. It needed a new market niche.
If we let our pulp and paper sector shrink, as it naturally must, we may find a new generation of industries growing up naturally when the old ones die.
Rachel Brighton is a freelance journalist and a former business editor and magazine publisher.
