We put every economic idea on the table — old, new, sacred, and stupid — and asked one question: could this actually work? The answers might surprise you.
"In 2008, aerospace and aerospace parts manufacturing accounted for more GDP than fishing, forestry, agriculture and tourism combined, in our province." – Honourable Darrell Dexter
Two days ago, in a media piece carried widely from the globe and Mail, the Ecology Action Center senior energy co-ordinator Thomas Arnason McNeil said, "There really needs to be a priority on stakeholder engagement for all ocean users. We’re going to need to prioritize ecological safeguards and preserve the existing livelihoods that we have. That includes the fishing industry. That’s half the economy in Nova Scotia.”
This is verifiably false. Yet, though I wrote to the editors and the fact checkers they did not/ would not change it.
The truth is, by Nova Scotia's own accounting fishing & seafood processing real GDP has declined, with the sector now comprising roughly 2–3% of Nova Scotia’s economy.
Nova Scotia is a major seafood exporter (around $2.5 billion in 2023) .
But exports alone don’t translate to GDP percentage. Even counting total marine value chains (harvesting, processing, related services) combine to only about 13.5% GDP, not 50%.
I'm not saying this to be mean or diminishing.
But it's just gotta be said that if we left some fish and lobster in the water it wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen in the short or long term.
To your point, both aerospace and fishing each employ about 9,600 direct jobs and declining. Both are about 2-3% of GDP.
Not that GDP is a great measure of anything but it's a comparative tool.
In Nova Scotia in broad strokes:
50% of GDP is private sector services
30% of GDP is government sector services
20% of GDP is goods-producing, including, mainly, construction.
To give it its due fishing is part of the 50,000 or so wealth creating jobs and punches above its weight bringing in $2.5 B in export dollars, accounting for about 25% of exports.
Impressive... but not 50% of Nova Scotia's economy... not even close.
Great article. Very interesting read. Here are my thoughts, for what they're worth:
13. Coal - Agree. Leave it in the ground. We've gotten all the low-hanging fruit, and there is nothing which can be manufactured out of the stuff that's worth the over-all cost of extraction and clean up. Until there is, leave it there.
12. Gold Mining. a. Allowing foreign ownership of any portion of what is Canada is not a good idea, ever. b. Allowing anyone - foreign or domestic - to engage in resource extraction/refining without first paying down a hefty deposit toward future clean-up once the site runs dry is also a big mistake. Would having to pay said massive deposit up front make it unlikely that the company would want to work here? Probably. Would that make it hard for Nova Scotians to find work? Not really. Most companies that come in to work in resource extraction bring their workers with them. The govenment makes them agree to hire a certain amount of local labour; but the over-all value to the province and its people is very low, and sometimes negative.
11. Oil & Gas. Same as coal. Totally agree - we have passed the peak oil and gas date, and I'm talking the old M. King Hubbert "peak oil", not the current business definition, though that also applies. We can use what's there to help with the transition to other energy forms; but that should be all it should be used for at this point.
10. Traditional Forestry. Should move beyond the traditional, which is much as any other extraction industry - damaging to both the ecology and the local economy. This is like #12 - too much foreign ownership of the industry means too little concern for local impacts. Northern Pulp does *not* hire as many Nova Scotians as it claims, and it has made a mess out of Boat Harbour and surrounding areas. And now it's going to move to another location in Nova Scotia where it'll make yet another mess for which we will be responsible? Really? It's also being subsidized by us! Let's instead put that money into research and development of - as you said - "sustainable silviculture or shift to adding value and story to the forest". Tie this to #3 so that we can transition from Traditional extraction of the forestry to Value-Added (like they are starting to do with the steel industry in Ontario. They're wanting to make their *own* beer cans now.)
9. Gravel, Stone, Aggregate. Again, put money into research and development of sustainability and circularity in the contruction industry to reduce not only waste in the industry but also reduce reliance on damage to ecosystems. This one is an example of low-hanging fruit, taking the easy road, short-term thinking to make the current quarter look good. And, ffs, stop selling rights to remove the sand from our beaches to the Chinese!! I've seen it happening!
8. I don't understand what you're saying with this category. I see "Do Nothing" (Preservation Mode)" as already deeply embedded in far too many industries in the province to warrant a category of its own. It's the reason we're allowing Northern Pulp to do again what it did before, just in another location. So this category can be included in some way in almost every other one up to #3.
7. Rare Earth Minerals. I like your best case scenario on this one. Also, there's a market for them because currently that's what's being used for whatever industries use them. Which is maintaining a status quo of its own. What do we use and why do we use it and how can we make things to do what we want them to do without using Rare Earth Minerals? Rare earth minerals are not really all that rare; they're everywhere - and that's the problem. They aren't like lodes of iron or copper, etc.. They're part of the dirt - scattered everywhere in every conceivable kind of strata and substrate; but not 'orderly' at all. And in minute quantities in any given parcel of dirt, but just ... everywhere. So, extraction is difficult because they can't be mined by 'normal' processes. Also, Nova Scotia is one big huge moraine. It's a pile of till (rock debris) which was dragged here and dumped by the last great glacial age. Our geology is all over the place because of it. Extraction would be costy, and to what point?
6. We'll keep mining those until we're tapped out, though we're a little ways from that yet. But then what? See, that's the problem - short-term thinking runs business; and that needs to change.
5. Agreed. But also tie that to #'s 1 and 2. Create a mixed bag of energy generation. Reliance on one industry kills towns when that industry goes away. This has happened through-out history, from the flour mills on every riverbend that disappear when wheat growing became industrialized and centralized, to the problems Flint, MI, is *still* having when its single industry (auto) left town.
4. "...undermine other established Canadian sources..." makes no sense. Do we really have that much that it would make industries in other provinces nervous if we developed it? If we do, then that is something which could be added to the over-all Canadian pot via transfer payments to other provinces via our developing wealth. Why should Alberta be the only one with an industry that makes them rich? :D But again, it's the same old resource extraction problem. We've already mined the low-hanging fruit. Our planet is a petri dish and we've used up all the good places. We need to come up with ways of living that do not require extraction, but instead circular sustainability.
3. Tie this to #10 Traditional Forestry to make a change in the entire industry. Also, make changes to the building codes so that the bidet becomes an essential fixture of every residence, removing our cultural reliance on toilet paper. We go through an incredibly massive amount of forests just to wipe our collective arses.
2. - and also #1. I'm tying these together because they suffer from the same restrictions where it concerns NIMBYism. There was a massive opportunity to build a huge wind farm in the Northumberland Strait a number of years ago; but it was nixed by none other than Anne Murray. She didn't want the view from her cottage to be ruined. Jeezus. And she got away with it!! Anyway, now to separate the two. There are plenty of places where solar panels would be highly effective and useful. Imagine every single parking lot at a shopping centre or industrial area in Nova Scotia covered in solar panels. That's a helluva lot of solar. That, alone, could power the province all by itself, never mind putting windmills offshore. As to the windmills offshore, I'd like to see every effort made to interfere as little as possible with any coastal fishery (though there are changes in extraction methods I'd like to see there, too). If we look after the fish and whatever lives on the ocean floor, we look after our fishery. Helping the ecology makes economic sense.
TL/DR: The biggest problem, as you've stated, is that process has become the product. Also, short-term thinking, a lazy reliance on status-quo, and an extraction-focused mind-set.
One last thing: What do we have that nobody else in Canada has (other than Newfoundland)? Proximity, sort of, to Europe and Africa. How to capitalize on that ....
Thanks for reading my notes and writing this detailed response.
We're on the same page. Not just you and I, but I think most disinterested citizens would come around the same list basically.
My notes to yours:
- Yes, traditional and value-added forestry go hand in hand.
- Do nothing is meant to describe literally doing nothing. Have no energy or resource industries at all.
- The undermining notion is big picture. Resource and energy industries require tremendous commitment and investment and in many cases the need is limited. A good example might be lithium. Sask. is actively mining a supply of all the lithium Canada, and most of the world, would ever need. It's been located, developed and the infrastructure is being built with tremendous federal support. Why would we duplicate that and how would we make the case for the feds or Canadian industry to invest in something Canada ultimately does not need more of that would undermine a current existing plan in a more natural, existing, and larger resource place.
- In the coming weeks I'm going to write dangerously about the Consultation Industrial Complex that's developed in Canada in the last 20 years. For the moment, it's sufficient to say that wind turbines off shore are legally and pragmatically different under the consultation industry con than onshore wind turbine farms or any other on land development. In a big way.
Re: Items 6 or 4, NS lists two base materials, samarskite (Cobequid) and monazite (Canso) which can produce samarium. Huge up front costs, massive competition from China but also, only France and one mine in Nevada could produce that for North American or European military battery tech (or possibly ITER type reactors) and neither place is anymore. It seems to me someone should bite the bullet and make this a state supported industry so China can't restrict it.
You don't mention tidal power at all. I know, it's not really a thing here. However, it's local (Bay of Fundy), irreproducible most other places and it would add to the resilience of the overall energy grid. The South Koreans and the British have both had some successes, we've had some failures, but I fail to see why we couldn't try, try again as they say. We should be able to produce enough off of one of the newer (British/South Korean type) turbines to power Truro. That's not nothing and it's steady energy. Hell, with more water melt from the poles and Greenland it might just mean more powerful tides 100 years in the future. Anyway, I don't know enough about the challenges but it does seem like a missed opportunity.
I like thinking of tide and wave power as the domain of tinkerers and backyard inventors. There's still a place for that.
For sure, it could go on the list for discussion. Where would you rank it?
We were lucky enough to get our cameras front line on the fundy tidal project. The program turned out great for Discovery. But it was a truly humbling experience for everyone else involved. A reminder of the power of the ocean and its destructive properties.
Most of the world will stick to rivers. That's the human league. But Nova Scotia, in my view, should not be in the river power business.
Maybe some day our material science will be a match for the sea at scale. But for now, it's not a thing.
At this point and our current tech level, I’d probably rank it 4.5-5. But I also haven’t studied the newer SK or UK tech, that might raise it a bit. And James Watt and Thomas Newcomen were sort of backyard inventors! 😉
I think you've done a good job at outlining the risks and opportunities for Nova Scotia, but find it odd that you would highlight the importance of considering the impacts on our environment, being wary of projects only supported by government with a decided lack of enthusiasm from the rest of the population, and a vision for what Nova Scotia should be 100 years from now... and THEN rank critical mineral development in your top five without acknowledging the significant detriment it would cause to the health and safety of our population. 100 years from now people will look back and think- you opted for resource extraction in a densely populated area that negatively affected human and environmental health???
I agree- let's be bold. Let's invest in the future, let's set Nova Scotia up for a history of prosperity instead of a history of cancer and destruction. Offshore has huge potential and there's many excellent best practices to learn from.
"In 2008, aerospace and aerospace parts manufacturing accounted for more GDP than fishing, forestry, agriculture and tourism combined, in our province." – Honourable Darrell Dexter
DEFSEC Atlantic September 9, 2009
https://sealevel.ca/ocean/pdf/PremierDEFSEC2009-09-09.pdf
This was before Ships Start here. Are we not living inside the belly of the military industrial beast?
Two days ago, in a media piece carried widely from the globe and Mail, the Ecology Action Center senior energy co-ordinator Thomas Arnason McNeil said, "There really needs to be a priority on stakeholder engagement for all ocean users. We’re going to need to prioritize ecological safeguards and preserve the existing livelihoods that we have. That includes the fishing industry. That’s half the economy in Nova Scotia.”
This is verifiably false. Yet, though I wrote to the editors and the fact checkers they did not/ would not change it.
The truth is, by Nova Scotia's own accounting fishing & seafood processing real GDP has declined, with the sector now comprising roughly 2–3% of Nova Scotia’s economy.
Nova Scotia is a major seafood exporter (around $2.5 billion in 2023) .
But exports alone don’t translate to GDP percentage. Even counting total marine value chains (harvesting, processing, related services) combine to only about 13.5% GDP, not 50%.
I'm not saying this to be mean or diminishing.
But it's just gotta be said that if we left some fish and lobster in the water it wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen in the short or long term.
To your point, both aerospace and fishing each employ about 9,600 direct jobs and declining. Both are about 2-3% of GDP.
Not that GDP is a great measure of anything but it's a comparative tool.
In Nova Scotia in broad strokes:
50% of GDP is private sector services
30% of GDP is government sector services
20% of GDP is goods-producing, including, mainly, construction.
To give it its due fishing is part of the 50,000 or so wealth creating jobs and punches above its weight bringing in $2.5 B in export dollars, accounting for about 25% of exports.
Impressive... but not 50% of Nova Scotia's economy... not even close.
Great article. Very interesting read. Here are my thoughts, for what they're worth:
13. Coal - Agree. Leave it in the ground. We've gotten all the low-hanging fruit, and there is nothing which can be manufactured out of the stuff that's worth the over-all cost of extraction and clean up. Until there is, leave it there.
12. Gold Mining. a. Allowing foreign ownership of any portion of what is Canada is not a good idea, ever. b. Allowing anyone - foreign or domestic - to engage in resource extraction/refining without first paying down a hefty deposit toward future clean-up once the site runs dry is also a big mistake. Would having to pay said massive deposit up front make it unlikely that the company would want to work here? Probably. Would that make it hard for Nova Scotians to find work? Not really. Most companies that come in to work in resource extraction bring their workers with them. The govenment makes them agree to hire a certain amount of local labour; but the over-all value to the province and its people is very low, and sometimes negative.
11. Oil & Gas. Same as coal. Totally agree - we have passed the peak oil and gas date, and I'm talking the old M. King Hubbert "peak oil", not the current business definition, though that also applies. We can use what's there to help with the transition to other energy forms; but that should be all it should be used for at this point.
10. Traditional Forestry. Should move beyond the traditional, which is much as any other extraction industry - damaging to both the ecology and the local economy. This is like #12 - too much foreign ownership of the industry means too little concern for local impacts. Northern Pulp does *not* hire as many Nova Scotians as it claims, and it has made a mess out of Boat Harbour and surrounding areas. And now it's going to move to another location in Nova Scotia where it'll make yet another mess for which we will be responsible? Really? It's also being subsidized by us! Let's instead put that money into research and development of - as you said - "sustainable silviculture or shift to adding value and story to the forest". Tie this to #3 so that we can transition from Traditional extraction of the forestry to Value-Added (like they are starting to do with the steel industry in Ontario. They're wanting to make their *own* beer cans now.)
9. Gravel, Stone, Aggregate. Again, put money into research and development of sustainability and circularity in the contruction industry to reduce not only waste in the industry but also reduce reliance on damage to ecosystems. This one is an example of low-hanging fruit, taking the easy road, short-term thinking to make the current quarter look good. And, ffs, stop selling rights to remove the sand from our beaches to the Chinese!! I've seen it happening!
8. I don't understand what you're saying with this category. I see "Do Nothing" (Preservation Mode)" as already deeply embedded in far too many industries in the province to warrant a category of its own. It's the reason we're allowing Northern Pulp to do again what it did before, just in another location. So this category can be included in some way in almost every other one up to #3.
7. Rare Earth Minerals. I like your best case scenario on this one. Also, there's a market for them because currently that's what's being used for whatever industries use them. Which is maintaining a status quo of its own. What do we use and why do we use it and how can we make things to do what we want them to do without using Rare Earth Minerals? Rare earth minerals are not really all that rare; they're everywhere - and that's the problem. They aren't like lodes of iron or copper, etc.. They're part of the dirt - scattered everywhere in every conceivable kind of strata and substrate; but not 'orderly' at all. And in minute quantities in any given parcel of dirt, but just ... everywhere. So, extraction is difficult because they can't be mined by 'normal' processes. Also, Nova Scotia is one big huge moraine. It's a pile of till (rock debris) which was dragged here and dumped by the last great glacial age. Our geology is all over the place because of it. Extraction would be costy, and to what point?
6. We'll keep mining those until we're tapped out, though we're a little ways from that yet. But then what? See, that's the problem - short-term thinking runs business; and that needs to change.
5. Agreed. But also tie that to #'s 1 and 2. Create a mixed bag of energy generation. Reliance on one industry kills towns when that industry goes away. This has happened through-out history, from the flour mills on every riverbend that disappear when wheat growing became industrialized and centralized, to the problems Flint, MI, is *still* having when its single industry (auto) left town.
4. "...undermine other established Canadian sources..." makes no sense. Do we really have that much that it would make industries in other provinces nervous if we developed it? If we do, then that is something which could be added to the over-all Canadian pot via transfer payments to other provinces via our developing wealth. Why should Alberta be the only one with an industry that makes them rich? :D But again, it's the same old resource extraction problem. We've already mined the low-hanging fruit. Our planet is a petri dish and we've used up all the good places. We need to come up with ways of living that do not require extraction, but instead circular sustainability.
3. Tie this to #10 Traditional Forestry to make a change in the entire industry. Also, make changes to the building codes so that the bidet becomes an essential fixture of every residence, removing our cultural reliance on toilet paper. We go through an incredibly massive amount of forests just to wipe our collective arses.
2. - and also #1. I'm tying these together because they suffer from the same restrictions where it concerns NIMBYism. There was a massive opportunity to build a huge wind farm in the Northumberland Strait a number of years ago; but it was nixed by none other than Anne Murray. She didn't want the view from her cottage to be ruined. Jeezus. And she got away with it!! Anyway, now to separate the two. There are plenty of places where solar panels would be highly effective and useful. Imagine every single parking lot at a shopping centre or industrial area in Nova Scotia covered in solar panels. That's a helluva lot of solar. That, alone, could power the province all by itself, never mind putting windmills offshore. As to the windmills offshore, I'd like to see every effort made to interfere as little as possible with any coastal fishery (though there are changes in extraction methods I'd like to see there, too). If we look after the fish and whatever lives on the ocean floor, we look after our fishery. Helping the ecology makes economic sense.
TL/DR: The biggest problem, as you've stated, is that process has become the product. Also, short-term thinking, a lazy reliance on status-quo, and an extraction-focused mind-set.
One last thing: What do we have that nobody else in Canada has (other than Newfoundland)? Proximity, sort of, to Europe and Africa. How to capitalize on that ....
Thanks for reading my notes and writing this detailed response.
We're on the same page. Not just you and I, but I think most disinterested citizens would come around the same list basically.
My notes to yours:
- Yes, traditional and value-added forestry go hand in hand.
- Do nothing is meant to describe literally doing nothing. Have no energy or resource industries at all.
- The undermining notion is big picture. Resource and energy industries require tremendous commitment and investment and in many cases the need is limited. A good example might be lithium. Sask. is actively mining a supply of all the lithium Canada, and most of the world, would ever need. It's been located, developed and the infrastructure is being built with tremendous federal support. Why would we duplicate that and how would we make the case for the feds or Canadian industry to invest in something Canada ultimately does not need more of that would undermine a current existing plan in a more natural, existing, and larger resource place.
- In the coming weeks I'm going to write dangerously about the Consultation Industrial Complex that's developed in Canada in the last 20 years. For the moment, it's sufficient to say that wind turbines off shore are legally and pragmatically different under the consultation industry con than onshore wind turbine farms or any other on land development. In a big way.
Re: Items 6 or 4, NS lists two base materials, samarskite (Cobequid) and monazite (Canso) which can produce samarium. Huge up front costs, massive competition from China but also, only France and one mine in Nevada could produce that for North American or European military battery tech (or possibly ITER type reactors) and neither place is anymore. It seems to me someone should bite the bullet and make this a state supported industry so China can't restrict it.
You don't mention tidal power at all. I know, it's not really a thing here. However, it's local (Bay of Fundy), irreproducible most other places and it would add to the resilience of the overall energy grid. The South Koreans and the British have both had some successes, we've had some failures, but I fail to see why we couldn't try, try again as they say. We should be able to produce enough off of one of the newer (British/South Korean type) turbines to power Truro. That's not nothing and it's steady energy. Hell, with more water melt from the poles and Greenland it might just mean more powerful tides 100 years in the future. Anyway, I don't know enough about the challenges but it does seem like a missed opportunity.
I like thinking of tide and wave power as the domain of tinkerers and backyard inventors. There's still a place for that.
For sure, it could go on the list for discussion. Where would you rank it?
We were lucky enough to get our cameras front line on the fundy tidal project. The program turned out great for Discovery. But it was a truly humbling experience for everyone else involved. A reminder of the power of the ocean and its destructive properties.
Most of the world will stick to rivers. That's the human league. But Nova Scotia, in my view, should not be in the river power business.
Maybe some day our material science will be a match for the sea at scale. But for now, it's not a thing.
At this point and our current tech level, I’d probably rank it 4.5-5. But I also haven’t studied the newer SK or UK tech, that might raise it a bit. And James Watt and Thomas Newcomen were sort of backyard inventors! 😉
I think you've done a good job at outlining the risks and opportunities for Nova Scotia, but find it odd that you would highlight the importance of considering the impacts on our environment, being wary of projects only supported by government with a decided lack of enthusiasm from the rest of the population, and a vision for what Nova Scotia should be 100 years from now... and THEN rank critical mineral development in your top five without acknowledging the significant detriment it would cause to the health and safety of our population. 100 years from now people will look back and think- you opted for resource extraction in a densely populated area that negatively affected human and environmental health???
I agree- let's be bold. Let's invest in the future, let's set Nova Scotia up for a history of prosperity instead of a history of cancer and destruction. Offshore has huge potential and there's many excellent best practices to learn from.