Northern Pulp to initiate sale of assets

Anjuli Patil · CBC News

· Posted: Jul 14, 2025 8:59 PM EDT | Last Updated: 7 hours ago

Northern Pulp has announced it volition initiate a court-supervised income process of its assets aft it confirmed it wasn't capable to unafraid backing for a caller mill project.

In a quality merchandise Monday night, the insolvent institution said the decision follows completion of a broad feasibility survey that concluded Northern Pulp could not execute the 14 per cent internal complaint of instrumentality required successful a colony statement with the state to make a bleached softwood kraft pulp mill and bioproducts hub adjacent Liverpool, N.S.

"Northern Pulp is thankful for the enactment and collaboration of the Province of Nova Scotia and section stakeholders passim the feasibility study," the institution said successful the release.

Northern Pulp, owned by Paper Excellence Group successful British Columbia, said proceeds from the plus income volition repay indebtedness incurred passim the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act process, money pension plans and lend to tract attraction and closure costs. Remaining wealth volition beryllium allocated to the province.

Northern Pulp has been nether creditor extortion since June 2020 aft it closed its kraft pulp mill successful Pictou County, eliminating 300 jobs and affecting different 2,000 positions successful the forestry sector.

The authorities ordered the shutdown aft Northern Pulp failed to conscionable the province's biology requirements for a caller effluent attraction plant. At the time, the province's Liberal authorities said the mill successful Abercrombie Point could nary longer dump its discarded into Boat Harbour adjacent the Pictou Landing First Nation.

In May of past year, a colony statement betwixt the province and Paper Excellence ended years of ineligible wrangling. Paper Excellence withdrew a $450-million suit against the state and abandoned plans to reopen its idled mill.

The statement said that if the institution resumed operations elsewhere, it required an interior complaint of instrumentality of 14 per cent.

The company's astir significant asset is 192,000 hectares of timberland in Nova Scotia. The state loaned the institution $75 cardinal successful 2009 to marque the acquisition successful an effort to protect jobs.

Nova Scotia's curate of earthy resources said Northern Pulp's announcement was "not the result we had hoped for." Tory Rushton said successful a merchandise that the state did everything it could to marque a caller sustainable pulp mill a world successful Nova Scotia.

"From the outset, our authorities was astatine the table, moving intimately with the institution to research each viable option. We provided meaningful enactment and discussed programs similar our Capital Investment Tax Credit that could person offered important fiscal assistance."

Rushton said the state remains "a steadfast spouse with the manufacture successful exploring however we mightiness enactment unneurotic — and with the national authorities — successful attracting a caller spouse that sees the imaginable successful doing concern here," helium said.

He said the state volition proceed to enactment forestry families and communities.

"We stay unfastened to bold ideas and beardown partnerships that enactment our earthy resources to enactment successful ways that payment each Nova Scotians," helium said.

Earlier this year, officials with Northern Pulp filed paperwork requesting an hold of the company's creditor extortion arsenic it sought to find if determination was a viable aboriginal for its cognition successful Nova Scotia.

The institution is owed backmost successful tribunal astatine the extremity of the week arsenic portion of the process.

When the colony agreement closed the history of the pulp mill's cognition successful Pictou County, it was announced that the absorption would displacement to conducting a feasibility survey to see if gathering a caller cognition astatine oregon adjacent the tract of the erstwhile Bowater Mersey Paper Company outside Liverpool would beryllium viable.