Perhaps turning the mill into an industrial hemp pulp mill is the answer
To the Expositor:
Bless MP Carol Hughes for stepping up about the shady closure of the Domtar Espanola paper mill under two years after its acquisition by Paper Excellence.
The people behind or associated with Paper Excellence appear to have a pattern of using thickets of corporations, including tax havens, effectively shielding transactions and assets from public and government scrutiny. The company won’t open up about its past financing, some of which was facilitated by the China Development Bank, which is owned by the Chinese government, the CBC has reported. Due to the saturation of the global wood pulp paper market in the past 20 years, China has been buying up paper mills to monopolize and control the industry.
While working as a project coordinator for Frontiers Foundation, the now defunct Canadian Indigenous housing provider, I had the pleasure to meet professor Gordon Schiefele in the summer of 2000. Mr. Schiefele was a researcher with the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs who took his previous Northern Ontario Hemp Project one step further, growing more than 120 acres of industrial hemp from Rainy River to Manitoulin Island. Mr. Schiefele’s research inspired the federal government to legalize the cultivation of industrial hemp in 1998. As the American government did a sophisticated job demonizing cannabis, Canadian farmers have been slow in growing hemp crops, when they could at the very least be using it as a natural alternate in crop rotation, to save money from purchasing expensive and toxic chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Not only does hemp use less water than any other crop, removes toxic contaminants from the soil, but also brings it back to life, by absorbing carbon and nitrogen out of the air and putting it back in the soil.
Mr. Schiefele proved that Manitoulin Island and Northern Ontario provide excellent conditions for growing industrial hemp, the original fibre used by the Chinese to make paper. (The first true paper-making process was documented in China during the Eastern Han period, 25–220 AD, traditionally attributed to the court official, Cai Lun.) The recognition of global warming has slowly awakened mankind to the importance of reducing the logging of trees. Since 50 percent of global logging is used for paper, it is long past time our now obsolete wood pulp paper mills retrofit, to making cheaper and better quality paper from hemp pulp and leave the logging for lumber. If the feds are willing to prop up the obsolete fossil fuel industry, might be a good time to buy up these obsolete wood pulp paper mills, when they lack the vision to convert to hemp paper mills.
D.S.McPhail
Manitowaning
