Bitterness?
“Oh yeah, it’s there,” said Blaise O’Laney.
“You try not to think about it because it makes you mad and being mad won’t make it any better. So you just got to live with it and move on.”
So O’Laney is moving on — he has a job lined up in Halifax that will require a three-hour daily commute from New Glasgow. It means more pressure on his wife, a full-time nurse, and he’ll see a lot less of his children.
“I’ll miss a lot,” said O’Laney.
“We’ll do it this way for a few years and then take a look at whether we need to move.”
Despite the hard road ahead, he knows he's one of the lucky ones — he has a new job to turn to.
The bitterness the Northern Pulp operations superintendent felt a day after getting a layoff notice stems from the opinion that he was legislated out of a job.
Over 300 jobs gone soon
While Premier Stephen McNeil has placed the blame on Northern Pulp, reiterating that the company had five years to prepare for the closure of Boat Harbour, O’Laney’s viewpoint is shared by many of the nearly 300 workers who will be laid off next week.
In a press release sent out Thursday morning by Northern Pulp's parent company, Paper Excellence said only a fifth of its workforce will be kept on past Feb. 1 to wind down the mill.
“It’s a profitable mill, there’s a market for everything it makes and it is meeting all the environmental regulations that are in place right now,” said O’Laney.
“So basically we’ve been legislated out of a job.”
That viewpoint isn’t shared by many of the fishermen along the Northumberland Strait, members of the Pictou Landing First Nation or other community members who advocated for Boat Harbour’s shutdown and against Northern Pulp’s proposed replacement effluent treatment plant.
But the feeling of being wronged is real.
As is the reality that over 300 more blue-collar jobs will soon be gone from Pictou County, along with the potential of many more in the forestry industry around the province.
They’ll be added to the list of those laid off from the wind turbine tower manufacturing plant DSME, Maritime Steel, Trenton Works and in Michelin Tire’s 2014 downsizing.
Social consequences
As the shedding of well-paid manufacturing jobs has continued in Pictou County, so too have the social consequences.
“There’s a loss of self-worth, financial ability, loss of identity,” said Michelle Ward, executive director of the Kids First Family Resource Centre that serves Pictou, Antigonish and Guysborough counties.
“We still believe it’s a male responsibility to make money and provide for families. We also know the suicide rate for middle-aged men, 45-60, is significantly higher in our community than it is in other regions.”
While much has been made of the potential effect of pollution on human health, there are also quantifiable impacts from the loss of the jobs provided by those polluters.
A study of opioid overdoses in the United States published last month by Penn State University researchers found an 85 per cent increase in deaths in communities that had lost an automobile manufacturing plant over communities that held onto their plants.
“Our study looks at opioids but this link between falling economic opportunity and health is not new,” said Atheendar Venkataramani, one of the study’s authors and a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the Perelman School of Medicine.
“Even before there was this huge supply of opioids available there were other consequences.”
Researchers like Venkataramani call them “deaths of despair.”
Health implications
The rise in suicides, overdoses and heart attacks in America’s rustbelt has been long studied.
Less research has been done on the health implications on Nova Scotia’s own rustbelt, running through former manufacturing towns between Amherst, Pictou County and industrial Cape Breton, of losing blue-collar jobs.
Fifty-three people died of opioid overdoses in Nova Scotia in 2019.
The Department of Health refused a request to break the deaths down by region.
The province’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Robert Strang, co-lead on the province’s Opioid Use and Overdose Framework, declined an interview on the connection between human health and declining employment.
According to its own annual reports, the multi-departmental team has led to the distribution of over 5,200 naloxone kits since 2016, funding for needle exchange programs, as well as the expansion of treatment programs and the reduction of wait times for same.
They are treating the symptom and having some success.
Venkataramani’s research is into the underlying disease that manifests itself in varied impacts on physical and mental health -- not just opioid overdoses.
The phrase "deaths of despair" was coined in 2005 by American economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton to describe the connection between the loss of blue-collar work and decreasing life expectancies amongst non-Hispanic whites without university degrees.
“These working-class folks who are experiencing further contraction of economic opportunity late in life are realizing they won’t be better off than their parents,” said Venkataramani.
At the Kids First Family Resource Centre on Provost Street in New Glasgow they have had to double their food and transportation budgets over the past five years due to growing community need.
Beyond the drop-in program for children, pre- and post-natal care, the resource centre also offers counselling sessions on finances, stress and family violence.
“They talk about child poverty rates, what it really is is family poverty,” said Ward.
“Where I worry the most is that our community doesn’t do a really good job in terms of supports for men, especially around mental health. Many blue-collar jobs are tied gender-wise to men more so than women. That’s not to say that females aren’t affected, because they certainly are.”
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