When I heard that veteran Prince George broadcaster and writer Ben Meisner had died at the age of 76, it brought back memories of the battle against the Kemano Completion Project.

Meisner, along with former CKNW talk-show host Rafe Mair, played pivotal roles in the defeat of Alcan's plan to divert massive amounts of water from the Nechako River in the early 1990s to produce more aluminum at its smelter in Kitimat.

It was one of the most controversial industrial projects in modern B.C. history, ranking up there with the Northern Gateway pipeline.

The Nechako is a major tributary of the Fraser River fishery. During that time, government and nongovernment scientists issued gloomy forecasts about the impact of Alcan's plan on the Fraser River salmon runs.

Environmentalists, led by Burnaby resident Mae Burrows and Greenpeace's Catherine Stewart, worked extremely hard to educate the public about complicated issues such as the effect of lower water levels on river temperatures and the resulting impact on fish mortality. First Nations also became heavily involved in the debate.

Meisner served the province well by wrapping his mind around all of this and passing this information along to his listeners of his radio show and readers of his newspaper columns. 

The controversy, which was largely whipped up in the media by Mair and Meisner, led then-Opposition leader Gordon Campbell to condemn the project. Then-premier Mike Harcourt sought a review by the B.C. Utilities Commission, which issued a damning report leading to the cancellation of the project.

It can be argued that through his diligent efforts as a journalist, Meisner helped save Fraser River salmon runs for a generation. How many of his peers in the business can make a claim like that?

On the 250 news website, which he founded, Meisner referred to himself as "the champion for the Nechako River".

Of course, industry rarely puts megaprojects on the back burner forever. And the current owner of the smelter, Rio Tinto Alcan, has come back with a $500-million project to finish its second tunnel.

It's part of what the company called the $3.3-billion Kitimat Modernization Project, which will nearly double the smelter's output to 420,000 tonnes per year.

In characteristic fashion, Meisner criticized this second tunnel in a 2012 article entitled "Second Tunnel At Kemano, Just Kemano Completion With Another Name".

He died in a Winnipeg hospital after getting sick on an ice-fishing trip in Manitoba.

As a radio broadcaster, Meisner was a throwback to the days when angry populists dominated the B.C. airwaves. He would ask scathing questions and was successfully sued by NDP cabinet minister Paul Ramsey in the 1990s.

I remember speaking to a CBC broadcaster after he returned to Vancouver after a lengthy stint in Prince George. I asked him what it was like. His reply was that it seemed to him that everyone in Prince George in those days was angry about political issues.

In retrospect, perhaps some of that grumpiness could be traced back to Meisner's influence over the city.

In 1996, residents in Prince George considered a class-action suit against Alcan. This came after a flood had reportedly caused $8 million to $10 million worth of property damage and killed upward of 1,000 beavers. Alcan, the B.C. government, and the Nechako Fisheries Conservation Program had approved the release of additional water in the summer and fall from behind the Alcan's Kenney Dam.

The Nechako River meets the Fraser River in Prince George and at the time, Meisner claimed that the flood had ripped spruce trees out from his waterfront property.

The controversy over the original Kemano Completion Project came to Vancouverites' attention in an award-winning 1992 cover story by Georgia Straight contributor Dirk Beck. In honour of Meisner, I've reproduced it in full below:

By Dirk Beck

I: THE COMPANY GIVETH
KITIMAT—Tom Robinson speaks in the soft, measured tones of a man who has lived through epochal events. Like the eagles that survey the shoreline, or their carved counterparts that perch, inscrutable and stoic, atop the village totems, Robinson has seen it all. One of the few Haisla Natives to still make his living as a fisherman, Robinson is, as he puts it, “the last of a breed”. As he mends his nets in the front yard of the home he built, and while his grandson hoes the garden, Robinson looks across the water to one of the largest aluminum smelters in the world. “I was there to greet them. I saw the first barge that came in here, before anything was built.”

When Alcan Aluminum Ltd. came to this remote corner of the Pacific Northwest in 1951, Robinson, for one, welcomed the company. “I’m glad they came. It was good for our people. Before, we were isolated. Didn’t have a hospital. The young people today don’t remember it, but it was a hard life. Things are easier today...maybe too easy.” It was not, of course, an unmitigated blessing. “We should have been consulted more on what went on. Some bad things happened. I guess if I was a painter, I’d paint the bad bits out.”

In ancient times, Robinson’s people lived farther down the salt chuck, in hidden valleys and inlets that yet bear the old names: Kitselas, Kildala, Kitlope. Legend has it they were afraid to approach the mouth of the Kitimat River for fear of being engulfed by a monster whose gaping, white maw could be seen opening and closing from miles away. The true nature of the beast was discovered when Hunclee-qualas—The Archer—having accidentally killed his wife, escaped her vengeful family by going where none had ever dared. As he paddled toward the delta, a flock of seagulls took flight. Here was the “great white mouth”, feeding on eulachon, that fish so highly regarded by The Archer’s people. Hunclee-qualas settled on the bay and, over time, was joined by others. They came to be known as the Haisla, except to the Tsimshians, who, on a mid-winter visit, gave them the name “Kitimaat”—People of the Snow—owing to the fact that there was so much of it on the ground as to render the villagers almost invisible.

Today, Native and white histories are alloyed in the welcome sign that visitors pass on the Highway 37 approach to Kitimat—a one-metre tall snowflake wrought entirely of aluminum.

To find out what brought Alcan here, you would have to hop into a helicopter and fly 160 kilometres south-east over some of the most rugged terrain in Canada, from which point you would be able to look down on a body of water that drains about 14,000 square kilometres of northern B.C., a body of water so vast that you would experience a noticeable change in climate were you to travel from one end to the other. This is the Nechako Reservoir, and it was this water—though certainly not in its present configuration—that caught Alcan’s eye back in 1948 when the company was invited by E.T. Kenney, B.C.’s Minister of Lands and Forests, to investigate the province’s hydroelectric resources. To make aluminum, the miracle metal of the modern age, requires a phenomenal amount of electricity, and the Nechako River watershed seemed rife with possibility. Of course, from their airborne vantage point, Alcan’s scouts would have had difficulty discerning the considerable amount of activity already going on in and around the watershed, most notably that of the Carrier-Sekani and Cheslatta Indians, not to mention several white settlers and, of course, the fish and wildlife. What they saw, to quote a magazine article of the time, was “a basin of some 50 snowfed lakes whose water, and vast potential water power was being carried uselessly into the wilderness to the east."

To harness that power required a serious rearrangement of the local geography in a scenario that might have been inspired by the exploits of that era’s favourite super-hero. It meant reversing the flow of the Nechako by putting thousands of tonnes of rocks in its way; hammering a 16-kilometre tunnel through the Coast Mountains to drop the water from the reservoir to the turbines (a drop 16 times greater than that of Niagara Falls); carving a powerhouse out of solid granite inside a mountain; stringing an 80-kilometre power line across some extremely forbidding terrain; and, finally, building an immense aluminum smelter, not to mention North America’s “first complete new town”. It meant the largest construction project ever undertaken in Canada, at a cost (in today’s dollars) of $3.2 billion. To spend that kind of money, Alcan needed some incentives, and the B.C. government—eager to open up a province that, at the time, was home to a mere 1.1 million people—proved obliging. It was willing to overlook, for example, the fact that the land around the headwaters of the Nechako had been designated Tweedsmuir Provincial Park in 1938—the first hint that provincial legislation could be just as fluid as the resource in question.

Alcan presented the province with a wish-list as unprecedented in scope as the project itself. The coalition cabinet of Conservatives and Liberals responded with the Industrial Development Act. The bill not only gave the company significant tax breaks, but afforded it the rights to all the land that would be flooded in the creation of the reservoir, all the land required for the townsites at Kitimat and Kemano (the site of the powerhouse, 65 kilometres from Kitimat), and all the mineral rights along the route of the tunnel.
It was on the issue of water rights, however, that Alcan struck its finest deal. The original draft of the bill empowered cabinet to give Alcan outright ownership of the water—ownership, that is, of whatever fell from the sky and, by dint of the local geography, collected in the Nechako Basin. The opposition CCF (forerunner of the NDP) baulked at the idea. In an effort at appeasement, the bill was amended to avoid the appearance of a give-away. Alcan would, instead, “rent” the water under a 50-year licence at rates considered “advisable” by the cabinet.

The result, according to Richard Overstall, a researcher with the Gitksan-Wet’suwet’en people in Smithers, is that Alcan pays about one-twentieth the amount of any other water customer in the province. In the five-year period ending in 1985, says Overstall, Alcan paid approximately $1 million per year, as compared to the $20 million to $23 million paid annually by B.C. Hydro for the same amount of water. (Aside from pointing out an indirect subsidy of a multinational company by B.C. taxpayers, these figures are of interest to Overstall because a good portion of Alcan’s power operations lie within Gitksan territory. Not surprisingly, Alcan has applied for, and received, permission to make representation at the Gitksan-Wet’suwet’en land-claim hearings currently before the B.C. Court of Appeal.)

What made the situation even more attractive was Kitimat’s location at the head of the Douglas Channel, which gives access to the Pacific, providing a route for raw materials to come in and finished product to go out. The amended Industrial Development Act was passed without further ado, and the construction of Kitimat began in the spring of 1951.

Early arrivals to the townsite found a jumble of bunk-houses and boardwalks buried in mud—an ambience perfectly suited to drinking, gambling, and, so the stories go, the occasional shooting. A sociologist recruited to the planning process had warned the company against letting this work-camp atmosphere prevail: “Loneliness of adults might well reproduce symptoms from North American pioneer life of the 19th century: aggressive rough-housing, brawling, disorganized sex behaviour, especially if the settlement were made quickly and by lonely, unmarried men.” Alcan was advised that “efficient industries can operate only with efficient people, and efficient people live and work in a favourable atmosphere.” Accordingly, the company set out to build what the Canadian Geographic Journal would call, in a 1959 article,“Tomorrow’s City Today”.

Alcan hired two New York planning firms, which were given the opportunity to create, from scratch, the perfect workers’ town. “We are interested in building neither palaces nor monuments, but we are extremely anxious to avoid a shack town,” said Alcan’s vice-president in charge of personnel, J.B. White. “We must not be extravagant or encourage the community to be extravagant.”

With a potential population of 50,000 in mind, the New Yorkers designed a community based on England’s garden cities. To separate cars from people, all the streets would be culs-de-sac connected by arterial roads. All houses would face onto green spaces, through which walkways would connect the various neighbourhoods. Families would be within strolling distance of schools and shopping centres, which would form the focal point for other amenities such as cinemas, libraries, recreational facilities, and government services.

These men were “thinking green” long before the term was coined and, in some ways, Kitimat may well be the envy of planners looking to make today’s urban sprawl more liveable. What Kitimat’s designers didn’t reckon with, however, was that their conception of Utopia might be someone else’s idea of stultifying suburbia. Their Order=Contentment equation didn’t factor in the average person’s hankering for the hurly-burly of…well, of Main Street, which, in Kitimat, is conspicuous by its absence.
As early as 1958, Pierre Berton, writing in Maclean’s, spoke of “a certain dissatisfaction in some quarters with the community’s disciplined perfection”. The houses, many of them duplexes and fourplexes produced en masse from three or four standard blueprints, reinforced the feeling of a cookie-cutter existence. As Alcan employee Art Wiens recalled in 1974: “The first morning, I took my bright new shining aluminum lunch-bucket and put it under my arm. My wife saw me to the door, I kissed her and then I looked down the street and all along the street this thing was being repeated. Everyone had an identical house, an identical lunch-bucket and, I swear, an identical wife.”
It was into this milieu that my parents arrived from Germany in the mid-’50s. For them, and for hundreds of other postwar Europeans (more than 50 nationalities were represented in Kitimat’s population), the town’s predictability must have been reassuring. A world away from the painful events of the previous decade, they found secure jobs, affordable housing, and, eventually, one of the highest median incomes in the country. There was a sense of community spirit. The children were safe, no one locked their doors, and everyone knew everyone.

Mindful of the importance of a content workforce, Alcan went beyond the perimeters of the smelter fence and adopted a paternal role in the community at large, giving rise to the not-entirely-cynical moniker, Uncle Al. The company sponsored recreational and cultural activities, and it seemed that even the most prosaic routines of daily life were identified, in one way or the other, with Alcan. Company-issued goods, from soap to socks, were found in every household, where they were referred to simply as “Alcan soap” and “Alcan socks”. Giant ball-bearings from the company’s machine shops were coveted as “steelies” by marble-shooting boys, while their mothers packed lunches in aluminum foil that was twice as thick as the cheap stuff you could buy in stores.

Twice every month, the company published a newspaper called (what else?) The Ingot, its pages filled with photos of smiling workers, one hand clasped by their shift supervisors, the other holding a token of appreciation on the occasion of their fifth, 10th, or 15th year with the company. (In his three decades with Alcan, my father accumulated a collection of anniversary mementoes that included pen sets, pocket knives, medallions and plaques, candlesticks, ashtrays, and, of course, a watch—all of them either made of aluminum or embossed with the company logo.)

And if you sought respite from the workaday realities of life in the mill by taking the family out for Friday night dinner, well, Uncle Al was there, too. Helen’s Cafe, contrary to the greasy-spoon connotations of its name, had plush carpeting, white tablecloths, and a swanky ’50s-moderne décor, the highlight of which was a six-metre mural that occupied one wall. The work of an Englishman named John Hopkinson—portrait painter to the Eaton family, no less—the mural was a vision of Genesis taken from the Book of Alcan.

The background, a veritable Valhalla of deep fiords and glacier-raked peaks, seemed a fitting tableau for the epic labours depicted. Here, rendered in a vaguely socialist-realist style, were the movers of mountains, the builders of tunnels and towers—in the centre of the canvas, a group of welders bathed in the glow of their torches; above them, a helicopter adorned with thunderbolts; and, off to the left, two surveyors overlooking the smelter from on high and pointing off to the distance as if to say, “There! There is the future!”

At Helen’s, men like my father could look up from their four-course Chinese dinner (the proprietor being one David Chow) and see themselves represented not as worker drones in a sweltering, grimy factory, but as architects of a vast and noble enterprise that bespoke the boundless optimism and promise of prosperity that was the ’50s.

II: THE COMPANY TAKETH AWAY
May, 1992. Forty years after its inception, the Aluminum City seems to have lost some of its shine. The parking-lot beacon of the City Centre Mall advertises: “FORTY STORES TO SERVE YOU”, but the sign is behind the times. Inside, vacantly yawning storefronts lend a desultory air to the businesses that have managed to stay afloat. Some have managed it for more than 30 years, like the Sears mail-order shop where my sister orders spring jackets for her kids (as did our mother before her), or Doris’ Delicatessen, which, despite competition from the new doughnut shop, is still the most popular place in town for coffee and gossip. And, of course, there’s the Home Hardware store run by the Wakita family: the place to go for everything from frying-pans to 50-pound test fishing line. The store’s outside wall is covered in photos of fish-derby winners, prominent among them the proprietor himself, Ron Wakita—obviously the man to talk to if you’re after chinook or coho.

But if the fishing is great, business (at least of the smallish variety) is floundering. Everyone seems to agree that it began with the recession of ’81 and was signalled by the closure of the town’s very first retail outlet, the Hudson’s Bay department store, whose three floors had formerly anchored the mall. Today, its main floor is subdivided into three small shops separated by a bewildering array of bars instead of walls, the aggregate resembling nothing so much as a penitentiary. The youth-oriented fashion store, making the best of a bad situation, call itself The Jail. The irony, of course, is in the bars themselves—a product of Alcan Aluminum Ltd.

Mike Scott, president of Kitimat’s chamber of commerce and manager of one its larger construction outfits, believes the only way to help small business in Kitimat is to get more big business into town. He sees Alcan’s controversial Kemano Completion Project (KCP) as playing a pivotal role. “The power that would be generated by the project,” says Scott, “would attract other industry to the area. With low-cost power here, there’s potential. Without it, there’s nothing. Kemano Completion is integral to this town’s future.”

Alcan’s multimillion-dollar expansion of its power operations, dubbed Kemano II by the media, has its genesis in the company’s 1950 water licence. Upon expiry of that licence in the year 2000, Alcan will be issued, in accordance with standard government practice, a new permit that will give the company the rights in perpetuity to the amount of water being utilized at the time, on the same terms as the original agreement. By the same token, the rights to any water not being used will revert to the Crown.

At present, Alcan is using roughly half the water provided for in its original permit. KCP represents the company’s intention to exploit the other half by the end of the century. Given the consequences of the 1950 project—the summary flooding out of the Cheslatta Natives and several white homesteaders, the drowning of thousands of acres of timber, and the virtual drying-up of the upper Nechako River for six years while the reservoir filled—it should come as no surprise that Alcan’s current plans have met with some stiff opposition.

KCP would further reduce the flow of the Nechako, a tributary of the Fraser River, to 12 percent of its pre-1950 levels, which, in turn, would bring the level of the Fraser down by about one metre at Hell’s Gate, according to the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union. That means endangered salmon runs, bad news for an industry growing weary of hearing nothing but. Bad news, also, for the Carrier-Sekani Natives who inhabit the Nechako watershed, and several other communities in the region who consider the Nechako their lifeblood.

Alcan first announced its intentions in 1979 (or, rather, it announced the construction of three new smelters that would be powered by expanded operations at Kemano). The promise of jobs, however, did not obviate the environmental concerns that were immediately and loudly voiced by several groups who would later join forces in the Rivers Defense Coalition (RDC). RDC spokeswoman Pat Moss recalls hearing at that time the first of five successive fisheries ministers promise a full public review. Alcan backed off.
Its determination to build, however, was amply demonstrated the following year when B.C.’s energy minister, Bob McClelland, announced the Socreds’ intention to prohibit all future private-sector power developments in the province. It was the first Alcan had heard of the policy, and, as it turned out, the last. In a sublime act of corporate hubris, the company pointed to its 1950 agreement and blithely said it would proceed with the Kemano Completion Project, regardless.

In 1984, the ministry of energy received Alcan’s formal application to begin construction on KCP and the first of two smelters, each supposed to create 700 permanent jobs. If the project wasn’t found acceptable by the public this time around, said a company official, it would be abandoned. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) hosted a series of “discussion meetings” around the province, which Alcan declined to attend, preferring to disseminate its views through public relations offices opened for that purpose in Vanderhoof (proposed site of the first smelter), Smithers, and Kitimat.

At a Vancouver meeting, a representative of the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission claimed that, with proper management, the Nechako system could produce sockeye catches of 4.6 million annually versus the one million average for the four-year cycle ending in 1982. The commission strongly opposed any development, as did a host of other speakers. Alcan, citing weak aluminum markets, put the project back on hold, and went to work behind the scenes.

Three years later, a series of private meetings mediated by UBC president Dr. David Strangway and attended by representatives of the DFO, provincial fisheries, and Alcan, eventually resulted in the signing, in September 1987, of a fisheries-conservation agreement that gave Alcan the green light on KCP. Critics called it a secret, back-room deal. The company commenced construction in 1989.

The RDC countered by going before the federal courts to argue that the federal government had not fulfilled its obligation (under legislation introduced by the Trudeau government) to conduct an environmental-assessment review. In 1991, Justice Allison Walsh agreed and ordered the feds to do so forthwith. The on-again, off-again KCP was off again, as Alcan decided to halt construction (though not ordered to do so by the court) while it appealed the decision.

In April of this year, the company threatened to sue the federal and provincial governments for the $500 million already spent on the project if it does not receive the go-ahead. In May, the Federal Court of Canada ruled in the company’s favour, but Alcan has not resumed work on the project. It now prefers to wait, according to company spokesman Les Holroyd, until it can be assured of no further court or government challenges.

“We would not do things today the way we did in 1950, and I object to people judging us today on what we did in the 1950s.”
—Bill Rich, Alcan’s vice-president in charge of B.C.

Certainly, one aspect of the new deal stands in stark contrast to what came before. In 1950, Alcan dangled a large carrot in front of the province: 3,000 jobs and the foundation for economic expansion in the north-west. Today, such incentives are ephemeral, at best. What started out as a commitment to build three new smelters has become “increased production when markets warrant it”. Considering that such talk has been around since Alcan’s first day of operations in B.C., and that the company posted losses of $36 million US in the first quarter of this year (owing to a flood of Russian aluminum on the market), British Columbians shouldn’t expect to find new smelter jobs in the foreseeable future.

So where will the 540 megawatts generated by the new, improved Kemano go? South of the border, say critics, to a country that has severely mismanaged its own water resources. It is not an unreasonable assumption, given that B.C. Hydro has a 20-year agreement to buy the power from Alcan, and that 40 percent of the Crown corporation’s profits last year were generated by selling power to the U.S. Therein lies Jim Nyland’s chief objection to KCP. Nyland is an Alcan employee who also works for the Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers (CASAW) in Kitimat, and as far as he is concerned, “If you’re going to tap into hydro resources here, then the economic spin-offs, including employment, should also reside here. Our concern is that power which will go onto the B.C. grid is, in turn, shipped south to operate smelters in Washington and Oregon.”

The Carrier-Sekani tribes, having witnessed the Nechako River’s reduction in 1950 to one-quarter of its natural flow, are loathe to see it halved again. When I asked Arthur Pape, a lawyer for the Carrier-Sekani, what was at stake for his clients, his answer was blunt: “Their future. It’s the foundation of their whole ecology. Fisheries, traplines, transportation, drinking water—all of it is dependent on the river.” Others dependent upon the river include: area farmers, who will face reduced water-tables and well levels; industries and municipalities that will have to deal with less dilution for their effluent; and, of course, B.C.’s salmon fishermen, for whom KCP is, in the words of the DFO’s 1984 discussion paper, “the habitat issue of the century”.

Premier Mike Harcourt and his environment minister are the latest to have pledged a full public review of KCP although, with the threat of a $500-million lawsuit hanging over it, the government has been purposefully vague about just what form that review would take. Accordingly, it has appointed University of Victoria law professor Murray Rankin (who drafted the provincial government’s new Freedom of Information Act) to review all the facts and advise this fall on how to proceed.

A good deal of the government’s pre-election platform will stand or fall on its handling of the KCP issue. Multiple resource use, sustainable development, accountable government, Native land claims—all come into play. The premier’s agility as a fence-sitter will be sorely tested: on the one side, he’s facing the constituency that put him in power; on the other side, he faces big business, whom he has been wooing so diligently.

While Alcan and the provincial government try to gauge the price of doing business in the future, Kitimat is having to deal with the unforeseen costs of the past 40 years. In the offices of CASAW, Jim Nyland pulls open a filing cabinet. A 1989 study by the Cancer Control Agency of B.C. showed that long-time employees in the Alcan plant had a 60-percent higher incidence of bladder cancer than the general populace. That study is the basis for Workers Compensation Board claims put forward by CASAW on behalf of its members. Nyland counts them out: 30 cases—old-timers, most of them—whose retirement years will not be quite so golden as they’d anticipated. The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) thought to be the cause of these malignancies are only the most grave of a long list of toxins that are the by-products of aluminum, including fluorides (which stunt plant growth and, in high concentrations, cause skeletal deformity in mammals), sulphur dioxide (a contributor to acid rain), and two substances (tetrafluoromethane and hexafluorethane) thought to be greenhouse gases.

In these environmentally aware ’90s, Alcan is having to clean up its act, both indoors and out. New methods and technologies have made for a cleaner workplace and less toxic waste, but progress is slow. With respect to many of the above contaminants, Alcan is only now approaching pollution-control objectives set out by the B.C. environment ministry in 1979. (That the government and the scientific community are themselves playing a game of catch-up with industrial polluters is evidenced by the fact that PAHs are, as yet, unregulated toxin. No one is quite sure which elements of the compounds are carcinogenic, and in what concentrations.)

A few hundred metres down the road from Alcan, the Eurocan Pulp & Paper mill is also cleaning up its act. In 1970, Eurocan was a welcome addition to what had formerly been a one-company town, but it, too, carried a price. In this case, the cost was borne by the Haisla people, who found their all-important eulachon run in the Kitimat River tainted by Eurocan effluent. The eulachon, having already endured the unfortunate placement of Kitimat’s sewage outflow above their spawning grounds, were rendered inedible by the addition of resin concentrates from the pulp mill.

For non-Natives, whose palates are unaccustomed to the rich, oily taste of the fish, it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate the significance of the eulachon to West Coast Natives’ diet and culture. The annual spring runs are a highlight of the Native calendar, and the fact that the Haisla have had to travel more than 80 kilometres to the Kemano River in order to continue an ancient tradition has been the source of considerable frustration during the past two decades. Twenty years after the fact, Eurocan’s sensitivities have caught up with the Haisla’s, and the company has agreed to a remedial program that will see zero tainting by 1994.

While industry adapts to the times, Kitimat itself is in transition. Most of its old-timers have retired to sunnier climes, and with them has gone the sense of community spirit that once made Kitimat seem like a giant block party. Today, the paycheques are bigger, as are the houses (though the doors, these days, have to be locked), and where, before, there was no television, there are now 27 channels (accessible with a satellite dish).

The predominantly male workforce, and the unassailable post-shift ritual of “beer with the boys”, ensure the continued prosperity of Kitimat’s three pubs. Saturday night karaoke at the Ol’ Keg is where a few drinks and a microphone bring out the talents hidden all week under hardhats and coveralls. And even with the unhappy discoveries of the costs both the environment and their co-workers have had to bear, the town’s employees still retain proprietary feelings for their place of work.

Says Jim Nyland: “I, personally, can be very hard on the company politically, but I have to reconcile that with the fact that when I have visitors from overseas I show them around the plant with pride.” Graphic evidence of that pride can be found in the union’s meeting hall, one wall of which is now home to John Hopkinson’s 1956 mural. And if you look hard at that mural, beyond the smokestacks and clearcuts, the air is still sweet, the water still clear.

CODA: AT THE END OF THE DAY

At 7 p.m., the last of the sun makes long shadows among the cedar and spruce that blanket the steep shores of Douglas Channel. There are no beaches here, just mountains that jut straight from sea level to snowline, making specks of the four of us in our little Zodiac. The noise of the outboard and our fluorescent-orange floater suits seem puny proof of our presence amidst this green and blue vastness. We’re returning from a day on the chuck, having crabbed at Kitsaway, jigged for halibut at Moody Point, and bathed in the natural hotsprings at Bishop Bay. Drunk on salt air and sea spray, it takes a few moments to recognize, on the water in front of us, a dark line stretching a hundred metres from shore. As we approach, the line is startled into life as hundreds of cormorants take flight, curving up and outward into two wide arcs that engulf us with the sound of a thousand wings. For one perfect moment, it’s there: the picture as Tom Robinson imagined it—with all the bad bits painted out.