Frederick Street: Life and Death on Canada's Love Canal

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

Throughout the 20th century, steelmaking in Sydney, Nova Scotia, has
been an economic and social disaster, a gigantic sinkhole for
public-money-subsidizing private interests. The steelworks provided
income for generations of residents and immigrants but tragedy (and no
workers’ compensation) for workers and their families. In every sense,
it is arguable that the industry was not worth the social costs of
production.

In 1986, when the cleanup was first announced, the residents of Sydney
were confronted with a many-headed monster. The tar ponds, with their
toxic sludge, not only polluted the community of Whitney Pier but
intruded into the town centre itself. The greatest source of pollution
was the coke oven site, which abutted Frederick Street, compounded by
toxic dumps, incinerators, and raw sewage. By 1996, $55 million had been
wasted on a cleanup system that didn’t work; no systematic sampling
had taken place, and an epidemiological study (which could not in any
case have been part of any practical solution) had fallen apart. When
basements flooded with lethal waste, the response was not cleanup or
even containment but “more research needed.” The paralysis in Sydney
continues to this day.

Told from the perspective of the citizens and activists of Whitney
Pier, Barlow and May’s flawless is likely the only tribute these
working-class heroes are likely to get (other activist heroes include
Bruno Marcocchio of Toronto and his late wife, Roberta Bruce). The
villains are Nova Scotia politics (whose sheer sleaziness brings to mind
Depression Louisiana rather than modern Canada) and the federal
Department of Health, which used a perverse notion of science to cover
up a moral crime against humanity. It has taken two leading female
environmentalists with a national profile to draw attention to a Cape
Breton scandal.