Coal Black Heart (28 page)

The numbers spoke for themselves: in 1944 Canada consumed 36 million tons of coal, 12 million of which came from Canadian mines, with the other 24 million via imports. Fourteen years later, however, Canadian coal consumption had dropped to less than 20 million tons; U.S. coal would still have 60 percent of the market, leaving
7.7
million tons for domestic producers. Of that, Dominion Coal’s portion—essentially all of Nova Scotia’s production—was 4.5 million, half of which was sold in Quebec, with most of the rest destined for the Sydney steel plant.

Coal markets elsewhere were in a state of pandemonium after the war: slumping in the United States, where oil and gas were taking away the market in industrial and home use; soaring in Germany’s Ruhr as rebuilding gathered steam. In Britain the shortage was so acute that the Labour government of Clement Attlee nationalized the mines in 1947, making 700,000 miners employees of the state.

Geography was what had doomed Cape Breton coal. The farther the coal seams lay under the ocean floor, the more lost travel time there was for the miners, the greater the complexity of the structural and ventilation problems, the higher the cost of production. The mines were old, neglected and inefficient—desperately in need of capital investment but unable to generate the income to pay for what so clearly needed to be done. In 1958, the average cost at the pithead of Nova Scotia coal was $10.72. American producers could ship their coal into Canada for one-third of that. The 1960 Royal Commission on Coal noted that moving it by rail from Glace Bay added another $6.31 to the cost. At the same time, the
new St. Lawrence Seaway provided “a cheaper means of transportation for American coal to move into the central Canadian market, and for large foreign oil tankers to sail into the same area.”

Ottawa did what it could to make Nova Scotia coal competitive with imports. The complex system of “subventions” or freight subsidies was by its own admission “a prolonged emergency measure that held little promise of effecting an acceptable solution.” And no amount of government intervention could do anything to alter the fact that Cape Breton coal was high in sulphur, which made it burn less efficiently than Pennsylvania coal. In 1959 this reality was driven home in a particularly lamentable way: Dosco’s new management began shipping in American coal for use in the Sydney steelmaking operation.

Friggin’ Dosco, Cape Bretoners used to moan. Goddamn Dosco, as if everything that happened was all the company’s fault. By then it did seem omnipotent—a behemoth that owned collieries, railroads and fleets of steamships; the largest undersea iron ore works, on Bell Island, just west of St. John’s, Newfoundland; blast furnaces, coke ovens and rolling mills in Sydney; a railcar plant in Trenton; shipyards in Halifax; a steel wire and nail plant in Saint John, New Brunswick; and even outfits in Ontario that made nail and wire products, or designed, engineered, fashioned and erected bridges, transmission towers, cranes and other structural steel shapes. “It is a great and valuable asset on our national balance sheet,” Lionel Forsyth, Dosco’s first and only Nova Scotia–born president, told the Toronto chapter of the Empire Club of Canada in 1953. Then, that was certainly true. But Forsyth had always warned Stellarton tycoon Frank Sobey that once Nova Scotians “lost their toehold on Dosco, it would be finished.” The Dosco
president, whose 1957 death left a power vacuum at the top of the company, was rumoured to be a bit of a booze artist, but truer words were seldom spoken.

Sobey wasn’t the only person aghast at what happened next. Roy Jodrey was a rural grade-school dropout who became the province’s richest man with his Warren Buffet–like investment genius. He was equally outraged to learn that a tight little cabal of shareholders and directors in Toronto and Montreal had struck a deal to sell Dosco to A.V. Roe Canada Ltd.—a company that owed its very existence to CD. Howe’s postwar ambition of developing a high-tech, homegrown aeronautical industry. That aspiration was shared by Sir Roy Dobson, managing director of A.V. Roe—a subsidiary of Hawker Siddeley Aircraft of Britain—and one of the designers of the Lancaster, the finest British bomber of the Second World War. In 1945, Dobson and CD. Howe had struck a sweetheart deal. A.V. Roe (AVRO) Canada—which would later be known as Avro Aircraft Ltd.—was set up in a plant outside of Toronto, “to give Canada,” as Dobson told the press, “a basic industry which, in our opinion, she badly needs. Canada will become the aircraft production centre of the British Empire within ten years.”

Sobey and Jodrey were unimpressed that A.V. Roe was then one of the most glamorous corporations in Canada. They cared not that the company, thanks to a steady diet of government contracts, employed 21,000 and had annual sales of $200 million by 1957. The pair, who were large Dosco shareholders, knew their way around a balance sheet; the takeover offer—a complicated mix of A.V. Roe common shares plus cash that worked out to about $38 per share when Dosco stock was trading at about $29—might have sounded sweet, but it effectively gave the conquerors control of a $300-million industrial empire for $60 million.

I don’t know whether Jack Briers shared their view that absentee management by a company of aircraft manufacturers was no recipe for Dosco’s success. He may even, in his heart of hearts, have worried about losing control to Englishmen—Roe’s majority owner, the British-based Hawker Siddeley Group, started by Sir Thomas Sopwith of Sopwith Camel fame—with no affinity for the coal towns and workingmen of Nova Scotia. He certainly didn’t have the means to do what the notoriously parsimonious Jodrey did next: launch an expensive, all-out propaganda war in the hope of scuttling the deal. When that failed, Jodrey tried to line up enough shareholders to force Dosco to call a special meeting, but fell short. On October 9, 1957, Roe announced that it owned 77 percent of Dosco’s 3.1 million shares. Three weeks later, at a special meeting, A.V. Roe exercised its right as majority shareholder and bounced Jodrey from the Dosco board.

His replacement was Dobson, now chairman of A.V. Roe Canada. And, Lord, he had big dreams. What he dreamed of was a fighter plane that could fly higher and faster than any in the sky, a jet that would catapult Canada to the forefront of the aviation world. The prototype for the Avro Arrow could do all of this. The precise reason John Diefenbaker killed the Arrow—spiralling costs? Political chicanery? Cold war intrigue? All of the above?—has spawned countless books, movies and conspiracy theories. For our purposes the important thing is that A.V. Roe had mortgaged its future on the project. When the Arrow was cancelled, the company immediately laid off 14,000 employees.

For Dosco, it was a crippling blow. A.V. Roe had promised to use its immense clout—along with its Ontario mills and factories—to help Nova Scotia steel and coal further penetrate the market in Upper Canada. “The two companies together would have been a major force,” explains Arnie Patterson, Dosco’s public relations
director in those days. “After the takeover battle, the Roe people, including the belted English lords from Hawker Siddeley, predicted that Roe participation would bring greater prosperity to the many Dosco communities. This never happened. All was lost with the crash of the Arrow.”

Raw-boned and restless, Patterson would go on to make a million bucks in radio and television, run twice unsuccessfully for Parliament and do a stint as Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary. When he joined Dosco he was on the short side of thirty, a strapping ex–city hall reporter for the Toronto
Telegram
hired to buff up the company’s image. The job started ominously; within months of signing on he was in Springhill, Dosco’s man on the spot during the Bump of ’58, which essentially marked the end of coal mining in Cumberland County. “I spent the next six years feeling like the purser on the
Titanic”
he recalls. “There was always trouble on some front or other.”

In fact, when the Arrow program was cancelled, Roe had to be supported by Dosco, itself ailing. Dosco lost $3 million in 1959 and $1.2 million the next year. Its steel arm was running near capacity and in the black and its shipyards were just about breaking even. Dominion Coal was the problem. From 1952 to 1955 its coal operation lost anywhere from $750,000 to $4 million. In a submission to the 1959 Royal Commission on Coal, Dosco laid out its view of the predicament:

“Action” meant closing mines: Florence, Dominion No. 4, Caledonia (by then the oldest operating colliery on the continent), No. 16 in New Waterford. I could try to describe the sorrow—the despairing meetings in the union halls, the inflamed rhetoric from the pulpit, the haunted gaze of the wives and children who understood that, as much as they had suffered, more and greater agony must now follow—but any words would be sorely inadequate. No mine lives forever, they more than anyone understood. The sheer size of the seams, along with the unceasing subsidies, had made them forget this hard truth.

These weren’t nomads who packed their bags every few years when a deposit was mined out. Generations had made their careers in the same pit, creating what Ivan Rand, who headed the 1960 Royal Commission on Coal, called an “assumed state of permanence.” It’s hard to say at precisely what point the delusion was shattered, but No. 16 was the eleventh coal mine to shut in industrial Cape Breton since the end of the war. The colliery labour force barely topped a hundred in the Inverness area on the western side of the island. The Springhill mines were all but silent. The Pictou County coalfield, Canada’s most extensively exploited field, was nearly tapped out.

Jack Briers got out, pension intact, before Florence closed, leaving three mines operating in Sydney Mines. The town’s population
was stagnant—or at least, so it seemed to Joan and Russ when they came to visit from Sydney and brought their three-year-old son, a boy of uncommon poise, beauty and intelligence. Somewhere there’s a picture of me taken around that time. I’m being lifted in the air by Clarie Demont, who seems googly-eyed with delight at having a grandson. (Five more and a single granddaughter would follow.) The photo can’t have been taken much before the day he emerged from the basement on York Street, after tending to the coal stoker, complaining of chest pains. A truly unexpected way for a man who once could outrun a stallion to go. But it was 1959. The old certainties were gone. Everything, everywhere, seemed to be shifting. Things just kept moving on.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

O
ne afternoon, years before starting to write this book, I sat on the hood of a rental car parked over the northern end of the Sydney coalfield and let my thoughts wander. It’s a holy place; the entire history of coal mining in Cape Breton lies buried underneath, in the tunnels and shafts where the GMA sunk the first shaft in the area in the early 1800s, in the men who died there, in the names of the companies that pushed farther out, beneath the massive weight of the sea floor, following the seams toward Newfoundland. It would be months before the last whistle blew in 2001 and the Prince mine, which extended eight kilometres from where I sat out under the ocean, closed. But this story was sputtering to its melancholy climax. And so, on an Indian summer day, in the parking lot outside the final coal mine operating in the province, I sipped rotgut coffee and waited for the last of Cape Breton’s fabled colliers to emerge into the sunlight.

I knew the impending event was a big deal, though I didn’t know much, beyond the basics, about coal mining at that point.

I had no idea, for instance, that Cape Breton was Cape Breton still—its economy stagnant, its population dwindling—after the failure of the Avro Arrow. Or that by 1962 Avro Canada had disappeared, its remaining assets taken over by Hawker Siddeley Canada. By then any optimism about Dosco’s future had dimmed to a single ember barely burning. When Roe took over in 1957, the flagship Sydney steel plant employed more than 5,000 and was bound for a record-setting production year. By 1960 the owner had stopped pouring money into infrastructure and begun selling off departments that required new investment. Soon the plant’s workforce had shrunk to 2,300. Two years later Dosco announced that it wanted to build a new rod and bar mill, which could use Sydney steel, in Contrecoeur, Quebec. Nova Scotia premier Robert Stanfield begged the company to build in Sydney, even offering to pony up $22 million, so Dosco would see the light. The mill went to Quebec anyway.

Dosco made no secret of its desire to unload its money-losing collieries. In 1960, twenty-seven coal mines were operating across the province. Five years later only three collieries—the McBean mine (374 men), the Drummond Coal Company (108 on the payroll) and the Greenwood colliery (104 employees)—were working in Pictou County. In Cape Breton, Dosco announced it was closing New Waterford’s No. 18 mine and estimated that the other five operating on the island had fifteen more years of life left apiece. A pair of British experts hired by Dosco concluded that a $25-million infusion of capital to rehabilitate the existing mines and to open a new state-of-the-art colliery at nearby Lingan would be needed to make its coal arm viable. The catch: Hawker Siddeley didn’t have the dough. Without $25 million in public money, 6,500 Nova Scotia miners would be jobless.

The threat had a familiar ring. Atlantic Canada spent most of the twentieth century listening to some industrialist threaten to
pull out of the region unless the government gravy train kept running. Ottawa again found the money. Dosco pulled out anyway, leaving the federal government in a quandary: let the industry collapse, find a private buyer or nationalize the mines? The government opted to save colliery jobs in the short run but took its lead from the latest in an endless string of royal commissions examining the Cape Breton coal industry. “Future planning should be based on the assumption that the Sydney mines will not operate beyond 1981,” wrote J.R. MacDonald, who suggested the creation of a federal Crown corporation empowered to handle the phase-out of the coal mines and to find ways to diversify the island’s economy. Thus, armed with $50 million in new capital and a mandate to gradually close the mines only after it had created alternative employment to stop the colliery communities from fading into ghost towns, the Cape Breton Development Corporation (Devco) was born.

One day around four p.m. I drove aimlessly back and forth along the town of Dominion’s waterfront until the right street magically appeared. In front of a new townhouse, a compact man sat in a lawn chair reading a newspaper. Wearing a tank top and shorts and the deep tan of a Florida pensioner, he looked to be perhaps in his early sixties. Since it was about ten degrees Celsius at the time—parts of Dominion harbour were still encrusted in ice—I stopped the car, rolled down the window and yelled, “You must be Bull Marsh.” The man who may have been the toughest president ever to lead District 26 of the UMWA turned out to be eighty-six and bore long scars on both legs from knee replacements to prove it. William Marsh, who has a good-humoured face and eyes that dance like water, was as interested in picking my brain as I was his. Eventually
we got around to the arrival of Devco and whether it was a welcome thing. “Private enterprise ruined the Cape Breton coal industry,” he said. “Government couldn’t do any worse.”

The feds had a rough start. A few months later came “Black Friday,” the day Hawker Siddeley announced it was shutting down the Sydney steel plant, the island’s other economic pillar. Some 35,000 people marched through the city’s streets in despair. Only the creation of another Crown corporation—the Sydney Steel Corporation (Sysco), operated by the Nova Scotia government—kept the plant operating. To run it the province chose Robert Burns Cameron, a “tough, shirtsleeved, blunt, profane” former war hero and Pictou County steel man who, according to the
New York Times,
liked “fat cigars, good whiskey, a cool office and vice-presidents who rip off quick answers to questions hurled at them like medicine balls.” To call Cameron one of the great characters in Nova Scotia business history would be a profound understatement. R.B. wore paper clips as cufflinks, and once cut off a tedious after-dinner speaker at the Bank of Nova Scotia annual meeting—Cameron was one of the bank’s largest shareholders, and a board member—by flicking off the banquet room lights mid-speech. He got results, though. Dosco said the steel mill was losing $1 million a month when it got out of the business. By 1968 Sysco was making $2.5 million a year.

No such miracle occurred at Devco. The third year in business, 1,340 of its employees snapped up early retirement packages. Its industrial development arm tried building wharves and airstrips, developing an industrial park and attracting light manufacturing, all with questionable success. Meantime, the coal business was in an uproar everywhere. In the United States, production was climbing back to postwar highs—thanks, in part, to increased foreign demand for metallurgical-quality coal for steelmaking—but some mines were
cutting back and others closing altogether. The problem: a growing uproar over air pollution, which increased demand for low-sulphur coal and boded badly for collieries yielding high-sulphur output like the ones from Nova Scotia. Another shift was under way south of the border: a movement away from deep underground mines toward safer, more productive strip mines, particularly outside of the Appalachian coal belt. The end result was that as the 1970s dawned, about 135,000 people worked in the American coal industry, compared to the half a million miners who had toiled there thirty years earlier.

By then, 4,500 people were employed in Nova Scotia’s mines—less than half the workforce during the height of the Second World War. That was still way too many. So Devco pushed ahead with its strategy: shutting the inefficient older mines while softening the economic blow by opening modern new ones that required far less manpower. I don’t have to search far for first-hand witnesses to what ensued. Sitting in a chair on his deck, Aloysius “Wishie” Donovan was chewing a toothpick and holding a steaming mug of coffee the day I went to see him. Back in 1967, though, he was just twenty-three, a tough, capable guy with only a grade nine education but two tours of peacekeeping duty in Cyprus under his belt. The son and grandson of Glace Bay colliers, Donovan grew up thinking, I’m getting the Jesus out of here. Yet when he left the army he decided to head back to Glace Bay, where he found part-time work as a postman.

Nobody encouraged him to go underground. When a job in the mines opened up, the recruitment officer told Donovan that coal mining’s long-term prospects “didn’t look good” and that he was probably better off going back into the army; his father implored him to stay out of the pit. One of his brothers even begged Donovan to join him in Grande Cache, Alberta, a new town being built to
develop the area’s coal reserves. He stayed put and started working as a mucker—loading the coal left behind by the cutting machines—in No. 20. Donovan, who spent thirty-two years with steadily increasing responsibilities underground, had a future. No. 20—too old, unsafe and inefficient—did not. In 1971 the mine breathed its last. So did the No. 2 across town in Glace Bay, and the No. 12 in New Waterford.

“We understood the mines were going to be shut down,” recalled Abbie Michalik, who worked in Glace Bay’s No. 4 pit until it closed in 1961 and he headed for No. 2 just in time for it also to shut down. “But it was hard to take. It used to be that a strong back and weak mind was all you needed. But if you had no education where were you going to go? How were you going to put food on the table, clothes on your back and get your kids an education?”

We talked outside, on a point of land a short walk from the company house where he grew up in grinding coal-town poverty with his seven siblings, mother and Polish-born dad, who lost an arm while underground. If such an upbringing tends to leave scars, Michalik, a fit seventy-year-old in a tracksuit, wears them easily. As we talked, we picked our way amongst pieces of discarded mine equipment—huge diesel generators, stupendous conveyor belts, monstrous hydraulic roof supports that had to be broken down above ground, taken into the pit and reassembled—scattered in low grass like the remnants of dismembered prehistoric beasts.

By the time we reached the shoreline, he was telling me about the amazing thing that happened next: how in 1973 the sheiks called an embargo on oil shipments against any countries supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Then, as oil prices surged higher, how coal emerged throughout the industrialized world as one way to reduce dependence on Middle East petroleum. In Canada, output from the collieries of Alberta and Saskatchewan
climbed by nearly one-third during the three-year embargo. Across the country, Nova Scotia Power, the provincial electrical utility, began turning to coal-fired power plants. Devco management stopped thinking about winding up coal operations and starting searching for ways to expand.

Over in No. 26, Sheldon MacNeil sure felt as though a new day had broken. Another miner’s son, he had been working in the X-ray department at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Glace Bay when he got the call to go underground. His father had gone into the mine at age nine at a time when trapper boys earned 50¢ for each ten-hour shift. In 1970 Sheldon started out as an electrical apprentice with medical benefits, paid vacation and a real pension plan. The men were even on the clock during the ninety minutes it took to travel the five and a half miles out under the ocean to the mine face, a right his father, Daniel T., never once enjoyed. “All I can say,” MacNeil tells me, in a Glace Bay Tim Hortons, “is thank God for Devco.”

The bottom line still glowed red. The losses mounted. The unfunded pension liabilities soared. Anyone who looked at things soberly, in the light of day, could see that political will—that most ephemeral of things—was all that kept Devco’s coal mines in business. But hope is a truly irrational thing. Suddenly, a person who really wanted to could discern a future in the Cape Breton mines.

What I’m trying to say is that I had a cousin.

At Glace Bay High School, they called Kenneth Demont “Mama”—an odd nickname for a guy with a torso like the Minotaur’s, who liked rattling the cerebellum of any hockey opponent stupid enough to come skating over the blue line with his head down. The nickname’s origin is theatrical. One day a high school teacher decided
to mount an in-class performance
of I Remember Mama.
When it came time to cast the title role, someone with an eye for the absurd blurted out, “Ken Demont,” and it stuck. Irony, you see, has never been unknown in this part of the world, where old-country Gaelic still hovered in the air as the first pictures arrived from Mars. By 1975, when he was in grade ten, the wilderness was receding across Nova Scotia, the forested hills sliced by roadways, the nocturnal darkness pierced by pinpricks of light. Suburbs had arrived; disco was here. Grown men, wild on Harvey Wallbangers, exhorted their befuddled children to “sock it to me baby, let it all hang out.” Housewives in miniskirts bearing vertigo-inducing geometrical designs pored over Carlos Castaneda by the light of a lava lamp. Middle-class boys stripped off their polyester shirts and streaked naked and screaming through the snowy east coast streets.

In Nova Scotia everything looked possible if you happened to be a certain age in the last quarter of the twentieth century. A university education seemed mandatory as my family continued its upward climb. Ken’s parents—my Uncle Earl and Aunt Rea, whose father went into No. 11 in Glace Bay at an early age—were both teachers. His brother Bruce was bearing down with single-minded determination on med school. After high school, Ken Demont headed for the shining alma mater of his father and uncles, Acadia University. He started out studying business, then switched to sociology. In 1981, two credits shy of his degree, he got a call from a buddy back in Glace Bay; after years of downsizing, Devco was hiring again. “The money was good,” Ken, a little broader and greyer, told me twenty-seven years later. “I wasn’t really a traveller and didn’t want to go all across the country for work.” Instead, he became a gandy dancer, looking after the maintenance on a Glace Bay section of Devco railroad that ran between the No. 26 pit and the coal-wash plant.