After decades of protests, environmental violations, government fines, and civil claims, it’s the end of an era.
Crofton’s embattled pulp mill is shutting down after 68 years, leaving 350 workers without jobs and destabilizing dozens of businesses in the region.
“The Crofton mill has been challenged for some time now,” Domtar’s paper and packaging president Steve Henry admitted in December 2025. “Unfortunately, continued poor pricing for pulp and lack of access to affordable fibre in BC necessitates the closure.”
The Crofton mill was once part of a recycling system of sorts; it was designed to turn waste from sawmills into energy, pulp, and paper. But a wave of sawmill closures has decimated BC’s pulp and paper industry. In 2003 the Province scrapped its appurtenancy rules that required timber to be milled where it’s harvested. and logging tenures (tree farm licenses) are no longer mandated to maintain or supply sawmills. The Crofton mill was so starved for feedstock it was reportedly importing wood chips from the US.
But as one chapter ends, another one begins. With the loss of the mill comes the possibility that the estuary may eventually heal from decades of abuse.
In the beginning
We can only imagine what the Chemainus River estuary was like in our grandparents’ time. The river delta on Vancouver Island’s east coast was an incredibly rich place. Where it reaches the ocean, the blue-green river slows and meanders across wide shoals into a small bay, protected by a string of small islands just offshore. The Halalt First Nation village of Xulelthw was surrounded by shallows teeming with crabs, oysters, clams, mussels, ducks, and eelgrass. These in turn supported salmon, bears, herons, eagles, and people across the region.
In 1957, BC Forest Products built its pulp and paper mill on the edge of the estuary. Village sites and ancestral burial grounds were paved over with no regard for the people who once lived there.
“The estuary now is dead.”
For decades, the mill dumped toxic effluent that contaminated the river mouth, decimating fish and wildlife. Shellfish harvesting closed in 1973, and fishing is permanently banned in many parts of Stuart Channel. The seabed is tainted with some of the most dangerous and persistent chemicals on earth: dioxins, furans, and heavy metals – compounds that accumulate over time instead of breaking down.
Dioxins in particular are byproducts of using chlorine to bleach paper, and they are linked to cancer, reproductive problems, neurological damage, impaired immune systems, and hormonal changes.
BCFP and the mill’s subsequent owners – Fletcher Challenge, Catalyst, Paper Excellence, and now Domtar – were well aware of the problems; over the years, they had plenty of warnings.
Residents revolt
Watershed Sentinel has been reporting on those battles since 1990. Blowing the whistle on pollution from kraft pulp mills was the magazine’s original mission. The collapse of a great blue heron colony was the catalyst.
The heron rookery on Shoal Island next to the Crofton mill was large and well-established, but it was in trouble. “Biologists were quite suspicious about what was happening with the heron population,” recalls Delores Broten, founder and executive editor of Watershed Sentinel. “That year [1987], 59 active heron nests at Crofton did not produce a single live chick, which was shocking.”
Nearby ospreys, bald eagles, and cormorants were also failing to reproduce, and scientists suspected mill pollution was the cause. Their fears were confirmed in 1991 when the BC Aquaculture Research and Development Council reported the herons had dangerously high levels of dioxin, which damaged their eggs and prevented their chicks from developing.
The herons had dangerously high levels of dioxin, which damaged their eggs
The loss of the iconic heron nursery, coupled with closures of once-abundant fishing and shellfish harvesting in the area, provoked residents to demand change.
Their demands culminated in new federal regulations about the use of chlorine in pulp and paper mills. By 1994, most mills – including Crofton – were required to switch from elemental chlorine to chlorine dioxide in order to reduce dioxin contamination. This was a major grassroots victory – and not just for Crofton.
Greenpeace was lobbying in dozens of countries to protect ecosystems by eliminating all forms of chlorine from pulp and paper production. Local groups like Reach for Unbleached and MillWatch took up the campaign in BC, and their legacy lives on. (To this day, Watershed Sentinel and other environmental journals are printed on chlorine-free paper.)
But the victory was bittersweet. Dioxin remains in the silt and sediment at the bottom of the estuary, and no one is cleaning it up. The mill’s dioxin pollution was not limited to ocean effluent; it was also in the air, along with toxic byproducts of burning hog fuel for energy to run the mill. A plume of pollution from the mill’s smokestack affected thousands of nearby residents.
Rather than switching to cleaner technology, however, the mill’s owners at the time, Norske Canada, proposed burning tires and coal along with hog fuel, which predictably sparked more public anger from those living downwind.
Among those in the path of the plume were rock legend Randy Bachman and his family on Salt Spring Island. Recognizing that locals needed to level up against the multinational corporate giant, Bachman recruited fellow rock stars Neil Young and the Barenaked Ladies to perform a benefit concert for the Crofton Airshed Citizens Group. The 2004 concert raised $250,000, enough to cover reams of independent research and environmental tests.
Airborne emissions experts used computer modelling to map wind currents and identify areas where higher concentrations of pollutants were settling. Alarmed by the results, locals pressed their demands for real-time dioxin monitoring at the mill’s smokestack. Broten recounts how a German company offered to donate a state-of-the-art monitoring device. She says the mill owners approved the system, as did BC environment representatives, but the federal Ministry of the Environment official chose to veto the project, leaving downwind residents frustrated.
Death and lawsuits
In its final decade, the Crofton mill was rocked by tragic accidents, environmental violations, and lawsuits. In 2016 and 2017, two unrelated industrial accidents killed two workers. After investigating, WorkSafeBC ordered Catalyst to pay $75,000 for each death.
Airborne sulphur dioxide emissions were detected in 2017 and 2018, and more fines were laid. 2021 brought a series of illegal wastewater discharges, including one incident that spilled up to a million litres of highly-toxic effluent found to be fatal to trout. The mill’s owner – now Paper Excellence, which acquired Catalyst in 2019 – was forced to pay $25,000 after the Province found it failed to properly inspect and maintain its equipment.
The highly-toxic effluent was found to be fatal to trout
These are only the major infractions. But they are dwarfed by the shadow of the Halalt First Nation’s $2 billion lawsuit against Catalyst in 2016. Halalt is no longer pursuing the civil suit, but the underlying claims have yet to be addressed.
The claim held the Crofton Mill and its owners directly responsible for polluting the Chemainus River and damaging fish spawning habitat with erosion, waste, and sediment.
Halalt band member Herman Thomas said that the mill’s waste discharged resulted in toxic “sludge” that built up between between the foreshore and Willy’s Island, cutting off access. “The estuary was rich,” Thomas told the Cowichan Valley Citizen in 2016. “The estuary now is dead. I believe that the pulp [mill] was the cause of that because of the sludge.”
“For our nation, I think it’s time for the feds and province to be accountable for the last 60 years of degradation to our [territory] and our loss of our salmon stocks over the last 20, 30 years,” said Halalt Chief James Thomas.
Prospective purchasers will certainly be wary of the mill’s toxic baggage
More recently, in December 2024, the Halalt First Nation launched a class action lawsuit to protect the Chemainus River, its reserve, and the estuary. The lawsuit names forestry companies Mosaic, Island Timberlands, and TimberWest along with three levels of government, alleging they “conducted their forestry operations in a careless and reckless manner.” It says overlogging and poor debris management is causing riverbank erosion and uncontrolled runoff.
The ongoing mismanagement has caused gravel, silt, and debris to accumulate in the lower river, damaging salmon spawning habitat and contributing to floods that destroyed homes on the Halalt reserve and elsewhere, residents say.
New initiatives
It’s possible that Domtar will try to sell the mill, or that it could become a worker-invested partnership like the Harmac mill, but prospective purchasers will certainly be wary of the toxic baggage and legal liabilities it carries.
Nevertheless, a new chapter is waiting to begin.
The Halalt First Nation has established the Chemainus Watershed Initiative, which is now in its second phase of working with industry, citizens, and governments to restore the river and the estuary after 150 years of logging and industrial development.
