End of the Line
From
the Magazine
Reporter: Leslie MacKinnon
Producer: Carmen Merrifield
January 17, 2000
Our story is about Cape Breton and
its people's long dependence on the coal industry. In a region already
devastated by high unemployment, the impending closure of another Devco mine
is all the more frightening. The miners ended their wild- cat strike at the
Prince mine in Point Aconi outside Sydney on Friday, January 14. After six
days underground, a handful of men emerged and were given hero's welcome by
family and friends.
They believe it took the illegal seizure of the mine to grab the
government's attention. It was a crisis that extracted a promise from Ottawa
for better negotiations for more work or pensions. They are back at work
while the work lasts. But the issues that led them to walk out are far from
resolved.
It's a Cape Breton ritual. An angry protest that says their rights
will not be denied and they will not be left at the end of the line. Outside
of Cape Breton a lot of Canadian just don't get it. They think: Why should
people like the coal miners, have the absolute right to work until
retirement or to be promised jobs in their community so that they never have
to leave?
Van Budden is 46 and he has worked in the mines for 22 years. Just
because he's not yet 50, he'll receive no pension at all. His wife, Edna,
campaigned all last year for a better exit plan for miners. She even met
with the prime minister.
They're completely skeptical about Ottawa's pledge on Friday. "I don't
see the government coming back with anything extra," Van Budden says. "You
know if they do, it'll be very minor. If they were going to come back with
something half decent, they would have done it by now. Jesus, it's a year
since this first offer last January 28 [1999].
"I mean why would you torture people for a whole year before you give
them something good? If you want to torture them, keep torturing them," he
asks. "That's what they're doing."
"We suffered the stress for that whole year the Devco families," Edna
says. "It took them 20 hours just to agree to sit down and negotiate. That's
a long time just to agree to do that much. What are they going to do? Is
this another ploy for time? Where are we going to end up and what's going to
come out of this?"
The Budden's didn't always have this sense of despair. Even how they
met when Edna was a waitress, was full of the spirit of optimism.
"My heart would beat you know, just pound," she remembers. "And I'd
say to the girls 'don't wait on him, you know. Let me, let me wait on him.'
He liked chocolate milkshakes so, of course, I made him the best chocolate
milkshake you could possibly make. I said to him I said 'Oh thank goodness
you know, I'm getting off at 12 o'clock.'
"He said 'Oh, I'll drive you home.'
"I said 'Oh no, no, no. I'll get a taxi.'
"'No, no, no. I'll drive you home.'
"And I said 'Well, if you'll take me right home.' So anyway he did and he
asked me out for a date and that was it."
Their wedding seemed the beginning of prosperity.
Both Edna's grandfathers were miners. One of them went underground
when he was 10. In 1904, her great-great- grandfather died in a mine. She
lost another relative in 1979 -- the best man at their wedding.
"He was killed in the explosion in '79," Edna says. "He wasn't killed
outright. He was one that went to Halifax to the burn unit. That's something
I'll never forget. Going there and looking in the burn unit and not knowing
him. You know, Van himself was smashed up in the pit. Had his leg smashed.
All my uncles worked in the mines. When our family gathers it's pit talk.
Whenever the men get together we say 'Oh there you go again, there they go
again.' Pit talk you know. So it's a part of your history."
That history was radically altered when the federal government took
over the mines over in 1967 with the express idea of phasing them out by
1981. That was the mission of the newly named Cape Breton Development
Corporation or Devco.
It seemed the heyday of coal was over. Then the oil crisis of the '70s
happened and suddenly coal was king again. The mines expanded and many new
young men were hired, most now in their 40s.
One of them was then 25-year-old Steve Drake, now President of the
local United Mine Worker's Union. He too has a tragic family history of
mining. His grandfather lost both legs in a mine explosion.
"I remember him going around the neighbourhood he had this small
little cart that he used to wheel himself around in," Drake says. "He was a
very determined person. He didn't let anything stop him. He built half the
houses in our neighbourhood with no legs. You know, the guys would take him
up. His friends would take him up on the roof and he'd do roofing and
shingling and stuff like that and didn't let anything stop him."
Even so, Steve took a job in the mines like his father and grandfather
before him.
"We had it made as far as we were concerned," he recalls. "Devco was a
good thing for everybody and it was going to last your lifetime. You could
never run out of coal and the 33 year contract with Nova Scotia Power was
going to keep every one of us working for at least 30 years 'til we'd be
eligible for retirement. That's what we all thought back in the 1970s when
we got hired."
The oil crisis ended and the demand for coal declined. Devco was
plagued by mismanagement, labour turmoil and high rates of worker
absenteeism. Over the years, union and community lobbying and politicians
hungry for Cape Breton votes kept the mines open at tremendous public
expense.
Ernest Cadegan grew up with nine brothers and sisters in Glace Bay.
He's become embittered by the politics of jobs, unions and government vote
buying in Cape Breton.
"We have spent countless billions of dollars so that these people
could have a job. Sounds like welfare to me," he says.
In the mid-'80s he attempted to modernize his family fish business,
now sold, with the goal of eventually providing better jobs for some of the
people of Cape Breton. He says the workers fought him every step of the way.
"I think they have a common enemy that cements them which is
management," Cadegan says. " They have an extremely anti- management kind of
attitude there. If you look at the Devco scenario, I mean really, it's been
30 years of labour-management strife. Maybe that's why a year ago, when the
federal government decided to get out, they just sort of said you know,
there's no point talking to them cause we know we're going to get. So here
it is. We'll impose this because who needs the grief of going down and
taking all the kind of verbal abuse that you're going to get and trying to
have any kind of a sensible conversation with them?"
And that's what happened last year.
In January '99, the government announced it was selling the mine,
setting off a year of conflict over what the government was offering the
displaced miners and what the miners think they are entitled to. It all
erupted with miners holding a mine hostage and threatening to blockade power
plants.
"I think in Cape Breton first of all, there's a kind of victim
attitude of 'nobody loves them and everybody's against them,'" Cadegan says.
"You know, you did something for me last year but you're not doing anything
for me today.
"And I can't help myself. So I think it's a little bit of that and a
little bit part of an absolute rejection that there's life beyond the Canso
Causeway."
John Hugh Edwards works for St. Francis Xavier University's extension
department. He grew up in Cape Breton and shared a bedroom with a great
uncle who'd been badly injured as a boy miner.
"I think some of us in the chattering classes, certainly the policy
makers in Ottawa and Halifax are not fit to carry their lunch cans," he
says.
"The miners in Cape Breton produce a real product that has found ready
markets over the years. After 300 years of mining, there is very little Cape
Breton coal on the ground that hasn't been sold. Right? We sold every lump
that we produced. It is a ready market that was part of a policy of the
federal and provincial governments here. It's not as if we were digging
holes and then filling them up in some sort of welfare program. There was a
real product. We're making something real."
Everyone in the community knows the Devco pull-out was inevitable and
is irrevocable. The question now is what happens to the mostly middle aged
miners who have homes, extended families and deep roots and, they think,
nowhere else to go? What do they deserve from a federal government that
encouraged them to become coal miners?
"When I go over to the mine site and see these miners coming up and I
see how worn they are, their bodies and I know how harsh the conditions
are," Edna says. "How many are suffering from injuries and arthritis and
lung problems. I see the wear and tear on their faces, it's heartbreaking."
"Twenty-two years is a long time to put in with a crown corporation
and then just be told to go down the road and take your severance and go,
you know. That doesn't make you feel very good," Van says.
What the miners want is enough work to carry them to a pensionable
age. Either in a new privatized mine or in environmental clean up work.
Steve Drake says miners, more than most, are owed this because of the
service they performed for the country.
"In the war, the government came to the coal miners in Cape Breton and
said you guys can't go to war. You can't sign up. You have to produce coal
because we need your coal to fuel the ships to help win the war.
"During the oil crisis in the 1970s, they came to the coal miners in
Cape Breton again and said under this legislation, the Devco Act, you guys
are going to be working for a long time because we need to get off this
foreign oil. It's costing Canadians right across the country billions of
dollars. These guys did a good job. They did what they were supposed to do.
It wasn't work-fare. It wasn't welfare. We kept the lights burning in Nova
Scotia for the last 100 years."
Now they feel they have no future. Even if he does win a pension, Van
Budden would receive only $22,000. At 46, he needs something else.
"Young people can get a job around here," he says. "What's a guy 46
and 48 and 50 years old going to do? Get a job a Tim Horton's? Nothing wrong
with Tim Horton's but it's kind of late in the game for me to start at Tim
Horton's."
"We have to move on, yes, but you don't do it at the expense of
families and men that have worked hard and put a lot of years service into a
crown owned corporation," Edna says. "I say we have to look after them. They
should be first priority and then move on and build Cape Breton, build it to
be a better place. And it seems like we're at the end of the line here."
"This is not only monetary," Edwards says. "This is psychological. I
do a good job. I do my job well and I deserve compensation for doing that
job. I still believe that. I still believe in a country as rich as Canada
that that should happen. A person who wants to work in this society has a
right to that work. Many people would disagree. Many people would say that's
an old idea, and its time is past. And I say no. In this country we are our
brothers' keepers."
The crisis is now over and the men are back at the one working mine
that's left. Knowing that these are probably the last days of Cape Breton
coal. It is difficult to imagine Cape Breton without coal but it is likely
that a hard, bloody and proud piece of the island's history is about to come
to an end.