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It’s amazing how often serendipity plays a role in uncovering a great story. One morning in May of 2000, I’d come back from the cafeteria with a coffee in my hand and I was standing restlessly at my desk at the magazine, where I was a staff writer. I’d finished my work on a previous assignment and it was time to look for the next subject. In the few minutes I’d been gone, a pile of office flotsam had landed on my desk.
It was mostly a collection of press releases and industry publications I’d never bothered to look at. At another time, I might simply have moved the pile on to someone else’s desk. But this time I shuffled through it. And about 10 centimetres down, my eyes landed on an edition of The Charter, a thin, weekly newspaper from the little town of Placentia, Newfoundland.
Who knows what it was doing there; maybe the mailroom had misdirected it. With the mildest sense of curiosity, I began to turn the pages of cheap newsprint, and within a minute, I saw that something was going on in Placentia. Furious letters to the editor, stories quoting tirades by Placentia’s mayor against other town leaders. The anger seemed to have something to do with fallout from the huge nickel discovery six years earlier at Voisey’s Bay, Labrador, some 1,100 kilometres to the north.
I dug around, made a few calls, and soon discovered that in 1996, Placentia, a town of about 5,000 with 75 per cent unemployment, had won the bid for a life-saving refinery to process the Voisey’s Bay ore. It had promised 600 immediate jobs and many more after that. But the project had gotten caught up in a standoff between the nickel producer, Inco Ltd., and the government of Newfoundland. The refinery had never come and, in its absence, little Placentia was tearing itself apart.
I got approval to fly there as quickly as possible, and spent a week immersed in the drama, interviewing as many locals as I could. Most of them were surprised to be talking to a journalist from Toronto, but they wanted their story told. And what a story it was. It had villains and tragic heroes, earnest hope and gut-wrenching calamity. Having watched their community die slowly for years, a small group of civic leaders had dared to dream.
The nickel from Voisey’s Bay would have to be processed somewhere–why not Placentia? It had an old abandoned U.S. Army base that would be perfect for a refinery. For a town edging toward oblivion, it would be like winning the jobs lottery.
Led by Placentia’s mayor, John Maher, the group did everything it could to win the bid, even teaming up with the rival community of Long Harbour, about a half-hour’s drive away. They did everything right. And in November of 1996, they won.
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