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Management Side
Port Hawkesbury Paper's Marc Dube dead at age 59

POINT TUPPER, N.S. (From news reports) -- Archie MacLachlan says without Marc Dube, it's unknown whether the Strait region's largest employer would have successfully reopened.

MacLachlan, president of Unifor Local 972, was reflecting on Dube's role in resurrecting the former NewPage Port Hawkesbury mill as Port Hawkesbury Paper after hearing of Dube's death Thursday following a brief battle with cancer. He was 59.

Dube was part of the effort that saw that Stern Partners-led Pacific West Commercial Corp. purchase the former NewPage mill in Point Tupper in 2012 and he then stayed on to serve as its development manager.

In addition to a year-long sales process, during which the mill was shuttered and most employees were out of work, Dube was also involved with discussions that resulted in a $124.5-million provincial aid package over 10 years under the former NDP government to restart the mill.

MacLachlan believes the decision to ultimately buy the mill had a lot to do with Dube's input.

"If it wasn't for Marc Dube, I don't know if Ron Stern would own the plant today and if Ron Stern didn't own it, who knows what would have happened," he said.

Former Port Hawkesbury mayor Billy Joe MacLean said replacing Dube will be a significant challenge.

"It was through his guidance in that process that they finally reached a deal," MacLean said. "He never missed a meeting that we had about the future of that mill, dealing with government."

When the mill did restart, only one of the mill's two paper machines went back into production and it now employs about half as many people as it did prior to shutdown. It now produces only supercalendered paper for the magazine and catalogue market.

Admitting that they didn't always see eye-to-eye, MacLachlan said, nonetheless, Dube was "a good guy," and he was saddened to hear of his death.

"Obviously we represented different views, but I always found Marc honest and fair and at the end of your conversation you knew what you had to do," MacLachlan said. "For a fella who was not really from the area, he fit in really well with the East Coast people."

Since coming to work in the Port Hawkesbury area, Dube commuted to Cape Breton from Sault Ste. Marie, ON, where his family lived.

"He spent the last five years of his life basically here, and that couldn't have been easy." MacLachlan said. "He seemed to be able to pull it off."

Out of respect for Dube's desire to maintain his privacy, mill management declined to make a statement regarding his death.

Bob MacEachern, owner of 101.5 The Hawk in Port Hawkesbury, said from the early days Dube understood the importance of the mill to both the local and provincial economies.

"He took his role very seriously, I guess, in two ways -- in ensuring that the startup of the mill went well but also that he established a level of confidence and trust in the employees and I think that was probably a crucial step in ensuring that he had success from the time that they started the mill right up until he left the operation in the spring," MacEachern said.

As part of the effort to build that trust, Dube would speak with anyone on the floor of the mill or in the community about the mill's plans, MacEachern said.

That confidence was something that had disintegrated under previous ownership which ran the Point Tupper papermaker as a "distant entity," MacEachern said. Dube, however, saw it as a core piece of business.

"This was an important acquisition for them and they wanted it to succeed," he said.

As development manager, one of Dube's key roles was in exploring potential new revenue streams and ways to diversify mill operations, which has ranged from everything from making better and fuller use of mill facilities to researching extraction of sugars from fibre to be used in products such as cosmetics or pharmaceuticals.

"He always had something in the cooker that they were testing," MacEachern said.

Dube also became involved in the local chamber of commerce and other community interests, he added.

Port Hawkesbury Paper employs 330 at the mill and supports 400-500 jobs in trucking and harvesting of wood.

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****

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