Closing E.B. Eddy

A Benjaminian Excise of the Tragedy of the E.B. Eddy Plant

On July 31, 2007, the century old dream of an industrial heartland in the Ottawa Valley was dealt a final blow. Domtar Corp. the owner of the historic E.B. Eddy plant announced the closure of the last remaining plant on Chaudière Island. An epoch had finally come to an end. The slow and steady decline had met its terminal point. Forest would no longer be transformed into a cashable commodity by the practiced hands of unionized labour.

For over a century, over a large geographic area stretching far into the Upper Ottawa Valley, lumber had been transported to Chaudière Island to be transfigured from one form to another. Squared logs, timbers, pulp, had all been transformed and metabolized by the labour of the workers and by the energy of the Falls into a commodity to be bought and sold on international markets. Now, we are told by the Captains of Canadian Industry, Chaudière timber is no longer a saleable commodity. The timber fibres are a relic of the past.

The debris of the messy past will soon be cleared out to form a neat natural image and a new wish image. The new utopia will fit neatly into the clean and crisp image of a green capital city. The Chaudière Falls, like LeBreton Flats, will be cleansed of its past, yet like all epochal shifts, the break will not be clean. The traces of past images will be recycled into the new dream embodied in the physical structures of buildings and in the ephemeral celebrations on its grounds. Ye olde plant will become the festival site for consumption where national culture and global tourism will now, in the place of paper, be manufactured. However, this new national storage of memory will be performed as a class-less memory void of the trials of the workers of the Flats. The memory of the Chaudière Falls is to store a national story of regeneration void of tragedy.

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“To the form of the new means of production which is the beginning is still dominated by the old one (Marx), there correspond in the collective consciousness images in which the new is intermingled with the old. These images are wish images, and in them the collective attempts to transcend as well as to illumine the incompleteness of the social order of production. There also emerges in these wish images a positive striving to set themselves off from the outdated – that means, however, the most recent past. These tendencies turn the image fantasy, that maintains its impulse from the new, back to the ur-past. In the dream in which every epoch sees in images the epoch that follows, the latter appears wedded to the elements of ur-history, that is, of a classless society. Its experiences, which have their storage place in the unconscious of the collective, produce, in their interpretation with the new, the utopia, that has left its trace behind in a thousand configurations of life from permanent buildings to ephemeral fashions.” Walter Benjamin