To the Honourable George Heyman

Hi, I’m a student from Riverside secondary school. Recently I have done some research on the Squamish nexen plant that closed down just over twenty years ago.  I found the information fascinating and a bit disturbing. The goal of the Squamish nexen plant was to extract mercury from the land and waterfronts do make pulp for the paper industry. In doing so, they tore up and took over 5 kilometers of lagoons and a lot of shorelines to extract mercury. They used mercury to manufacture mercury-cell technology that helped make caustic acid and chlorine with was then used to make pulp for the paper industry. The mercury quickly contaminated the area, and it became a hazardous environment for life. I am glad that it is currently shut down, but I do wonder why it was running for so long? And if you were thinking of bringing it back? I do hope that you do not. Wishing you success in your cause.

-N.M

Ask

Finding good guiding questions for this topic was hard because the Squamish nexen plant was up and running twenty years ago so I could not compare anything to the future. I was able to come up with, What would the canada look like if we still used the Squamish nexen plant, but besides that it was hard to think of anything else. So I mainly stuck to facts. one of my questions was what is the Squamish nexen plant, because I had never even heard of it.

Acquire

Gathering information was a bit of a struggle. Because the Squamish nexen plant was long ago, and quite specific I was very limited to my options. I was able to use google, and one article from gale engage. I got pictures from pexels and flickr which turned out great. I tried using topic finder and world book advanced but neither of the search platforms new what it was. Luckily the sites that I did find either gave me a direct answer to my question or a bunch of leading hints to an answer, so I was able to find enough Information to answer my question

Analyze

analyzing my work went pretty smoothly. I cited all my sources that gave me the green light that my information was accurate. And all the texts that I read mostly summarized the same idea of the Squamish nexen plant. What its goal was, why it was dangerous, how it affected the environment and so forth. When words in the text did not make sense, I had to define them, and when I did the text made a lot more sense and I was able to compare one text to another to see if they were similar. using these strategies helped me gain enough information for my questions.

access

I think overall the project could have gone better. I found myself frustrated at some points for even though I found enough information to answer my questions I would have loved to have found more.i think I had this problem because the topic I chose was very specific. it was about a system in Squamish that operated over twenty years ago with one goal. to create pulp. Another reason why I think this was a hard topic to research is that it was a private cite and it was so long ago. That limited me very few pictures and sources. I found myself at some points wondering if I would have information or images. So I think what would help me next time is to choose a subject more focused on the present so I can be more supplied with my sources.