1 With these words, Tony Tremblay, the narrator and co-director of the documentary film The Last Shift: The Story of a Mill Town, welcomes us to Dalhousie, New Brunswick: the town that the mill built. But what happens when you take the mill out of the mill town? Like so much scholarly and artistic work undertaken in the immediate aftermath of deindustrialization, The Last Shift is a lament for a lost way of life. The filmmakers use a combination of archival and contemporary video, personal photography, music, and thirteen oral history interviews to represent the history of the town. It is a fine example of place-based storytelling. The film ends with “Grey Town,” an original score written and performed by Michael Levesque, one of the mill workers interviewed. The Last Shift is a love letter to Tremblay’s hometown.

2 Throughout the film we hear a great deal about what made Dalhousie home. There was a time when people felt connected, rooted. Boom times and the “mill’s generosity” allowed people to plan for the future. The company provided water, serviced the town site, and built a grand hotel. Leisure time was spent hunting and fishing; youth found summer employment in the mill. Working lives in the mill come to life as interviewees recall its sounds, sights, and smells. For the filmmakers, Dalhousie was “a place that was sheltered.”

3 One of the film’s highlights, for me, relates to the rich shop floor culture that grew up inside the mill. We hear of shop floor jokes, nicknames, and the hand-signals used to communicate through the noise of machinery. One interviewee shows us the gestures used to signal going for a beer, getting a Pepsi, and playing hockey. We also hear the many ways that resourceful workers scavenged for leftover materials to make stoves and stills. Conditions were tough, however, and working in the mill took its toll on workers’ bodies. Hearing loss was almost universal.

4 Unfortunately in adopting a narrative of “our town,” the film-makers erase the class divides that existed before the closure. Everyone seemed to get along. In part, this may be a product of the closure itself where old workplace divides suddenly seemed obsolete or beside-the-point. Local managers were in much the same boat. In my experience, interviewees are unlikely to emphasize shop-floor struggles after a closure. The beginning of the end came in 1992 when two paper machines were shut down, resulting in the layoff of 450 workers. Dalhousie never recovered. The mill’s total closure finished it off. Surprisingly, trade unions are mentioned only once in passing despite the mill’s rich union history. One assumes that this story was edited out, as Aurele Ferlatte (a prominent New Brunswick trade unionist from Dalhousie) is interviewed. The story is one of loss, not resistance. Perhaps it is to be expected that the film’s tone is melancholy rather than angry or defiant – the mill did close and the town is struggling. A few still images of protest are included near the end of the film but these are detached from the spoken narrative.

5 Instead, we are told of Dalhousie’s uniqueness. When the mill opened in 1930, it was the largest paper mill in the Maritimes and one of the largest mills of its kind in the world. It employed one thousand people and physically dominated the city. The mill was the “real and symbolic centre” of daily life in Dalhousie. Its closure “pulled the foundation away from us,” one woman poignantly explains. The workers interviewed are eloquent in their testimony. At one point, Tremblay tells us that: “In no other town would you find a mill with this kind of domination over the physical, social, and cultural landscape.” Dalhousie’s mill stands alone.

6 In invoking the uniqueness of Dalhousie, the film-makers want us to care about their hometown. In doing so, however, they failed to link Dalhousie to the wider forestry crisis that has devastated towns and cities across Canada. Sadly, Dalhousie’s experience is far from unique. When listening to Dalhousie residents speak of their deep connection to the mill and the hurt that followed, I could hear the voices of my own interviewees from Sturgeon Falls, Ontario and from my own hometown. Dalhousie’s ordinariness does not diminish its importance. To the contrary, it amplifies it. Dalhousie’s story is our story. That provincial and federal politicians stood by and did nothing as one “Dalhousie” after another went down is a national disgrace. We can and must do better. When planning for the future, companies can be required to take responsibility for existing plants and workforces. Yes, some mills will continue to close, but workers and dependent communities should be treated as something more than disposable people.

7 The Last Shift should be read as a political act. It also represents a rare example of university-based researchers (Tony Tremblay is a Canada Research Chair in New Brunswick Studies at St. Thomas University and Ellen Rose is a member of the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick) daring to make things personal. This is as it should be. History is intensely personal. The Last Shift joins a handful of other Canadian films like the National Film Board’s Temiscaming, Quebec - A Town That Wouldn’t Die (1975) and Shutdown (1980), as well as Working Days (1996), that bear witness to the enormous human cost of deindustrialization.

Steven High is a Canada Research Chair in Oral History at Concordia University and author of Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt (2003) and Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (2007).