Cape Breton Development Corporation
[1] On March 30, 1968, DEVCO expropriated DOSCO's coal mines and the Sydney and Louisburg Railway, settling for a payment of $12 million.
Initially, DEVCO focused on operating the coal mines throughout the Sydney Coal Field that it had inherited from DOSCO, while attempting to invest in other initiatives such as establishing a post-secondary education institution in the area (what would become the University College of Cape Breton, now Cape Breton University), tourism developments, industrial parks for non-coal/steel related manufacturing industries, and investing in small area businesses and community infrastructure projects to help unemployed coal miners and steel workers who had been laid off during the 1960s drawdown in production.
Faced with rising subsidies for DEVCO, the federal government announced it was getting out of the coal industry in January 1999 by mining out the rest of Phalen by the end of the year and attempting to sell the Prince colliery.
In September 1999, Phalen colliery closed for good, with 400 employees laid off and the only on-line traffic source for the Devco Railway severed.
The Prince colliery continued with production, however coal was trucked from the mine to the Victoria Junction preparation plant, from which it was then taken by rail to the Lingan Generating Station.
Devco Railway also began to be used for importing some coal from locations in the United States and South America, with the international shipping piers beginning to be used in the reverse of their intended design.
On November 23, 2001, Prince colliery closed for good, after the federal government failed to entice any private sector investors to purchase the mine.
The federal government moved swiftly to sell off assets, transferring the mine properties and mineral rights back to the provincial Department of Natural Resources.
DEVCO subsequently decommissioned the Victoria Junction coal wash plant and began to immediately prepare remediation of the mine sites.
On December 18, 2001 DEVCO sold all surface assets, including the international shipping piers, railway track, railway rights-of-way, locomotives and rolling stock, and a coal storage facility and locomotive shops at Victoria Junction to 510845 New Brunswick Incorporated, a wholly owned subsidiary of Emera Inc., the holding company which owns Nova Scotia Power Incorporated (Nova Scotia Power Corporation having been privatized in 1992).
