Editorial: Kemess North in limbo

Mid-September saw a body blow delivered to British Columbia’s renascent mining industry, with a joint federal-provincial environmental panel recommending in a 299-page report that Northgate Minerals’ planned $190-million Kemess North mine expansion in north-central B.C. not proceed, mostly due to local aboriginal opposition to the planned conversion of a large lake into a tailings pond.

The panel was comprised of chairperson and agrologist Carol Jones, mining engineer and U.B.C. mining engineering department head Malcolm Scoble, and sociologist Mark Duiven.

Their recommendation is not binding on Canada’s and B.C.’s environment ministers, who ultimately grant the needed environmental permits. But this kind of report — over two years in the making — does bear much bureaucratic weight. (Readers can find it at www.ceaa.gc.ca ).

Two things are now clear: Northgate has badly mishandled its community relations if so many local aboriginals oppose the mine expansion; and environmental panels in this country are now acting way beyond their mandate.

Most mining companies active in the world’s hinterlands will blame any local opposition to their activities on the locals’ supposed unfamiliarity with modern mining, and insist that education and social programs will win the locals over.

Northgate can’t use this time-buying excuse: It’s been operating the nearby Kemess South mine for years and employing some 475 workers from around B.C. and Alberta, including 45 local aboriginals.

It’s a tremendous strategic failure that Northgate hasn’t been able to leverage its successful development and operation of Kemess South into broad community support and a mutually agreed benefits agreement for Kemess North.

Why is that? Perhaps because Northgate hasn’t hired enough locals, or because Kemess is a fly-in, fly-out operation, or perhaps it’s a remnant of a diffident corporate culture infused years ago by Brascan, when Northgate was an unloved subsidiary run on a shoestring budget.

With regards to the panel members, reading through their report is deeply unsettling for anyone contemplating building a mine in Canada.

Positively, the panel says it’s “satisfied, taking into account Northgate’s commitments and proposed mitigation and compensation measures, that the project would not likely result in significant adverse environmental effects.”

The panel agrees that the tailings disposal method and location are the best choices and are both environmentally effective and technically and economically feasible. It notes that the lake would return to normal water quality within a few years of mine closure and the project would engender no “significant adverse effects on fish and fish habitat.”

Northgate has shown the panel it can meet every single environmental regulation. But in today’s world of environmentalists gone wild, apparently that’s no longer enough to get past an environmental review.

The panel was unimpressed when government agencies advised it that, “in most important respects, the project could be implemented in a manner consistent with (our) respective programming and regulatory objectives.”

Instead, the panel chastises its squaresville federal and provincial environmental colleagues for actually “examining the question of the project acceptability primarily from the relatively narrow perspective of their own well-defined mandates.”

Well-defined mandates be damned! You see, the panel “believes it is also necessary to evaluate the project’s effects holistically, and to incorporate values expressed by the public.”

That may sound nice, but what are some of these incorporated values? The panel solemnly notes that the local tribes “have stated that water is sacred to them” and that the destruction of any natural lake “goes against their values as Aboriginal people.”

The panel gushes that the lake has “important spiritual values for Aboriginal people,” but then admits that the closest community is 70 km away and that “aboriginal use of the lake and surrounding area has not been very intensive, likely moderate at most.”

Why exactly a government-funded environmental panel comprised of university educated professionals should blithely accept that stone-age-inducing, shamanistic values such as “water is sacred” should automatically trump the values of Western civilization and modern science, is unstated. Pity.