King Coal meets Big Green

The Cheviot coal mine project, being pushed by Luscar and Consolidated Coals subsidiary Cardinal River Coals, is back in the environmental assessment process following last year’s Federal Court decision, which forced the Department of the Environment (DOE) to demand further studies from the project’s proponents.

The court challenge to Cheviot was brought by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), by its provincial affiliate, the Alberta Wilderness Association, and by three other groups: the Canadian Nature Federation, the Pembina Institute, and the Jasper Environmental Association. It was bankrolled by the Sierra Legal Defence Fund, the same group that is covering costs for the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee’s (CARC’s) action in Federal Court to force the DOE to demand cumulative effects assessments from Diavik Diamond Mines. The Sierra Legal Defence Fund provides lawyers, research and (frequently) public-relations savvy for opponents of development projects.

Mr. Justice Douglas Campbell of the Federal Court ruled in April 1999 that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act required the DOE to insist on more studies than just the ones that had been approved by a joint national and provincial review panel. The court decision stopped the mine development, which had been fully approved by the panel, in its tracks.

Like CARC, the groups opposing the Cheviot mine wanted the proponents to consider underground mining as an alternative to the planned open pit. Coal, though, is a bulk commodity, and underground mining could easily kill the project’s economics.

And also like CARC, the groups asked for cumulative effects assessments. This is a sensible-sounding name clothing an idea that is not entirely reasonable: that somehow, proponents of a development should be able to gaze into the future and determine what other developments are likely to come along during the life of the project.

We have news for the backers of “cumulative effects”: Many mining projects are assessed without a definitive figure for mine life, owing to uncertainties about the maximum potential size of the resource, about the long-term economics of the commodity, and about the mine’s own long-term costs. Those uncertainties alone make it difficult, if not impossible, to predict what other projects will come down the pipe during the mine’s lifetime.

Add to that the impossibility of knowing what other deposits or prospects in an area may one day make a mine and a “cumulative effects” assessment begins to look like the mother of all moving targets.

Cardinal River Coals had filed notice of appeal but did not make further submissions to the court in time to have that appeal heard. Finding them in default of the requirement to make timely appeal, the court dismissed the application in February of this year.

During that time, Cardinal River had gone back to the drawing board to commission a new series of studies for the national/provincial review panel. It submitted them to the panel, and public hearings started at the beginning of March.

Apart from its opposition to Cheviot, CPAWS is a principal supporter of the “Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative,” or Y2Y, a program to create a contiguous zone of protected areas, parks, and management areas from Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, north to the Tombstone Mountains area of the Yukon. Cheviot, like most of the coal deposits in the Rockies, sits in the area the groups behind the initiative want to see designated.

CPAWS and its provincial affiliates are pursuing the Y2Y program through the political process, through the courts, through the native land claims process, and through one-sided “public-awareness” campaigns that paint mineral exploration and production as environmental disasters waiting to happen. This newspaper published an examination of the conflicts of interest that attended the creation of the Tombstone park (T.N.M., March 6/00), showing that CPAWS and environmental groups have, to a large extent, taken control of land use in the Yukon.

By exercising unelected political power in the territory, CPAWS is showing a face quite different from the one it shows the public. Instead of a grass-roots citizen group saving valuable wilderness lands by taking big government and big business to court, we have a Machiavellian political agent achieving its ends by any means necessary.

The whole Y2Y effort in the Yukon — not to mention the work of another of CPAWS’s provincial affiliates, the Wildlands League, in the tendentious Lands for Life program in Ontario — calls into question CPAWS’s motives and methods.

There is a test of CPAWS’s integrity to come. Cardinal River has said its court-mandated studies on alternative development methods and cumulative effects give the Cheviot project a clean bill of health anyway: if the review panels agree that Cheviot should go ahead, it may be illuminating to see whether the project’s opponents turn to the courts or to another forum to try and block the project once more.

If the groups that brought the 1999 court challenge meant what they said when they launched it, then they have what they asked for — the DOE did oblige Cardinal River Coals to do the studies the groups wanted. On the other hand, if they find further ways to oppose the project, it will be clear that the studies they asked for were only window-dressing on a purely anti-mining stand.