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Environmentalists to warn U.S. Supreme Court not to follow Canada on mine tailings
January 12 2009 | News Articles | Canadian Press
Environmentalists to warn U.S. Supreme Court not to follow Canada on mine tailings
20 hours ago
Canadian Press
Canadian mining regulations come under the scrutiny of the United States Supreme Court on Monday as environmentalists from both countries try to prevent American miners from depositing tailings in an Alaskan lake.
“Canada is a cautionary tale,” said Catherine Coumans of Ottawa-based MiningWatch, who helped write the brief to be presented in a hearing in Washington, D.C.
“What I’m hoping is that the Americans won’t make the same mistake we’ve made.”
The court is preparing to rule on the legality of allowing tailings from Alaska’s Kensington gold mine to be dumped into nearby Slate Lake. It’s the first such permit to be issued in the U.S. under mining regulatory changes made in 2002.
In Canada, where similar changes were made at the same time, applications have been filed or permission granted to reclassify at least 21 lakes as tailings ponds – including Fish Lake in central B.C.
Hundreds of years ago First Nations stocked the pristine lake in the Chilcotin region with fish that have fed generations. Now Taseko Mines Ltd. of Vancouver wants to fill the trout-rich lake with waste from a proposed gold and copper mine.
The Tsilhqot’in First Nation filed a lawsuit last week that claims Ottawa has no constitutional right to reclassify the lake.
“Our people planted fish in that lake before European contact,” said Joe Alphonse, Tsilhqot’in director of government services. “Our people always depended on fish and continue to this day.
“That’s our grocery store out there.”
Mine tailings are often environmentally hazardous as they contain heavy metals and toxins such as cyanide. They can also leach acid into water.
The Fisheries Act bars dumping deletrious substances into fish-bearing fresh-water bodies. But it allows mining companies to apply to do so as long as there’s compensation for destruction of fish habitat.
Coumans suggests dumping into natural bodies of water is cheaper than building an artificial tailings pond, so the regulatory changes have in effect given mining companies an incentive to try to have otherwise healthy lakes redefined as “tailings impoundment areas.”
“There are more (applications) coming down the pike,” she said. “We’re now facing a deluge of companies wanting to use natural water bodies.”
That’s what U.S. environmentalists are trying to avoid, said Dave Chambers, a geophysicist with the Center for Science in Public Participation, which also helped prepare the brief.
“You’re ahead of us,” he said. “The lesson there is that if this happens at Kensington, stand by, because there are going to be dozens of proposals to do the same thing.
“It’s the cheap way to go, and that’s what you’re seeing in Canada.”
But Gordon Peeling, chief executive of the Mining Association of Canada, defends Canada’s regulations. He says the changes actually put tailings disposals under more environmental scrutiny.
Any such proposal must be examined by federal regulators and the local community, he said from Ottawa. The destruction of any fish habitat must be offset by improving other water bodies or through a cash payment.
Storing tailings under water minimizes leaching of contaminants from the ore, Peelings said. But steep terrain or geological risks sometimes make tailings ponds unfeasible, while lakes can act as natural containers.
“In certain geographic circumstances (a tailings pond) may result in greater terrestrial disturbance than comparative environmental impact on the lake.”
Chris Doiron, chief of Environment Canada’s mining and minerals section, said the new rules are actually tougher than the regulations they replace because they remove the decision from the fisheries minister’s discretion and bump it up to the Treasury Board.
But Coumans remains skeptical.
“Once they’ve already made all their decisions they bring us in so they can say they’ve consulted nationally.”
She says environmentalists believed the regulations were altered to legally grandfather five existing natural tailings ponds – not sanction new ones.
“During this entire process, all the way up to 2002, the whole issue of using water bodies for tailings was never, ever discussed.”
Not true, says Doiron, who was part of the consultations.
“I was asked a specific question whether there could be additions … My answer was very specifically, yes, there could be.”
Doiron says there are nine water bodies approved for dumping and about a dozen more under consideration.
The list includes four B.C. projects, three in Newfoundland, three in Nunavut, one in Manitoba and one in the Northwest Territories.
David Anderson, Liberal environment minister at the time the regulations were revised, agrees with Peeling that sometimes the risks from man-made tailings ponds outweigh potential damage from using a freshwater lake or stream.
Anderson, now director of Guelph University’s Institute for the Environment, warns it shouldn’t become general practice, however.
But Coumans says that’s exactly what’s happening and she hopes the U.S. court hears that message during Monday’s hearing.
“If you’re going to open the door, you’d better be prepared to start sacrificing lakes and rivers right, left and centre.”
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