LandKeepers News Archive
Frustration mounts over environmental reviews
March 06 2009 | News Articles | Prince George Citizen
Frustration mounts over environmental reviews
Written by Gordon Hoekstra
Prince George Citizen
Friday, 06 March 2009
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Waiting game continues, despite high stakes
This is the first in a three-part series on the effects the environmental review process has on industrial development in northern B.C.
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Fort St. James businessman Don Derksen has been eyeing the environmental assessment process at the Mount Milligan mine — a project he considers vitally important to economic diversification — with frustration.
Derksen, president of Fort Machine Works, has had to lay off a couple of workers from his staff of 10 because of a severe downturn in the forest sector. With both the province and federal government involved in the mine assessment, the clock is at two years, four months, and counting. It is uncertain how much longer the process will take to reach completion; perhaps eight months, perhaps more. Derksen is not interested in reducing environmental standards but he does want a more timely process.
“There are all these projects that have been on the burner for yeas and years and years, and they procrastinate to the point where everybody finally says, ‘The hell with it, I’ll go to Australia or some other place’,” says Derksen. “And here we are with no employment.”
On the list of proposed projects in northern B.C. you can add the Kitimat-to-Summit Lake natural gas pipeline, the Kutcho mine, the Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell project, the Morrison and Bronson Slope mines, Ruby Creek, Red Chris and the Northern Gateway pipeline. The projects bring a promise of billions in investment, construction jobs, as well as sought-after permanent jobs.
The projects are viewed by many municipalities and business groups as necessary to help diversify and prime the North’s economy, particularly as a beetle-ravaged timber supply is expected to shrink the forest sector for decades.
However, there is a hitch.
As Derksen is beginning to realize, it is increasingly time consuming for companies to manoeuvre themselves through the environmental assessment process, partly because the threshold at which the impact and benefits of the project are analyzed has been raised and First Nations are demanding more input. But also, say industry officials, because the federal government’s involvement can send a project sideways.
The B.C. Environmental Assessment process has legislated timelines, but the federal government process is much more open-ended. And while there is a joint agreement that calls for harmonizing the two assessments — an effort to avoid duplication — there are no guarantees that will happen.
Some projects do make it through the assessment process — the massive Galore Creek copper, gold and silver mine is an example, although it took three and a half years — but it appears to be the exception rather than the rule. Kemess North, Northgate Minerals’ $200-million gold and copper mine expansion, took more than four years to make its way through the assessment process before a review panel rejected the project. The Ruby Creek molybdenum mine in the far northwest corner of the province near Atlin received the OK from the province in late 2007, but after three years and nine months, the federal process is not complete.
The federal government is well behind the province in its assessment of Mount Milligan, the closest proposed project to Prince George, 155 kilometres to the northwest.
While the project has been in the provincial assessment process for two years and four months, the federal government has yet to seek public input.
It seems that no one is particularly satisfied with the process.
Industry is looking for a more certain, timely process, and First Nations want more direct involvement and funding from government to back up their participation. Virtually all projects in northern B.C. are located on the traditional territories of First Nations, who have not concluded land and treaty claims.
The issues around the environmental assessment are attracting attention at the highest political levels.
The federal government said just weeks ago that it will fast-track environmental assessments to expedite new public works projects. Transport Minister John Baird — the former environment minister — said that coming legislative changes should eliminate 90 per cent of federal environmental assessments.
Premier Gordon Campbell has noted that $25 billion in provincial projects are tied up in the federal environmental assessment process. Campbell, who spoke at an economic summit in Prince George recently, says it’s time to figure out a way to shorten the process. At the same summit, Pierre Gratton, president of the B.C. Mining Association, called for more radical surgery. He argues for full delegation of authority to the province, or, if possible, devolution.
“You bang your head on a wall — you have been working so long with the system to try to get it to work, and every attempt does not seem to work,” observes Gratton. “So you get to the point where you think, well, really, they should accept the fact they (the federal government) doesn’t have the wherewithal to properly run the legislation they’ve passed and should get the provinces to fulfil their responsibilities for them.”
Industry representatives and the province have raised the idea of creating a one-window process, pointing to the Yukon, where the federal government has devolved responsibility for the management of the environmental assessment process to an agency at arm’s length from the government.
For northern B.C. there’s a lot at stake economically.
An analysis by The Citizen of eight mines and a natural gas pipeline project that are under review, or could face further review, shows the projects are worth more than $7 billion, would create an estimated 4,000 construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs. The projects don’t include Enbridge’s $4.5-billion gateway pipeline, which is estimated to create another 4,000 construction jobs. That pipeline, because it crosses the Alberta-B.C. border, is subject to a high-level joint National Energy Board and federal environment ministry review. While the pipeline projects create few permanent jobs, the mines do.
Terrane Metals’ proposed $917-million Mount Milligan project alone would create 600 construction jobs and 350 permanent jobs. The jobs would be particularly welcome to communities like Mackenzie and Fort St. James, which are located nearby. Mackenzie, a community of 4,500, has lost an estimated 1,800 jobs as a result of an unprecedented forest downturn led by a collapse of U.S. housing. Fort St. James, an even smaller community, has also lost hundreds of forest jobs with the closure of two sawmills and reductions at two others.
Fort St. James mayor Sandra Harwood says it’s frustrating to watch the ponderous regulatory process, one which she likened to a slow-moving dinosaur. If it falls down, you are afraid it won’t get up, she says.
“The two years seems interminable,” says Harwood.
She likes the idea of bringing the management of assessment process down to the local level — as the Yukon model appears to do.
Janine North, CEO of the North Trust, an $185-million economic development fund, adds there are problems with the timeliness of the assessment of smaller projects as well. Recently North received a call about delays in approving a gravel extraction project to mitigate flood concerns that would have put 25 people to work.
“It’s a small example that shows that every town and many private projects are facing this,” she said. “It’s not that any community or any business wants environmental standards to be lowered, they just want an accountable process, a well-managed process, that’s done in a time-sensitive way.”
There are projects that have been approved in less than two years, coal mines in northeastern B.C. and the Mackenzie Green Energy power plant.
However, no major mineral mine projects, where big dollars and large amounts of jobs are involved, have been approved in the North in the past decade. It’s meant that only three remaining major mineral mines remain — Kemess South gold and copper, Huckleberry gold and copper and Endako molybdenum. By 2010, only Endako is expected to be in operation.
That means that if no new mineral mine begins operating in the next two years — which is unlikely given the global economic slowdown — the North will be home to only one mineral mine.
“To bring certainty and investor confidence back, really people need to see results,” says Gavin Dirom, president of the the Association for Mineral Exploreration B.C. “We have to move past talking about it and get on with it.”
Northgate Minerals chairman Terry Lyons believes the environmental assessment process — which should be answering technical questions, he argues — has been turned into a project assessment that includes social and cultural issues, including those of First Nations. Lyons estimates his company spent $5 million on the review process, part of $30 million spent to develop the Kemess North project, which was eventually rejected by a joint B.C. and Canadian review panel.
The panel didn’t reject the project on a strictly technical basis, but instead said it would not be in the public interest.
In a 299-page decision, the panel said in its view, the economic and social benefits provided by the project, on balance, were outweighed by the risks of significant adverse environmental, social and cultural effects, some of which would not emerge until many years after mining operations cease.
“We have a tendency over and over not to respect timelines, not to be proactive, not to come up with reasonable no’s. We wind up basically in a process that is a long road to maybe,” said Lyons. “The industry in general would like to move towards a fast no, not a slow maybe.” Northgate has turned its attention to Ontario and Australia.
First Nations in northern B.C. did not support the Kemess North project, in part, because it proposed using a lake to dump acidic tailings and waste rock.
First Nations have been asking for a much bigger role in environmental assessments. They are not calling for the process to be quickened.
In 2007, the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council had sought $2.4 million from the federal government to spearhead a First Nations review of Enbridge’s oil pipeline in northern B.C., a project that cut through dozens of First Nations’ claimed traditional territory.
Ottawa never responded.
Just last fall, First Nations from across B.C. gathered in Prince George to hammer out a mining plan, a draft of which called for lakes to be off-limits to mine waste storage, and provincial legislation that would require impact-benefit agreements between First Nations and companies before environmental assessments start.David Luggi, chief of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council, says as a general rule First Nations are not against development. But he stressed they want to see responsible development.
“How you get that support is you have to reach down to the grassroots level,” he said. “That’s a process in and of itself, and oftentimes the review process of the province and the feds doesn’t permit that because they are more concerned about the process itself, rather that taking the time to hear individual concerns.”
Environmental groups also have concerns with the provincial and federal governments’ apparent interest in changing the assessment process.
Mining Watch Canada official Ramsey Hart said the group’s main concern is that the process could be watered down. He noted they agree the process should be efficient, but it also must be effective. The group launched a court challenge over the Red Chris mine in northern B.C., challenging Ottawa that they were not applying a high enough review to the project. The low-level screening review the federal government used doesn’t mandate any public input.
“I do get a bit concerned when people start haranguing on the environmental assessment process for delays without a real good analysis of what’s causing those delays,” said Hart. “Is it something inherent in the environmental assessment process? I honestly don’t think it is. I think it is often a lack of resources within government,” he said.
While industry, First Nations and communities wait to see if Ottawa will make changes, Terrane Metals, the company trying to develop the Mount Milligan project, remains uncertain how long its review will take. More critically they are not sure what level of review the federal government will ultimately end up pursuing. That uncertainty is not helpful when the company is talking to bankers to finance the project, says Terrane Metals official Glen Wonders.
“Nobody is asking for a quick and easy here. All we are saying is lay out some ground rules, stick to them, and give us the certainty of a decision process that is fair, transparent and is time bound,” says Wonders.
“We’ll work within those contexts,” he said.
***Monday: The Yukon environmental assessment model.
Tuesday: Political promises, what do they mean?***
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