Money well spent

While we were raking the current Ontario government over the coals last week, for spending money without the authority of the legislature, some of that same money was being dished out for a new project. And we have to admit that, leaving the legal and constitutional issues aside, it’s money that has a chance to be well spent.

The Ministry of Northern Development and Mines will get $21 million to continue the Abandoned Mines Rehabilitation Program. This is the government scheme that provides funds to do proper closure work on former mine sites whose owners have gone into bankruptcy or otherwise vanished.

Launched in 1999 and funded with $27 million for its first four years, the Rehabilitation Program was the first really comprehensive effort to make orphan mine and mineral exploration sites safe. In its first four years, the program assessed more than 4,000 abandoned sites; together with earlier documentation, it established that about 6,000 former mine sites, exploration shafts, adits and drill sites exist in Ontario. The program did rehabilitation work at 55 of them. Not all of those sites were Deloros or Kam Kotias; some simply needed concrete caps on old entries or fences around dangerous access.

There are two worthwhile lessons to take from that straightaway: first, only a small fraction of mineral exploration sites presents an acute environmental or safety hazard; and second, much useful rehabilitation work can be done without great expense.

When it came to the big projects, the Abandoned Mines program gave good value for money, completing rehabilitation work at such old mines as Toburn, Central Pat and Zenmac.

The biggest of the cleanups, at Kam Kotia, east of Timmins, has consumed about half the project’s budget. There, acidic runoff from tailings was affecting surface water quality; but instead of creating a new, more intractable mess — as the United States Environmental Protection Agency did at Summitville — the program has built a new tailings dam and removed large volumes of uncontrolled tailings to it, and dug an interceptor ditch and built a liming plant to catch and treat acidic runoff.

It’s not a bad payoff for $27 million. We can hope, and expect, that the next $21 million will be spent as usefully and as prudently.

One encouraging difference in the new, four-year plan is that the Ontario Mining Association will be involved. Member companies of the OMA will contribute as much as $1 million, the sum to be matched by the province, for land rehabilitation work.

That speaks to the need for the industry to pull out its own wallet in order to bring abandoned sites up to an acceptable standard. It is certainly fair to say that society in general has taken the major benefit out of mineral development; rightly society is paying for the major part of the rehabilitation work. But it is certain that the Canadian mineral industry’s own capital base owes much to the successful development of Ontario’s mineral endowment in the first half of the 20th century.

When the mineral industry is seen putting its dollars into this program, it helps its own credibility immeasurably. Rightly or wrongly, a taxpayer who sees himself footing the bill for “old” failures of environmental stewardship will imagine that the present-day mining industry is the same one that walked away from those failures fifty years ago, and he will expect a payback.

Society has eaten well off mineral development in Ontario. So has the industry. It’s right that both are ready to pick up the tab.