The mining industry, and anyone else with an interest in land use, resource conservation, and northern economic development, should be watching developments in an application brought to the Federal Court of Canada last December by the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee.
Whether the court agrees to hear the application will be a test of the process-shopping technique now being used by groups opposed to mining projects. CARC is asking the Court to direct the Department of the Environment (DOE) to order a full cumulative effects assessment of the Diavik diamond project in the Northwest Territories. CARC finds the approval process that Diavik has already passed — a comprehensive study report under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act — insufficient grounds to allow the project to go ahead.
Diavik did not get its approval in the dark of night. The process started in March 1998 and included public consultation through the whole study period, plus a formal 60-day public consultation once the comprehensive study report was submitted to the department. CARC knows all this: it was there, and made formal comments to the department on the report.
And when the minister of the environment, David Anderson, approved the comprehensive study report, CARC did not accept the outcome of the process in which it had participated. It took the government to court instead, arguing that the DOE is obliged, under the act, to demand a full cumulative effects assessment.
Are CARC simply sore losers in a public process, or the guardians of the broader public interest in keeping northern development balanced and environmentally sound? Are they advocates for sustainable development, or knee-jerk anti-mining zealots? Or are they even able to step back and examine their own part in the Diavik process?
For six years since the Diavik pipes were discovered, the only production proposal seen as a feasible one was an open pit, with the waters of Lac de Gras held back by a system of dikes. This entirely reasonable view held through the whole feasibility study — and was substantiated whenever underground methods were considered. In its list of demands placed before the government, demands it is now asking the courts to mandate, CARC has asked for “a careful consideration of feasible alternatives and their environmental effects.” To be precise, CARC wants the government to force Diavik to bring forward a plan that includes underground mining.
But mining a kimberlite pipe is not like mining a gold vein in the Yellowknife shear. It is high-tonnage mining, no matter how you slice into it, and the reasonable underground options are all bulk-mining methods whose safety would be severely compromised by a body of water poised over the workings. In short, if CARC knows about diamond mining, then it knows it is demanding that Diavik’s proponents be forced back to the drawing board, there to waste their time on unsafe or uneconomic production options.
In a speech delivered to an audience at Queen’s University, CARC’s executive director, John Crump, insisted, “for the record, again, CARC is not saying ‘no’ to the project.” Perhaps: but CARC’s “yes, but . . .” is heavy-laden with project-killing conditions.
Another of CARC’s concerns centred on the disposal of country rock from the open pits — the material was mostly granite, but about 10% was a biotite schist that carried some potentially acid-generating sulphide minerals. Diavik examined three options to manage country rock: store it on land; stockpile it, returning it to the first pit to be mined out; or use it as fill on the waterward side of the dikes. The latter two offered the advantage that sulphides submerged in water do not generate acidic runoff.
Diavik rejected the pit disposal option both because the costs could have killed the project and because surface weathering during the stockpile period could have undone the advantage of underwater disposal. Diavik rejected the dike option because it took away fish habitat and because local people regarded the option as waste disposal in Lac de Gras. It settled on land storage, with runoff from the area contained and treated.
Yet in a 1999 letter to then-minister Christine Stewart, CARC characterized Diavik’s proposal to store the country rock on land as a plan to “create a potential toxic mountain on the landscape,” which is an unusual way to view natural materials, whether acid-generating or not.
In the same letter to Stewart, CARC argued that the approval process needed to address “uncertainties related to protecting water quality, ensuring no net loss to fish habitat, and assessing cumulative effects.”
Diavik is a diamond deposit. What potential water pollutants are likely to be generated, apart from those that attend any camp or installation anywhere and would have to be addressed as part of the normal land-use process?
CARC’s second objection — no net loss to fish habitat — effectively vetoes the development. The Diavik kimberlite is under a lake, and unless part of the lake is drained there is no mine. It means choosing between Lac de Gras as a fish habitat and the diamond mine, but that is a choice we should be making with our eyes open, not a circle the proponent should have to square at the bidding of the government or a stakeholder group.
CARC also finds room to demand that the Diavik project assessment should address the cumulative effects of future projects. (Evidently CARC knows there will be more economic diamond deposits discovered, a feat of clairvoyance that would make Nostradamus blush.) The demand is purely fanciful. Is Diavik expected to know which other exploration projects in the Slave Province will come up trumps? Is it expected to guess? To estimate? To pick a number from a hat? Asking the proponents of a mining project to analyze and predict the “cumulative effects” of other, hypothetical projects is to send them on a fool’s errand as a condition of project approval.
To hold project proponents to the highest standards of scientific and engineering practice is not only reasonable, it is a duty: and to its considerable credit, CARC has made issues of Diavik’s dike designs and simulations and the limited amount of baseline data available to assess the project’s ongoing impact. But to go from that to a trail of roadblocks and process-derailment, via the courts, makes a joke of Crump’s oft-repeated claim that “we’re not out to block this project.” Should people believe Crump’s assurance, or read CARC’s attitudes from its list of demands and its waspish harrying of the approval mechanism?
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