Giant Mine Remediation Project

Today I took a break from fibre-arts (a "Trashformation" project - more on that another time) to attend a few hours of the week-long public hearings being held about the Giant Mine Remediation Plan.

The Giant Mine - where to start about this giant headache? I can see it from my balcony - it's just outside of Yellowknife, at the beginning of the Ingraham Trail, and it can't be missed. Canadians with longer memories and a history of watching the news will recall that during a strike there in 1993 an explosion killed nine strikebreakers and replacement workers. Yep - that's the one. Read more at Giant Mine.

Well - mining companies have come and gone, the last one in receivership, and have left behind the second largest federal contaminated site in Canada. We're not talking small potatoes here, folks: 237,000 tonnes of arsenic stored underground, numerous tailings ponds on 2,300 acres of essentially contaminated land, and 500,000 cubic metres of arsenic contaminated water treated each season (the helpful brochure says that's about 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools).

Water - what water? Well, the water first in Baker Creek which flows through the site, then in Back Bay to which Baker Creek flows, finally in Yellowknife Bay, and eventually, of course, in Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River.

Remediation is a long, slow, complicated, highly political - and possibly somewhat scientifically impossible - project. For certain, restoration as such is impossible. Remediation can be done, and that's the focus of the inquiry: how much remediation, and at what cost? Remediation to industry or to residential standard? Remediation to (technically harmless) waste land or to useable land? These are Canadian tax dollars at work: to mediate, monitor, and maintain the Giant Mine site, $150 million have been spent to date, $480 million will have to be spent for further essential remediation, and future maintenance will cost $1.9 million a year - forever.

Remediation is a joint project between AANDC (pronounced AndC - the federal ministry of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada), and the GNWT (the Government of the Northwest Territories) - these two bodies are known collectively as "the developers." Of course "the developers" rely on an army of outside consultants, for example from Toronto, for the actual plan. The Department of Oceans and Fisheries needs to be involved as well, because a major question is whether the water quality is such that fish in any of the waters mentioned above are fit for human consumption. But they can't decide about the fish themselves - that's the purview of Health Canada. And Health Canada, much to the visible annoyance of inquiry participants, did not show for the inquiry (they were reportedly "occupied elsewhere").

Putting "the developer" on the hot seat were various stakeholders - the Yellowknife Dene First Nation, the North Slave Métis Alliance, the City of Yellowknife, and others whom I didn't hear in the few hours I attended. Final decision rests with the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board. There were two interpreters in a glass booth in the back for one of the NTs nine official Aboriginal languages (I didn't catch which one). 

It would seem that when several levels of government get involved in a complex project, passing the decision buck is one of the strategies. For example, when one of "the developers" mentioned that the fish in Back Bay contain between .25 and .50 as much arsenic as food one normally obtains in grocery stores (who knew that we buy a certain amount of arsenic as part of our groceries?), he was quickly rapped over the knuckles by a review board member: he was not a Health Canada official, and only Health Canada could make pronouncements on fish safety. Health Canada was notable by its absence. "The developers" quickly retracted any statement about fish.

Fish is not an abstract problem, even to me, for I buy Great Slave inconnu fillets at the local COOP. For aboriginal people who depend on fish as part of their diet, it's an immediate problem, with life at stake. 

It's a huge issue, without question. Reportedly - again the helpful brochure - the gold taken out of the mine would be worth about $3.5 billion today. The question might be raised: is this worth it? Well, ok - that's in part a rhetorical question. How much of that 3.5 billion made its way into Canadian tax coffers? My guess would be: not enough to cover the remediation, likely not by a long shot.

I left when one of "the developers" gave a power-point presentation with excruciatingly obfuscatory managerial goobledy-gook delivered in a deadly monotone - just couldn't spend my valuable time listening to that. Still, I learned a lot in a short time. And what I learned wasn't exactly pretty.

That's part of what makes the north so interesting - arsenic in the water isn't someone else's remote issue, it's in the mine I can see from my window, impacting the fish I buy at COOP, thinning the ice that supports the ice-road my sister drives to Dettah, affecting the drinking water of the cute grade-school students at the Dettah school. Us all, in other words.