Explainer

A timeline of the never-ending saga that is the Taseko New Prosperity mine

The volley of legal challenges surrounding the $1.5 billion gold and copper project is dizzying. Here's some help.

By Carol Linnitt

Feb. 7, 2019 0 min. read

This article is more than 5 years old

A decade-long battle to build a $1.5 billion gold and copper mine in the traditional territory of the Tsilhqot’in First Nation is back in a federal court — again.

The legal twists and turns of this project, first proposed back in 2008, are many and hard to keep track of.

Between defamation lawsuits, rejected project proposals and lost judicial reviews it’s near impossible to stay on top of this controversial mining proposal, although that’s exactly what the Tsilhqot’in First Nation has had to do at every step of the way.

The Narwhal created a handy-dandy timeline to help layout the flow of legal proceedings that continue to this day.

Like a kid in a candy store

When those boxes of heavily redacted documents start to pile in, reporters at The Narwhal waste no time in looking for kernels of news that matter the most. Just ask our Prairies reporter Drew Anderson, who gleefully scanned through freedom of information files like a kid in a candy store, leading to pretty damning revelations in Alberta. Long story short: the government wasn’t being forthright when it claimed its pause on new renewable energy projects wasn’t political. Just like that, our small team was again leading the charge on a pretty big story.

In an oil-rich province like Alberta, that kind of reporting is crucial. But look at our investigative work on TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline to the west, or our Greenbelt reporting out in Ontario. They all highlight one thing: those with power over our shared natural world don’t want you to know how — or why — they call the shots. And we try to disrupt that.

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