On a brisk December day, Judy Campbell walks down Pooley Street in Wells, B.C., a tiny community 80 kilometres east of Quesnel on Highway 26. Cold snow squeaks underfoot and the snow banks are piling high. Campbell turns left and opens the door to the education and cultural centre, Island Mountain Arts. A rush of warm air flushes her face.

The town of Wells and the surrounding region have gone through multiple transformations since miners and prospectors first moved in, more than 150 years ago.

In 1862, William “Billy” Barker struck paydirt on Williams Creek. The gold strike triggered the Cariboo Gold Rush and the town of Barkerville sprung from the wilderness. Sixty-five years later, miner and prospector Fred Wells started the Cariboo Gold Quartz Mining Co. in his namesake town, seven kilometres away.

By the early 1940s the population had ballooned, peaking at around 4,500, according to the Wells Historical Society. The town grew around the mine. The bars were hopping, hotels thrived. When the mine closed for good in 1967, jobs went with it. The vacuum left behind would be slowly filled with creatives like Campbell and others seeking affordable small-town life. 

Campbell and her then-husband arrived in Wells six years after the last gold bar was poured at the long-running Cariboo Gold Quartz mine. It was a -20 C winter day but the locals were kind and welcoming, and you could rent a cabin for $20 a month. Campbell embraced Wells. Four years after arriving in town she helped launch Island Mountain Arts, a centre for education in the arts that would put this remote town in the Cariboo Mountain foothills on the map. From the centre grew ArtsWells, a popular summertime festival.

During her time in this community of just over 200 people, Campbell has been CEO of Barkerville Historic Town and Park and served on the District of Wells council for 16 years. Not much ruffles her feathers. However, the Cariboo Gold Project, an underground gold mine being proposed by Montreal-based Osisko Development Corporation, has her fearing for the future of the town she loves.   

Mining around here isn’t exactly a shocker. The landscape between Wells and Barkerville bears the historic scars of gold dredging and placer mining. 

But Wells has changed; tourism and the arts are as important as resource extraction, despite the fact that a lot of local tourism has been built on the lore and legends of gold mining. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 65,000 tourists a year visited Barkerville, now a historic mining town with no permanent residents, injecting $11 million into the regional economy. Thousands more come to Wells for the ArtsWells festival or to explore Bowron Lake Provincial Park and other local attractions. But gold fever is not just a thing of the past. Many miners live in Wells and work at Osisko’s existing gold mine, Bonanza Ledge, an old claim on Barkerville Mountain overlooking the town. Osisko has been mining there since 2016 under its subsidiary Barkerville Gold Mines. And despite being a relatively small mine, it’s a major employer in the area. According to Osisko’s December newsletter, 192 people work at the mine, and it employs another 119 contractors. 

Now Osisko wants to go big and is pushing for a third gold rush with its proposed Cariboo Gold Project. The mine, which according to the company’s project description would cost an estimated $400 to $450 million to build, employ 460 people and operate for roughly 16 years within the municipal boundaries, has got people talking once again about how a town and a hard rock mine can live together.

Mine development plays into local politics

Since it took over mining at Bonanza Ledge, Osisko has firmly established its presence in Wells and among local First Nations. In many ways, it’s been a good neighbour. 

In October 2020, the company signed a life of project agreement with the Lhtako Dené Nation, the main titleholder in the region, that provides “economic benefits, business, education and training opportunities,” Alex Callahan, spokesperson for Osisko, wrote in an emailed statement to The Narwhal. Chief Clifford Lebrun of the Lhtako Dené Nation worked closely with Osisko on its application to expand mining at Bonanza Ledge. 

In a statement released last October by the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation, Lebrun was quoted as saying the partnership proved First Nations and industry “can work together in a good way.” Lebrun did not respond to interview requests from The Narwhal.

According to Callahan, discussions about the Cariboo Gold Project are ongoing with the Lhtako Dené, Williams Lake First Nation and the Xatśūll First Nation, all three of which have territories overlapping or adjacent to the proposed project.

Osisko is also supporting the community of Wells with a number of financial contributions. In 2021, the company donated $500,000 to the Barkerville Historic Trust, which operates the historic town and park that draws in so many visitors each year. Osisko also lent financial support to the District of Wells as it updates its official community plan. 

“Osisko graciously donated $100,000 towards the [planning] process,” Donna Forseille, chief administrative officer for Wells, tells The Narwhal in an interview.

Judy Campbell has another way of putting it.

“They’re throwing money at us left, right and centre,” she says.

She admits the funds are welcome in a small town like Wells, but at the same time it complicates the community’s relationship with Osisko. The last six months have been tumultuous for Wells residents. Big industrial developments tend to stir up passions, for and against. These passions led to the resignation of the town’s one-term mayor in November, amid accusations about a conflict of interest because he worked as a machine operator at the existing mine. Three councillors resigned shortly after.

Wells’ new mayor, Ed Coleman, was elected on Feb. 5. He’s an out-of-towner from Quesnel with deep ties to gold country, having worked for seven years as CEO of Barkerville Historic Trust. It was a landslide victory in small-town terms; Coleman took 89 votes, more than tripling those cast for his rival. Coleman plans to remain in Quesnel and commute to Wells for council meetings. In a phone interview with The Narwhal, Coleman rated the Cariboo Gold Project a “seven out of 10.” He has concerns about the exact location of mine infrastructure but believes the company is being receptive to public feedback.

“Osisko has had a community office in Wells since 2015, and the president has a home here. He’s been very accessible to the community,” Coleman says. “You’re going to get a strong reaction to any industrial development but I think COVID-19 has made the communication piece a little difficult.”

Coleman says the promise of upgrades to power, water and sewer infrastructure, which is part of Cariboo Gold’s pitch, could be a boon for the small cash-strapped community.  

More than 1,600 technical concerns raised through environmental assessment

Judy Campbell says Osisko has done a lot of things right. 

“In a lot of ways they’re pleasant to deal with,” Campbell says. “But nowhere in their application do they really paint a picture of what a day in the life of Wells would be like when the mine is open.”

One of the first things visitors to Wells would see is a mine site services building a few minutes walk from the visitors centre at Jack of Clubs Lake, a two-kilometre long lake surrounded by forest on the west side of Wells. That’s where ore would be crushed in a concentrator, sorted and stored while a steady stream of trucks hauls the concentrate 110 kilometres from the mine to the Quesnel River Mill. There, Osisko will produce gold bars and store mine tailings above the banks of the Quesnel River. At the same time trucks carrying waste rock would be constantly shuttling to and from the mine services building. A new transmission line to power the facility would cut a 70-kilometre swath through the forest. Taken together, it’s an industrial footprint that will have an impact on small town life in Wells, good and bad.

Last July, Osisko submitted its application to the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office, triggering a 180-day review process. With the public comment period closed, the environmental assessment office published a notice earlier this year that Osisko’s application for an environmental assessment certificate had been reviewed, along with a summary of comments on it from First Nations, the community advisory committee and a technical advisory committee — composed of seven provincial government ministries alongside several other government bodies. 

The notice suggests Osisko still has much work to do to get Cariboo Gold past the finish line. The Lhatko Dené First Nation, Xatsull First Nation and Williams Lake First Nation highlighted a host of concerns, including downstream impacts on fish and fish habitat from its mill on the Quesnel River, impacts on the southern mountain caribou herd near Barkerville and bioaccumulation of metals in plants used by First Nations.

In addition, the technical advisory committee listed more than 1,600 concerns related to technical aspects of the mine proposal. According to the environmental assessment office, approximately 42 per cent remained unresolved at the end of January. The concerns range from impacts on wildlife to human health, to air and water quality.

Now it’s up to Osisko to submit an acceptable revised application to move the process ahead. Callahan, the company spokesperson, said Osisko hopes to have an accepted application and an environmental certificate from the minister of energy, mines and low carbon innovation by late 2022.

The complicated relationship between tourism and mining

The tension between tourism and resource extraction is weighing heavy on Dave Jorgenson’s mind these days. He’s a long-time Wells entrepreneur who owns and operates the Frog On The Bog gift shop with his wife, Cheryl Macarthy, as well as three separate accommodations, popular with tourists visiting Barkerville and Bowron Lake. He’s thoughtful, and at times conflicted, knowing that his business benefits from both the region’s colourful mining history as well as its peaceful surroundings.  

“People think that I’m trying to kill this mine but that’s not the case,” Jorgenson says.

At a production rate of 4,750 tonnes of ore per day, the Cariboo Gold Project falls under the 5,000 tonnes per day threshold that triggers a more rigorous federal review. In Jorgenson’s submission to the provincial assessment office during the public comment period, he argued for more study of the potential impacts of the proposed mine. He also asked the company to consider moving some of the mining infrastructure, including the concentrator at Jack of Clubs Lake. It would be less of an eyesore and source of noise and air pollution, Jorgenson tells The Narwhal.

Jorgenson is concerned the issues raised by the technical advisory committee don’t address community values or quality of life. “That’s worrisome to me,” he says.

Other comments submitted by community members illustrate strong support for the project. 

Wells local John Aitken called Cariboo Gold “a blessing for all of us.”

And more nuanced comments come from people who aren’t necessarily opposed to the mine but want to make sure it’s done right. In a lengthy submission, Cameron Beck, a member of the community advisory committee, said he was “looking forward to the benefits, both to Wells and all of British Columbia,” but added that he was disappointed by the company’s environmental assessment application. When reached by The Narwhal, Beck said in an email his views on the mine haven’t changed.

“The projected life of the mine is just 16 years. That’s here today, gone tomorrow. Preliminary mine activities have already increased heavy truck traffic, noise and dust. Bright lights flood the night sky. The cost of housing for retirees and artists is increasing,” Beck said in an emailed response. “The mine and the increase in population will, nonetheless, have benefits, too. We need to partner with the mine to develop a formally agreed-upon plan to ensure those benefits aren’t outweighed by the negative impacts.”

Cariboo Gold could set precedent for future B.C. environmental assessments

Cariboo Gold has for the most part slipped under the public radar. However, the project is being watched closely by the mining industry and some environmental watchdogs who view it as a road test for B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Act, updated in 2019.

The updated legislation is intended to ensure First Nations, communities and the public in general can participate in a transparent assessment process, says Michael Goehring, president and CEO of the Mining Association of B.C. He wouldn’t discuss Cariboo Gold in particular.

Gavin Smith, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, says no project has yet to go the distance to final decision under the updated law and its associated regulations and agreements. He believes the outcome of the Cariboo Gold assessment will be a measure of the province’s commitment to important regulatory changes, like more robust First Nations consultation and the establishment of community advisory committees. 

A project like Cariboo Gold can have economic benefits that spin far beyond the district boundaries of Wells, says Joel McKay, CEO of Northern Development, a regional economic development corporation based in Prince George. He refers to Cariboo Gold as the “classic dilemma around big industrial development.”

“Wells is a brownfield site with a long history of mining. And the tourism sector has been built around giving visitors a taste of what the gold rush was like back in the 1800s,” he says in a phone interview. “We have something that would be excellent for the economy, but there will be costs. And a lot of those costs will be borne by the community of Wells.” 

McKay says it’s not unusual for there to be a lot of questions and issues that still need to be addressed at this stage in the process, and he has “no doubt” the mine will be built.

“The big question is will the economic benefits outweigh the costs?” he asks. “Wells and Barkerville have a vibrant tourism and arts community that, if managed, can be sustainable. Mines eventually close.”

Osisko’s mining track record worries residents and onlookers

It’s not just the devil in the details of the Cariboo Gold proposal that worries Campbell and Jorgenson; it’s also Osisko’s mining track record — in Wells and Quebec. 

In 2011 the company opened what it bills as Canada’s largest open-pit gold mine, in Malartic, a city of nearly 3,000 people, 560 kilometres northwest of Montreal. Osisko ran the mine until 2014 then sold it to Canadian Malartic Mining Corporation.

Life with the mine was difficult for Malartic citizens like Diane Gagnon. In March 2016 she travelled to Kamloops, which at the time was faced with the proposed open-pit Ajax gold mine within a few kilometres of the city’s boundaries. 

In an open letter to Kamloops city council she described “experiencing serious problems and community impacts related to daily blasting, ground tremors, air blasts, dust and noise” from the Malartic mine, adding that the mine also “created deep community divisions”

The same year that Gagnon travelled to Kamloops to share her cautionary tale, Malartic residents launched a class action lawsuit. Osisko wasn’t named in the suit because they no longer owned the mine, but the company’s actions while owner were put under the microscope.

Trudel, Johnston & Lespérance, the firm that represented the plaintiffs, pointed to hundreds of notices of non-conformity issued by Quebec’s Environment Ministry related to noise, air quality, earth tremors and other permit violations. The notices go back to 2008, when Osisko was building the mine, through to 2014 when it sold the mine to Canadian Malartic, and they continued to pile up under the new owners. In 2019, complainants reached an out-of-court settlement with Canadian Malartic Mining Corporation.

Asked about the infractions at the Malartic Mine, Callahan, the spokesperson for Osisko, said in an emailed response that they weren’t representative of Osisko’s ownership and that the company “was not a party to the lawsuit.”

He cited a 2011 public opinion poll Osisko commissioned that indicated 87 per cent of Malartic residents had a good or very good opinion of Osisko. 

He dismissed any comparisons between Wells and Malartic, noting that while Malartic was a major open-pit operation, mining at the Cariboo Gold Project is entirely underground, with processing also taking place either underground or in a sound-insulated building.

Back in Wells, Dave Jorgenson also believes Osisko has a lot to answer for when it comes to its more recent activities at Bonanza Ledge. In five years, the company has faced several operational and environmental reprimands and fines. In 2018, the company was fined $200,000 for violating the federal Fisheries Act after discharging effluent into Lowhee Creek, a tributary of the fish-bearing Willow River. The conviction earned Barkerville Gold Mines a spot on the federal Environmental Offenders Registry. 

In early 2020, the province’s environmental protection division handed the company fines totalling $53,000 for failing to comply with the terms of its permit under the Environmental Management Act, as well as another $30,200, in part for tailings storage violations.

Last May, the province again fined Barkverille Gold Mines, this time totalling $80,000 for exceeding discharge permit limits for cadmium, cobalt, copper, nickel, nitrite, sulfate and zinc. The province noted in its environmental compliance report that it was the “second penalty for the same contravention.” 

Concerned about these violations, Jorgenson sent a letter in mid-October to Bruce Ralston, Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources. In it, he says he raised concerns about Osisko’s permit infractions at Bonanza Ledge, as well as the proposed locations of Cariboo Gold’s infrastructure. Ralston responded the next month, defending Osisko’s record saying the company “has made progress addressing overdue orders and non-compliances.”  

Around that time, the minister of mines amended the company’s Bonanza Ledge permit, allowing production to increase from 150,000 to 215,000 tonnes per year. 

According to Callahan, Osisko is working hard to do better at Bonanza Ledge. He said the company “has worked with experts on reclamation and closure plans for the Bonanza Ledge and the QR Mill and has posted $40 million in bonds for that work at both sites.” He said the company inherited problems from the previous owner and the penalties that led to Barkerville Gold Mines being listed on the Environmental Offenders Registry occurred before Osisko became sole owner of the mine. (Osisko made its initial investment in 2016 and took full ownership three years later — the year after being listed on the registry.)

Osisko has invested $4 million in a new water treatment plant and another $1.5 million in a de-nitrification plant. Kent Karemaker, media spokesperson for the Ministry of Mines, said in an email to The Narwhal that a decision has yet to be made on Barkerville Gold Mines’ application to amend its Environmental Management Act permit in order to operate the new treatment plant.

When it comes to Cariboo Gold, Callahan said Osisko has done extensive studies on the proposed mine site with an aim of reducing the development’s impacts. 

On paper, Osisko’s Cariboo Gold Project hits some high notes, Ugo Lapointe, former Canadian coordinator for MiningWatch told The Narwhal in an interview. He lists the use of electric vehicles, sound insulation and the proposed dry stacking of tailings, which he says is considered industry best practice. Tailings are what’s left behind after metal is extracted from the ore. Mining companies have conventionally stored this waste material in impoundment ponds, but it has proven time and again to be a dangerous convention — as the disastrous Mount Polley dam collapse illustrated.

Globally, experts recommend the more secure method of dewatering tailings and stacking them as dry cakes. But without a technical requirement from the province, it’s up to the mine operator to make this choice. That Osisko plans to use the more costly but safer technique is a positive sign but, Lapointe says, the QR Mill and tailings storage site’s proximity to the salmon-bearing Quesnel River, needs close scrutiny.

And in the end, actions always speak louder than best intentions.

“Of course, in Malartic, Osisko promised the moon, but on the ground things were much different,” Lapointe says.

Saving the mine and the town of Wells

Down at Frog on the Bog, wintertime business is slow. Cheryl Macarthy has just pulled her locally famous carrot cake from the oven. Dave Jorgenson sits down for a coffee. Gold fever is nothing new to this part of B.C. It informs art, culture, lore and a sense of place in Wells. Nobody denies it, not even Jorgenson. After all, one of the gift shop’s top sellers is the Secret Society of Dead Gold Miners T-shirt. 

Jorgenson sips his coffee, then sticks a fork into a slice of carrot cake. Catastrophic forest fire seasons and COVID-19 have not been kind to tourism in Cariboo country in recent years. In this light, the heady promise of high-paying mining jobs can be seductive and alluring. 

He has the sense the environmental assessment office is steamrolling to one conclusion: project approval. Smith, of West Coast Environmental Law, says under the old environmental assessment act, the province “very, very rarely rejected a project at the end of an [environmental assessment].” The proposed Ajax gold and copper mine, for which the province denied an environmental certificate in 2017, is one rare example. Whether that will be the case under the new act is yet to be seen. 

Wells was built on mining, and a modern gold rush could shape the destiny of this little Cariboo community.   

“Wells has reinvented itself to become the outdoor recreation hub for exploring and celebrating the surrounding wilderness in all seasons, and it’s a regional centre for the arts,” Jorgenson says. “All I’m trying to do is to save this mine and save our town.”

Updated on Apr. 12 at 10:45 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the location of Wells, B.C. as east of Quesnel, not west.

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Wayne White parks his pick-up at the end of a bumpy logging road and steps out where Pyrrhotite Creek squeezes through a tiny slot in the bedrock. 

It’s an innocuous looking trickle, but for decades this creek carried toxic effluent from the abandoned Mount Washington copper mine, virtually killing the Tsolum River.

“Four years of mining and a 40-year reclamation effort,” White, president of the Tsolum River Restoration Society, says as he gazes out over the Comox Valley on the central east coast of Vancouver Island. 

He points to where the Tsolum River winds to its confluence with the Puntledge River, a few kilometres from Comox Harbour.

In 1967, after a year of construction and less than three money-losing years of operation, the Japanese backers of this ill-fated open-pit mine went bankrupt, leaving behind mounds of copper ore and waste rock blasted from the north side of Mount Washington. 

Perched 1,300 metres above sea level, the mine was plagued from the start by a deep snowpack that lingered well into summer and made work difficult.

The miners walked away, but the environmental impact didn’t.

Wayne White, President of the Tsolum River Restoration Society walks along the edge of the copper mine on Mount Washington. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The site of the Mount Washington mine on Vancouver Island. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Today, it lives on as a textbook example of the complex and long-term challenge of mitigating acid rock drainage. 

When mine waste and tailings are exposed to air and water, oxidation occurs. If mineral conditions are right, this process can produce acidic runoff capable of damaging downstream aquatic environments for decades — even centuries — if left unchecked. 

Even before the last ore truck rumbled down the mountain, exposed mine waste was already leaching metal into Pyrrhotite Creek that would eventually decimate fish populations in the Tsolum River. 

A v-shaped water gauge on Pyrrhotite Creek headwaters, just below the site of the Mount Washington mine. The majority of water testing done on Pyrrotite Creek is conducted here. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

A shot of a rock cut on the Mount Washington mine access road showing the signature white streaks where copper sulphides, or salts, have precipitated from rock containing copper ore. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The cost to the local economy was pegged at between $2 and $3 million per year in lost fishing opportunities alone.

It took a multi-decade, multi-stakeholder effort to clean up this mine and nurse the Tsolum River back to health. 

But when it comes to metal mines, the remediation work is never really over. 

White understands this all too well. Before retiring several years ago, he was a career civil servant who worked in the environment ministry’s pollution control branch.

“We’ve learned as a community group that we constantly need to keep our foot on the gas to make sure government does what it says it’s going to do,” he tells me.

A map of the Mount Washington copper mine in proximity to three creeks that feed the Tsolum River. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

‘The Hermitage’

Father Charles Brandt, another local concerned with the river, took a rather unconventional route to river conservation.

He was raised on a farm in Kansas, served in the U.S. Airforce and briefly studied ornithology at Cornell University, before turning to theology. In 1948, he was ordained into the Anglican church, before converting to Catholicism. He joined a Benedictine monastery in Oklahoma and eventually, this winding path led him to Vancouver Island.

In 1965, he moved to “The Hermitage,” a pastoral property next to the Tsolum River, north of Courtenay, where he lived until 1970. 

Father Charles Brandt, longtime environmental advocate involved in the restoration of Tsolum River. Brandt is photographed in his book binding studio where a poster of the Mount Washington mine hangs on his wall. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

In the 1980s Brandt helped raise awareness about the collapse of salmon populations in the Tsolum River. “We started writing letters to everybody we could think of in government telling them that the Tsolum River was dead,” he told The Narwhal. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Brandt, 97-years-old, helped found the Tsolum River Restoration Society. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Brandt moved there as part of a plan to commune spiritually with nature, but his early days at The Hermitage also introduced him to fly fishing — and, eventually, a lifelong commitment to the Tsolum itself. 

He would prove to be as dedicated to river conservation as he is to his faith. Brandt played a crucial role in the establishment of the Tsolum River Restoration Society, a leading force in the river’s rehabilitation.

“The first winter I was at The Hermitage I was walking across the Farnham Road bridge and looked down and saw a fisherman holding a beautiful 22-pound steelhead,” Brandt, now 97, says, sitting in the living room of his home on the Oyster River. 

A mine cleanup that fell through the cracks

The Mount Washington mine is located on private land, thanks to a legacy that dates back to 1884, when a coal baron named Robert Dunsmuir was granted land on Vancouver Island — a giveaway that would eventually total 8,100 square kilometres, and included surface and subsurface rights. 

In the ensuing years, these rights were parcelled up and sold to various interests, creating a muddy jurisdictional tangle that made it difficult for any one company to be held responsible for cleanup of the mine.

A view from the Mount Washington copper mine. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The mine site’s ownership remains divided between companies and the provincial government. Better Resources Ltd. owns the precious metal, forest company Timberwest owns the trees and surface rights, and the Crown owns the subsurface rights. 

Had the site been on Crown land, the abandoned mine would have fallen under the Ministry of Environment’s contaminated sites regulation — but being on private land it slipped through the cracks and landed in a sort of jurisdictional purgatory.

Making things more complicated, the mine’s closure also predated the introduction of reclamation regulations under the Mines Act in 1969. These regulations, now called the Health, Safety and Reclamation Code, hold companies accountable to “protect and reclaim land and watercourses affected by mining.” The act also requires mining companies to post financial security to pay for clean-up (although amounts required under B.C. laws are regularly criticized for being woefully inadequate).

In the case of the Mount Washington mine, the absence of a clear path forward meant the job of sounding the alarm fell to volunteers like White and Brandt.

‘No fish in the river’

Brandt became hooked on steelhead fishing at a time when metal leaching from Mount Washington had yet to trickle its way down through the watershed. 

Back in the 1940s, the Tsolum was an angler’s paradise, with large numbers of pink, coho, chum and steelhead salmon.

But even then, the watershed was far from pristine. 

The Tsolum River. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Industrial logging — during a time when the importance of riparian setbacks to river health was poorly understood — caused erosion that damaged the natural shape and flow of the river and the pools, riffles and gravel spawning beds that are so important to fish. So did the removal of tonnes of gravel from the riverbed used to construct the runways at the Canadian Forces Base in Comox in the early 1940s. 

Despite these challenges, the river managed to support healthy runs of salmon — until the acid runoff took its toll.

The spectre of acidic runoff remained more or less hidden until 1982, when the Department of Fisheries and Oceans released 2.5 million fry from a test hatchery on Headquarters Creek into the Tsolum. Two years later, a mere 10 pinks were counted in the river. 

Pink returns tend to fluctuate greatly, but this decline was seen as catastrophic and mobilized the local steelhead-fishing community.

“We started writing letters to everybody we could think of in government telling them that the Tsolum River was dead,” Brandt recalls.

That caught the interest of John Deniseger, a government biologist heading up the Ministry of Environment’s environmental impact assessment branch at the Nanaimo office. Though the presence of copper in the Tsolum River was already known to fisheries scientists, the link between metal leaching at the mine and copper spikes in the river was poorly understood.

“It took a couple of years of detective work in the early 1980s. We knew there were no fish in the river, we just needed to show why,” Deniseger, now retired, says over the phone from his home in Bowser.

“Salts” form on copper ore, making copper water soluble and thus dangerous to fish. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

A pulse of springtime, copper-laced water

The Mount Washington mine poses unique challenges for local rivers, in part because of its location high in the watershed where snow can be deep enough to bury a four-storey building.

Runoff from Pyrrhotite Creek — fed by snow melting high above near the Mount Washington mine — peaks in May and June, sending a pulse of copper-laced water into the Tsolum in late spring and early summer at the precise time when the river’s water levels are lowest. If the flux of toxic run-off had come at times when water levels were already high, natural dilution could have been at least part of the solution, without anyone pointing a finger at the mine site.

The timing was poor for another reason; copper-laced water flowed into the Tsolum at a particularly sensitive time for fish populations, when fry are only just emerging from their gravel spawning beds and are at their most vulnerable. 

A graph showing the annual dilution ratio of Pyrrhotite Creek within the Tsolum River. The flow of Pyrrhotite Creek is mainly driven by snowfall in the winter months, providing more water to dilute copper. January shows a dilution rate of 440:1, 440 parts water to one part copper. In May the dilution ratio plummets to about 50:1, 50 parts water to one part copper. Source: Tsolum River Partnership. Graph: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Though the pinks leave the river earlier in the spring — thereby avoiding peak copper levels later in the season — the overall health of the river was degraded, Deniseger says, making it hostile to salmon, trout and the freshwater invertebrates on which young fish depend. 

Deniseger’s sampling showed that, by the late 1980s, spring peaks of copper in the Tsolum ranged between 70 and 90 parts per billion — four to six times higher than the 15 parts per billion benchmark considered to be toxic to fish over the long term.

Further testing enabled Deniseger to zero in on the north pit of the mine as the primary source of acidic runoff. 

Locals now knew they had a toxic river on their hands, yet it would take many more years of trial, error and community pressure on the government until anything was done to set it right.

The Mount Washington mine where water is not diverted around capped waste piles. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

A step in the right direction

The province undertook its first major reclamation effort between 1988 and 1992.

Though the price tag was $1.5 million, it was a rather low-tech endeavour: covering the mine waste with a cap of glacial till and building a channel to divert water around the contaminated area.

Expectations were high, and the province even announced an ambitious target to reduce levels of dissolved copper by 95 per cent. 

Water testing from 1993 to 1996, however, revealed the effort was a dismal failure. Although there was evidence of some decrease in copper levels in the following years, no one could agree on the reason. 

The Tsolum River task force, which included community members, government agencies, local First Nations and industry, lobbied in 1998 to have the Tsolum declared one of B.C.’s most endangered rivers.

The Tsolum River. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

White holds up copper-bearing rocks at the mine site. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The remnants of the abandoned copper mill at the Mount Washington mine. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

By 2003, a new solution was floated: diverting Pyrrhotite Creek in the Spectacle Lake wetland, located below the old mine mill site. 

The goal was to use the natural wetland to filter out metals before the water was returned to Pyrrhotite Creek and eventually into the Tsolum River.

It worked, in part. Copper was reduced by another 40 per cent, falling well short of the target deemed acceptable for the Tsolum. 

Deniseger says the partial success was an important milestone because it began to shift public perception of the Tsolum. 

“We needed to change the perception that the river couldn’t be fixed,” Deniseger says. “After the wetland diversion it was like someone had flipped a switch. There was an instant positive impact on water quality.”

Yet Deniseger says he and others knew the passive form of treatment would likely be temporary at best; the small wetland’s peak effectiveness was expected to last between 10 and 15 years then gradually diminish over time.

Hiem along the banks of the Tsolum River. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The rebirth of a river

The positive results from the wetland approach also led to new interest from industry, catching the eye, in particular, of the Mining Association of B.C.

“Mount Washington was giving the mining industry a black eye,” White says. “They had an interest in being part of a good news story.”

Along with the provincial ministry of mines, the Mining Association of B.C. joined the multi-stakeholder Tsolum River Partnership and the search for a more permanent fix began. 

The partnership settled on a novel technique that had been used in other industrial clean-up applications, but rarely for mine closures. It involved capping the offending mine waste with a thick bed of glacial till, then laying down a bituminous membrane — basically a half-centimetre-thick layer of bitumen sandwiched between robust geotextile fabric — over which another metre or so of glacial till would be laid.

Armed with a plan vetted and approved by mining reclamation experts, Deniseger and the partnership asked the Treasury Board for $4.5 million to carry out the project. 

“Considering annual economic losses of of $2.7 million from the Tsolum, it was a good return on investment,” Deniseger says.

They got the funding, and in 2009, contractors got to work. Over the next six months, dump trucks carried more than 128,000 tonnes of gravel up the steep mine access road, while workers rolled out 12 kilometres of the membrane, heat sealing the joints by hand. 

Afterwards, much of the site was covered with logging debris and replanted with alder as an erosion control measure.

In 2009 waste rock at the Mount Washington mine was covered with geomembrane and buried under 128,000 tonnes of gravel. Drainage ditches built into the cap divert clean water away from the capped waste. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Pryyhotite Creek flowing into the natural Pyrrhotite Creek wetland. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

A small amount of water from an under pipe that drains the area beneath the 12 kilometres of geomembrane. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Fish responded quickly. 

In 2013, a little more than three years after the north pit was capped, roughly 61,800 pink salmon returned to spawn in the Tsolum, the largest return since the 1950s. In 2015, 129,000 pinks came back to the river — a record return since fish counts began in 1953.

For Brandt, it was like witnessing the rebirth of a beloved river.

“It felt really good to see fish back in the river, that all that volunteer effort had paid off,” Brandt says.

Wayne White calls it a “good news story,” one that has not gone unnoticed. 

The Tsolum River Partnership received the 2011 Premier’s Award and the 2011 B.C. Mine Reclamation Award.

Copper concentrations in Pyrrhotite Creek, 2007-2009. Source: Tsolum River Partners. Graph: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

For his part, Deniseger was personally honoured in 2013 with the Premier’s Award for many contributions throughout his career, not the least of which was helping to forge the unique partnership necessary to help solve the Mount Washington problem. 

So far the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources appears confident about the integrity of the Mount Washington mine remediation. In an emailed statement, a ministry spokesperson wrote that inspections in 2018 and 2019 “reviewed and determined that the observed erosion of the till is not compromising the cover,” noting that a rip discovered in the cover was promptly repaired.

White holds a piece of the bituminous membrane used to cover and seal mine waste on Mount Washington. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

White at Pyrrhotite Creek just downstream of the Mount Washington mine. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

“The contractor monitoring the site is reviewing the feasibility of establishing a vegetation cover,” the statement said.

The costs of failure are devastatingly expensive, and impacts can last for centuries. In the western United States, historic mining has damaged an estimated 25 per cent of all watersheds. 

In Canada, taxpayers are on the hook for astronomical mine remediation costs at the Giant mine near Yellowknife and Yukon’s Faro mine, both of which surpass an estimated $1 billion, while the Britannia Mine on Howe Sound is expected to cost taxpayers $100 million.

The Tulsequah Chief mine, built in the 1950s along the B.C.-Alaska border, has leaked acid mine drainage into a tributary of the Taku, the prevailing salmon-producing river for southeast Alaska. Despite pressure from Alaska, the province has been unable to successfully clean up the mine for more than 60 years. 

An ongoing community effort

On a sunny morning, biologist Caroline Heim, the Tsolum River Restoration Society project coordinator, walks a stretch of the lower Tsolum River in hip waders, looking for pink salmon that dart through the riffles in schools of 20 and 30. 

More than 20 volunteers have turned out for the annual fish count. The water is so clear that Heim can easily spot redds, the shallow depressions of clean gravel scoured by female salmon into which they deposit eggs.

“The main issues facing the Tsolum today are low water flows in the summer and restoring riparian areas,” Heim says, adding that sedimentation from past logging continues to have downstream impacts on fish habitat.

Industrial logging along the Tsolum River occurred before the importance of riparian zones were widely understood. Logging, in addition to the removal of tons of gravel from the rivers bed, disturbed the natural spawning grounds of salmon in the Tsolum. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The banks of the Tsolum River have been restored after years of intensive logging. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Hiem helped replant the banks of the Tsolum River with willow as part of the Tsolum River Restoration Society’s work. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

In many ways, today’s Tsolum is a picture of a healthy river. 

But the story of the river’s health is still evolving.

For White, Mount Washington is like a rocky relationship that you can’t get out of, no matter how hard you try.

Since the 2009 pit capping, runoff has begun to erode channels in a steep section of the covered mine site — the only part of the site not revegetated or covered with woody debris. The fear is that the membrane will be uncovered and exposed to damaging UV radiation.

“It’s something we’re concerned about,” White admits. 

White says the restoration of the Tsolum River is a “good news story” but says the mine site still requires regular monitoring and maintenance. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Twelve kilometres of bituminous membrane were rolled out to seal mining waste at the Mount Washington mine. White, pictured with the author far left, says that runoff has washed away sections of the gravel cover, leading him to worry the geomembrane underneath could become exposed to damaging UV radiation. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

The Tsolum River Restoration Society plans to continue to put pressure on the government to make sure the mine is properly cleaned up.

Public pressure may be the most important piece of any mine reclamation effort, according to William Price, an environmental scientist with Natural Resource Canada’s mine effluent section.  

Speaking at an October seminar in Smithers, hosted by the Bulkley Valley Research Centre, Price noted that a robust regime of maintenance and monitoring is critical to prevent the unraveling of years of volunteer effort and expensive remediation. 

According to Price, it’s not whether or not society will need the products of sulphide mining, which go into electric vehicle batteries, flat screen TVs, wiring homes and countless other every day utilitarian needs. Rather, it’s whether or not we’ll manage mines responsibly.

Update December 17, 2019 at 3:45 p.m. PST. Two photo captions were updated to clarify the role of water drainage on the mine site. The first concerns the under pipe which drains water captured under the geomembrane. The second caption clarifies the image of Pyrrhotite Creek draining into the natural wetland. The costs of clean up at the Faro and Britannia mines were clarified to reflect the fact these amounts are estimates and not costs already paid by taxpayers.

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Rare species like American badgers, flammulated owls, yellow-breasted chats, desert night snakes and western rattlesnakes make their home in the southern Okanagan Valley grasslands in the heart of B.C.’s wine, golf and beach country. 

For more than 15 years, efforts to create a national park in the grasslands, one of Canada’s most unusual and beautiful landscapes, have started, stalled and re-started. 

Cattle graze near the border of a proposed national park reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior, just west of the White Lake Grasslands Protected Area, near Okanagan Falls, B.C. Photo: Jake Sherman

On July 3, the fiercely debated South Okanagan-Similkameen National Park Reserve took a large step closer to becoming a reality with the signing of a memorandum of understanding among the province of B.C., the government of Canada and the Syilx/Okanagan Nation.

The memorandum establishes a working boundary for the park and the framework for negotiations moving forward, but it doesn’t seal the deal on the national park, which has polarized pro- and anti-park factions since the idea was first pitched in the early 2000s.

“It’s an important milestone for sure,” says Richard Cannings, MP for the South Okanagan-West Kootenays and the federal NDP’s natural resources critic. “I grew up in these grasslands and it’s one of the top-four endangered ecosystems in Canada.”

But Cannings, who is also a well known biologist and field guide author, is also cautious about the future of the area long on the radar of conservationists and scientists.

South Okanagan-West Kootenay MP Richard Cannings photographed on his property above Penticton, B.C. Photo: Jake Sherman

B.C.’s southern grasslands — which include an arid ecosystem around Osoyoos reminiscent of the Arizona desert and characterized by antelope brush and fragrant sagebrush — face intense development pressure. People want to live and play in an area known for its hot summers and mild winters. Changing normalized patterns of behaviour on the landscape, whether it’s ATVing or hunting, is always an uphill struggle. 

Desert brush photographed in the White Lake Basin, which is at the centre of a debate over the future of a proposed national park reserve in British Columbia’s southern grasslands. Photo: Jake Sherman

Desert brush in the White Lake Basin. Photo: Jake Sherman

By national park standards, the proposed South Okanagan-Similkameen National Park Reserve is small. It’s roughly 300 square kilometres and covers an area from Taylor Lake north of Oliver to the U.S.-Canada border, bounded by the Similkameen River and the west side of the Okanagan Valley. (Banff National Park, Canada’s first national park, is more than 6,600 square kilometres by comparison.) 

The park would be composed of a patchwork of existing provincially protected lands, open Crown land and private parcels. More than 30 federally listed species at risk and 60 provincially listed species live within the proposed park boundaries.

The White Lake basin and grasslands. Photo: Jake Sherman

The White Lake Grassland Protected Area, basin and biodiversity ranch are at the centre of a heated debate of the future of a proposed national park reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior. Photo: Jake Sherman

It’s a naturalist’s paradise and also unfinished business for Parks Canada. It would fill a gap in Canada’s national parks plan, which identifies B.C.’s southern grasslands as one of 39 eco-regions that form a distinctive component of the national landscape — an ecosystem that so far lacks national park representation. 

Ken Wu is co-founder of the Ancient Forest Alliance, a conservation group he left early this year to launch a new organization, the Endangered Ecosystem Alliance. 

“Most people associate me with big trees and coastal forests,” Wu says. “But I believe this is one of the greatest conservation opportunities in Canadian history. It would have some of the highest densities of listed species of any national park in Canada.”

However the anti-park faction is as passionate as pro-park conservationists like Wu and Richard Cannings, whose professional association with this landscape dates back to the 1970s when, as a young university grad, he got a job surveying existing scientific literature on B.C.’s interior grassland regions as possible candidates for protection.

A home in the unincorporated town of Olalla, B.C. Photo: Jake Sherman

The issue has divided communities such as Oliver, where in April the confusingly named anti-national park group known as the South Okanagan Similkameen Preservation Society held a public meeting that drew 300 people. 

Many in attendance were opposed to the proposed park, including Rick Knodel, the Area C director for the regional district of Okanangan-Similkameen, who likens a national park to sacrificing local sovereignty to the federal government. 

Antipathy toward Parks Canada and the federal government runs deep among society members. Group spokesman Lionel Trudel, an Okanagan Valley-based photographer, insists the society supports conservation of the area’s unique grasslands, just not by bureaucrats based in Ottawa.

“We as a society are looking elsewhere for solutions and we don’t want Parks Canada as an entity in this region,” Trudel says.

He says the prospect of thousands of new visitors a national park would bring to the busy Okanagan Valley tourism corridor would add unwanted pressure to policing, ambulance services and other resources, as well as more traffic to the already busy Highway 97. 

The Crowsnest Highway, between Osoyoos and Keremeos, B.C., the site of a proposed national park reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior. Photo: Jake Sherman

Trudel also says his group is concerned about potential special hunting rights for First Nations in a national park reserve that would otherwise be off-limits to hunters, ATV users and other groups.

Parks Canada held a series of 39 information meetings between January and March 2019, which were attended by more than 600 people, and also received feedback on the park from another 2,800 people in the form of  a survey. The results reflected a sharp divide between support and opposition.

Hunters and Marron Valley, B.C., residents Marty Clark, Sean Duncan, Doug Cowe, Michelle Parott and Dominic Gorkoff oppose the establishment of a national park reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior. Photo: Jake Sherman

MP Cannings believes many concerns about the park are based on misinformation that continues to spread among anti-park activists, such as the claim that Parks Canada will expropriate private land and drive out cattle ranchers. 

Neither is true according to Sarah Boyle, a Parks Canada project manager. She says the federal government cannot expropriate private property in order to establish or enlarge a national park or national park reserve.

“Private lands would only ever be purchased on a willing-seller/willing-buyer basis,” Boyle told The Narwhal.

Boyle added that Parks Canada will continue to work with ranching families to provide “stability and certainty on Crown grazing lands, tenures, water and other resource values.”

Cannings has heard Parks Canada address these concerns many times in the past.

“It’s frustrating to be going to public meetings 17 years into the process and still hear people talking about expropriation,” Cannings says. “Honestly I think there’s a lot of mistrust and dislike of the federal government that’s behind this.”

Uthlxanica7, 67, is a Syilx elder who opposes the establishment of a national park reserve in British Columbia’s Southern Interior. He lives on the Keremeos Forks Indian Reserve #12 and #12A between Kaleden and Keremeos, B.C., and said he sees the federal government’s encroachment as yet another tool of colonial exploitation. “The land is my home,” he told the Narwhal. “I don’t need the federal government to explain that to me. They tell me we’re multicultural. I’m not a multi-culture. I come from here. History repeats itself. Look at Yellowstone where my people can’t even get their medicine. The animals are leaving. The earth is talking. No one wants to listen. This is not gonna be fit for nobody.” Photo: Jake Sherman

Don Gayton is an American-born Vietnam War resistor, author and grasslands ecologists who has lived in Canada since the late 1960s. For the past dozen years Gayton has made his home in Summerland on the west shore of Okanagan Lake, about 40 kilometres from the proposed park’s northern boundary. He calls grasslands “the Rodney Dangerfield of ecosystems.” 

“They get no respect. In mountain parks, the scenery with all the waterfalls, glaciers and mountains does all the work for you. In grassland country, you have to do the work and get down on your hand knees to truly appreciate it. If you put in the effort, the quiet and amazing diversity is breathtaking,” Gayton says. 

“But this is a challenging place to create a national park. It’s basically a suburban area.” 

Don Gayton is a grasslands ecologist and the author of six books. He is a vocal proponent of a national park reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior. Photo: Jake Sherman

For park opponents worried about hunting access, Gayton points out that national parks can act as refugia for wildlife, which could benefit hunters in the long run. But as a grasslands ecologist, concerns about lost hunting opportunities rank low in importance. 

“Species like antelope brush, badgers and tiger salamanders are at the very northern end of their range. Their genetics are important because they’ve had to adapt,” Gayton says, pointing out that the South Okanagan belongs to the vast and arid Western Great Basin that spans North America from Mexico to just across the U.S.-Canada border. “This is an extremely rare and important region, ecologically.”  

That’s why he believes the region deserves the highest form of protection possible — and in Canada that means national park status. 

However, Gayton says Parks Canada is omitting two areas from the park proposal that biologists consider critical from a species and ecosystem perspective — Vaseux Lake and the White Lake Basin.

Vaseux Lake is the only place in the south Okanagan Valley where undeveloped land reaches the valley floor on both sides. Photo: Jake Sherman

Vaseux Lake, located between Okanagan Falls and Oliver, is a critical area excluded from the current national park reserve proposal. Photo: Jake Sherman

Vaseux Lake is found where the Okanagan Valley pinches to a narrow opening north of Oliver and is bounded on the west by soaring cliffs. It’s the only place in the south Okanagan Valley where undeveloped land reaches the valley floor on both sides. 

Immediately to the west is the natural grassland basin of White Lake, where nationally significant populations of the endangered sage thrasher are found, as well as unique mosses that thrive in the saline conditions of White Lake, tiger salamanders and a host of other listed species. 

Gayton calls White and Vaseux lakes one of the “jewels in the grasslands crown” and, like most conservationists, he’s confounded that they have been omitted from the national park reserve proposal. 

The White Lake biodiversity ranch between Okanagan Falls and Marron Valley, B.C. Photo: Jake Sherman

White Lake is one of the “jewels in the grasslands crown,” according to ecologist Don Gayton. Photo: Jake Sherman

Two federal agencies already own land in these areas, the Canadian Wildlife Service and the National Research Council, which runs the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory near White Lake.  

The Nature Trust of British Columbia owns the 940-hectare White Lake Basin biodiversity ranch and also co-manages — with B.C.’s Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations — roughly 480 hectares of land along Vaseux Lake, which includes important habitat for bighorn sheep. 

Wu says his organization will continue to push to have White Lake Basin and Vaseux Lake included in the park proposal. Cannings says he hasn’t heard “a reasonable explanation” for why they have been left out, but at this point prefers not to put up any more roadblocks.

“I suppose it speaks to the complexity of this national park proposal,” Cannings says. “At this point, I think most of us are feeling that we need to get this done.”

Getting final approval for the park won’t happen without the consent of  the Syilx/Okanagan Nation, which represents the Okanagan Indian Band, Osoyoos Indian Band, Penticton Indian Band, Upper Nicola Band, Upper and Lower Similkameen Bands and Westbank First Nation. 

The conservation model under consideration is a national park reserve, distinct from a national park in that it applies to lands that are also subject to a claim of Aboriginal title. Both Pacific Rim on Vancouver Island’s West Coast and Gwaii Haanas on the southern reaches of Haida Gwaii are national park reserves.

Clarence Louie, the tough-talking chief of the Osoyoos Indian Band, scoffs at park opponents who suggest a national park would lead to increased crime and wildfire risk, two tropes often trotted out at anti-park meetings. 

Louie believes much of the opposition is rooted in “white peoples’ ” mistrust and resentment of Aboriginal rights and title in the lands at stake. 

Chief Clarence Louie of the Osoyoos Indian Band is a proponent of a national park reserve in the South Okanagan. In early July he signed a memorandum of understanding that signalled the first formal steps toward the park’s creation in partnership with local First Nations. Photo: Jake Sherman

Though the bands that form the Syilx/Okanagan Nation are supportive of the park concept in principle, Louie says much work needs to be done before the distinct brown and yellow Parks Canada signs start appearing in Okanagan and Similkameen territory.

“We don’t have all the information. There needs to be hundreds of more meetings and discussions,” Louie says.

Gayton is taking the long view on the South Okanagan Similkameen National Park Reserve. He hopes to see it come to fruition in his lifetime.

“The average timeline for creating a national park is 30 years so we’re about halfway there,” Gayton says.

A sign in support of a proposed national park reserve in British Columbia’s southern interior, photographed along the Crowsnest Highway, between Osoyoos and Keremeos, B.C. Photo: Jake Sherman

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In April 2013, a group of Guatemalan farmers, among them Adolpho Augustin Garcia, converged outside the front entrance of Vancouver-based Tahoe Resources’ Escobal mine. Located in southeast Guatemala near the community of San Rafael Las Flores and operated by Tahoe subsidiary Minera San Rafael, the mine was already controversial even though it hadn’t yet begun production.

Garcia and fellow protesters faced off against private security personnel working for Alfa Uno, the firm that Minera San Rafael had contracted to guard Escobal, which went on to become one of the world’s largest silver mines, producing a world record 21.2 million ounces of silver concentrate in 2016. Lucrative as it potentially was, the mine was plagued by protests by the local Indigenous Xinca, small-scale farmers and community leaders, many of whom fear its impact on water and land.

That day, under the orders of the head of security, a Peruvian named Alberto Rotondo, personnel guarding the mine allegedly fired on protesters with rubber bullets as they fled the entrance. Seven were injured.

Six years later, this skirmish is reverberating throughout the Canadian mining industry and has the attention of the country’s legal system.

A case for which court?

In June 2014, seven Guatemalan plaintiffs, including Garcia, launched a civil suit against Tahoe Resources in B.C. Supreme Court, alleging negligence and battery at the hands of Escobal mine security. Then in November 2015, Justice Laura Gerow ruled that a Canadian court didn’t have jurisdiction, agreeing with Tahoe that the case should be heard in Guatemala.

However, the plaintiffs appealed a year later, and in 2017 the B.C. court of appeal overturned Gerow’s decision, supporting the argument that the Guatemalans likely wouldn’t get a fair trial in their own country.

(Guatemala ranked 96th out of 113 countries in the 2017-18 Rule of Law Index published by the independent World Justice Project, compared to No. 9 for Canada.)

Tahoe asked the Supreme Court of Canada for leave to appeal, but the request was denied that June. Garcia vs. Tahoe had cleared its final legal hurdle, and this potentially game-changing case is set to proceed in a Vancouver courtroom. (In February 2019, another Vancouver-based company, Pan American Silver, completed its acquisition of Tahoe Resources for roughly $1 billion.)

It’s a shot across the bow of corporate Canada, warning companies that when it comes to overseas operations, they can no longer pawn off responsibility for human rights violations to in-country subsidiaries.

It also marks a legal milestone: the first time a Canadian court has agreed to allow foreign plaintiffs to seek justice in Canadian courts for incidents alleged to have occurred abroad.

Joe Fiorante, a partner at Vancouver law firm Camp Fiorante Matthews Mogerman, represents the seven plaintiffs, three of whom settled out of court with Tahoe.

“In terms of setting precedent, it is very important for there to be a public trial,” Fiorante says. “Our goal is to make the parent company responsible at the highest level,” he adds.

“If a board of directors knows that it will be responsible for the conduct of its subsidiaries abroad, that will have a profound impact on corporate responsibility.”

As of May 2019, no trial date had been set.

From whence you came

In the past, Canadian companies have mounted successful appeals in similar cases by arguing a common-law doctrine known as forum non conveniens, whereby courts may refuse to take jurisdiction over matters where a more appropriate forum is available.

The result: lawsuits filed in Canada by foreign plaintiffs alleging wrongdoings by Canadian companies have been dismissed and sent back to languish or die a quick death in the plaintiffs’ home countries.

But this line of defence is showing cracks.

Canada is the undisputed powerhouse of the mining industry, home to 75 per cent of its companies. Figures from the Mining Association of Canada show that Canadian investment in mining abroad more than tripled between 1999 and 2016.

But with the clout of being the global leader in mining and mining technology sometimes comes uncomfortable scrutiny, especially when Canadian players build operations in countries where the rule of law is weak, democracy fragile, respect for human rights tenuous, corruption rampant and accountability non-existent.

Allegations of modern slavery against Vancouver-based Nevsun Resources

Tahoe isn’t the only B.C. mining company facing a possibly ugly public trial.

In 2014, three Eritrean men filed a suit in B.C. Supreme Court alleging that they were subjected to abusive labour practices by a state-run contractor engaged by Vancouver-headquartered Nevsun Resources for the construction of its Bisha mine in Eritrea, on the Red Sea in Northeast Africa. The original three plaintiffs have since been joined by more than a dozen other former Bisha employees, and this mass tort claim over allegations of modern slavery is another ignominious first for Canada’s mining sector.

Unlike with Tahoe, the Supreme Court allowed Nevsun to appeal a lower court’s decision allowing the case to proceed. This past January, the Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments from both sides, with Nevsun asking for the case to be sent back to Eritrea. While the plaintiffs and defendant await a decision from Canada’s top court, debate continues outside the courtroom.

Amanda Ghahremani, former acting legal director of the Canadian Centre for International Justice and a legal consultant specializing in international law and redress for victims of atrocity crimes , believes it would be hard for the company to successfully argue that Eritrea is an appropriate venue for the plaintiffs to seek justice.

The country of five million, which fought a protracted war of independence with Ethiopia that ended in 2000, is a de facto one-party state with a dismal human rights record that “continues unabated,” according to a 2018 report by United Nations special rapporteur Sheila Keetharuth.

“I hope Canadian mining companies are paying attention to these court cases. They should be,” Ghahremani says. “It’s important for them to understand that they cannot go into foreign countries and commit human rights violations and not be held responsible.”

Ontario court hears gang rape case at Guatemalan mine

Industry executives are likely paying close attention to a third lawsuit involving another Canadian company, Hudbay Minerals, that is winding through the Ontario courts.

The company chose not to pursue an appeal of this suit, filed in 2011 by 11 Indigenous Mayan women in Superior Court of Ontario alleging gang rape by security personnel at Fenix Mine in eastern in Guatemala back in 2007. The incident is alleged to have occurred before Hudbay acquired the property from Skye Resources in 2008 and the Toronto-based company has since divested its interest in this property.

The nickel processing plant for the Fenix mine in Guatemala, owned by Hudbay Minerals. The company is facing charges in an Ontario court related to the alleged gang rape of 11 Mayan women. This photo is a stitched panorama of three separate, horizontal frames. Photo: Roger Lemoyne

Scott Brubacher, director of corporate communications for Hudbay Minerals, said that the court case was at a standstill as of spring 2019. According to Brubacher, confusion around mine ownership at the time of the alleged crimes and misreporting in the media has put Hudbay in a difficult position.

Not surprisingly, many Canadian law firms with mining industry clients are also closely following these courtroom developments.

In a February 2017 blog post, Vancouver-based McCarthy Tetrault called Garcia vs. Tahoe “significant for both Canadian resource companies operating abroad and for foreign individuals alleging that Canadian parent companies are responsible for wrongs committed in the complainants’ home country.”

A reputation as good as gold

Though none have been proven in court, allegations of rape, slavery and shooting protestors with rubber bullets don’t burnish the image of the Canadian mining industry, especially when it’s trying to earn social licence for mines in countries that often present complicated social, economic, political and environmental challenges.

However, mining investment can be a powerful trigger for positive change, says one of B.C.’s biggest industry boosters.

Mark O’Dea is a Newfoundland-raised geologist and mining entrepreneur who sold publicly traded Fronteer Gold to U.S. titan Newmont Mining Corp. for CAD$2.3 billion in 2011. He’s also a winner of the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia’s Murray Pezim Award for perseverance and success in financing mineral exploration. O’Dea is no stranger to launching mining ventures abroad. As founder and chair of Vancouver-based investment firm Oxygen Capital Corp., he has interests in projects in Ontario, Nevada, Turkey and the West African nation of Burkina Faso.

Although O’Dea wouldn’t comment on Tahoe and Nevsun’s legal troubles, he thinks negative stories involving Canadian mining companies overshadow the economic good that mines bring to developing nations. He points to Karma, a gold mine in Burkina Faso that he developed through one of his companies, True Gold Mining.

O’Dea says the USD$130-million project brought opportunities to a region of the country that was previously without industry and “desolate,” though it also ran into protests from local populations that briefly suspended its construction in 2015.

“Over several years we created 1,000 jobs, with spinoffs to local business, and we damned a seasonal river to provide year-round water,” O’Dea says. “That’s a lasting benefit; that’s long-term.”

The mining sector does a poor job of telling its own good news story, he adds.

Tahoe mining licence suspended, blockades continue

Though Tahoe didn’t respond to interview requests, the company’s story in Guatemala is much more nuanced than you’d gather from sordid tales of security forces firing indiscriminately on protestors. Many local Guatemalans, both mine workers and business owners, support Escobal. Yet the project remains mired in controversy, and efforts by mine managers and Guatemalan government officials to suppress local dissent are well documented.

While Tahoe was preparing to defend itself in B.C. Supreme Court this past summer, troubles continued to mount at its Guatemalan silver mine.

In July, Escobal protester Ángel Estuardo Quevedo was murdered, and the perpetrators haven’t been identified.

Protesters in the community of Casillas, near the Escobal mine — one of the world’s largest silver mines — pray for calm amid rumours the army is on its way to evict their anti-mining roadblock. Mine owner, Vancouver-based Tahoe Resources, faces charges in Canada related to violent clashes with protesters in Guatemala. Photo: Nina Lakhani

Earlier in 2018, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala suspended Tahoe’s mining licence, asking for a third-party review of both Escobal’s environmental impact study, along with the Guatemalan Ministry of Energy and Mines’ consultation process that resulted in its permitting in 2013.

The mine, which has been shut since mid-2017, remains the target of blockades, as well as protests 40 kilometres away in the nation’s capital, Guatemala City.

Lawyer Fiorante, whose connection to Guatemala dates back to travels there in the early 1990s, when the country was still crippled by civil war, says he’s “open to discussions about the benefits of mining.” (He now serves as volunteer legal counsel for Project Somos, a Vancouver charity that helps orphaned Guatemalan children.) “But in countries like Eritrea and Guatemala where there is so much corruption, I don’t think you can have any assurance that these benefits will trickle down to local people.”

Canada’s missing ombudsperson

Compared to the developing world, Canada has relatively stringent mine assessment and permitting procedures — so stringent that Oxygen Capital’s O’Dea says it’s become difficult to develop projects on his home turf in a reasonable time frame.

(Still, there are problems on home turf, too, with taxpayers shouldering the burden for abandoned mines like the Giant Mine in Yellowknife and a massive 2014 tailings dam failure at the Mount Polley mine resulting in 25 billion litres of contaminated materials entering Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake, a source of drinking water and major spawning grounds for sockeye salmon.)

When a Canadian company makes a foreign play, especially in jurisdictions where democratic institutions are brittle, it takes a next-level commitment to corporate responsibility and oversight to ensure that the project meets Canadian standards. Factor in local contractors that may be accustomed to playing by a different set of ethical and legal rules, and events can quickly spiral out of control.

That’s a big reason why in January 2018, the federal government announced $6.8 million in funding over six years for the creation of CORE, the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise, tasked with investigating allegations of human rights abuses involving Canadian companies of all stripes operating outside the country.

Ottawa is also establishing a multi-stakeholder advisory body to guide government and the ombudsperson on “responsible business conduct abroad.”

Improving mining responsibility abroad

Even at the highest level of mining industry advocacy, it’s widely accepted that Canada needs to step up its corporate responsibility game on foreign soil.

Ben Chalmers, VP of sustainable development for the Mining Association of Canada, says his organization sees the new willingness of Canadian courts to try cases involving foreign plaintiffs and Canadian companies as a step forward when it comes to transparency and clarity.

In 2004, the mining association began implementing its “towards sustainable mining” initiative. Chalmers calls it a response to some high-profile tailings pond failures during the 1990s, such as the one near Virginia, South Africa, in 1994, when the Merriespruit tailings dam collapsed, killing 17 people and destroying 80 houses.

The initiative provides protocols and frameworks for companies on all aspects of operations, including aboriginal and community engagement, greenhouse gas emissions and tailings management, biodiversity conservation, health and safety, crisis management, mine closures and the prevention of child and forced labour.

To achieve verification, a company must conduct annual self-assessments, get an external verification every three years and provide a CEO letter of assurance confirming that the outside assessment meets the standards, Chalmers says.

“We’re not without problems as an industry. But I’d say as a country, we’re doing more than most to address conflicts that arise between companies and the communities in which they operate overseas,” he asserts.

“I also think that we’re seeing more companies adopting progressive and proactive policies on their own.”

As proof of Canada’s commitment to socially responsible mining, Chalmers cites a 2018 study by Paul Haslam, an associate professor in the University of Ottawa’s faculty of social sciences, which rates 634 mining properties in five Latin American countries for their impact on local communities. Out of this total, Haslam and his fellow researchers identified 128 mines with known social conflict, nearly 33 per cent of them Canadian-owned.

Although Chalmers think it’s a decent batting average, Catherine Coumans, research coordinator for MiningWatch Canada, says if this is how Canadian mining companies are playing ball, they need to strive for a much better standard on the international stage. In her view, the mining association’s sustainable mining effort smacks of the fox guarding the henhouse.

Case in point: in 2016, the Mining Association of Canada gave a leadership award to Hudbay Minerals for its Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Co. at the same time the company was defending itself against alleged human rights infringements at its former mine in Guatemala.

“We don’t think [towards sustainable mining] is the highest standard that it could be,” Coumans says from MiningWatch Canada’s Ottawa headquarters.

Activists and industry watchers are anticipating the full implementation of an independent set of standards known as the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, she notes.

Mining’s day of reckoning

The fact that the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance has been 12 years in the making is a testament to the socioeconomic complexity of mining.

Where the “towards sustainable mining” program was driven internally by the Canadian mining sector, the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance emerged after citizen activists started showing up with placards at retailers like American luxury jewelry chain Tiffany & Co. in the mid-2000s, when the public shaming of so-called blood diamonds from Africa was hitting a fever pitch and consumers demanded to know more about precious-gem and metals procurement policies. When these retailers approached non-governmental organizations for guidance in identifying the “green miners,” Seattle-based Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance coordinator Aimee Boulanger explains, they found there was no credible body to help them separate good and bad actors.

“It has been a hard process because mining is so complex. No two sites are the same, from the geochemical conditions to the water conditions of a mine, or the sociopolitical conditions of a given jurisdiction,” Boulanger says. “The strength of [the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance] will be the fact that the third-party verification will be just as important as the standards themselves.”

The Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance launched in 2019 with a heavyweight steering committee including representatives from the mining giants Anglo American and ArcelorMittal, downstream purchasers like Microsoft Corp. and Tiffany, human rights and environmental non-governmental organizations, labour groups and Indigenous leaders.

Currently two mines, Anglo-American’s Baro Alto Mine in Brazil and the Carrizal Mine in Mexico are using the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance self-assessment tool to measure their social and environmental performance and are sharing their findings publicly on a responsible mining map.

“We don’t yet have any Canadian mines that have come in asking to be recognized by [the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurances] system, but we hope some soon will,” Boulanger says, adding that the initiative is working with the Mining Association of Canada on a project to explore a possible level of shared recognition.

Boulanger places mining in a similar phase as the garment and forestry industries more than a decade ago, when consumers and activists began placing their practices in a glaring spotlight, whether it was a sweatshop in Bangladesh or old-growth clear-cutting in B.C. Such pressure helped put corporate and social responsibility at the top of boardroom agendas in those industries; Boulanger believes mining’s day of reckoning is next.

“My hope is that CEOs will realize that they won’t be able to avoid this level of corporate responsibility indefinitely,” she says.

Mining is already a much different world than it was in the 1990s. Organizations like ResponsibleSteel and the Responsible Jewellery Council, both based in the U.K., are targeting their sectors to raise ethical standards.

Loose language from the Canadian government exhorting Canadian companies to respect the law of whatever country they’re operating in no longer cuts it. Consumers, buyers and now Canadian courts are expecting more.

In turn, lawsuits like the ones faced by Tahoe and Nevsun playing out in Vancouver courtrooms, and Hudbay Minerals in Ontario, have put Canadian miners on notice.

“Canada is actively mining in many countries where the rule of law is loose,” attorney Fiorante says.

“We’re trying to place legal responsibility right at the top of these companies.”

A version of this article originally appeared in BC Business.

*Updated 11 a.m. June 12, 2019, to reflect the fact that Tahoe Resources was acquired by Pan American Silver in February 2019.

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