This is the second part of a two-part series on the impacts of the Mount Polley mine spill, four years later. Read part one of this investigation.

Kim Goldforth and I are standing on the shore of Quesnel Lake, at the very spot where the 2014 tailings spill ripped a new confluence into the side of this great fjord, when two men approach us from the land side.

We were just about to get back on Goforth’s fishing boat anchored at the outflow of Hazeltine Creek, but turn to face them instead. “Don’t take any shit from these guys,” said Goforth beneath his breath.

The two men are not Mount Polley staff as we expected, but a fisheries team from the Northern Shuswap Tribal Council, which represents four nearby First Nations communities. Four years after 25 million cubic metres of metal-rich tailings spilled into the lake, they are here to assess and observe fish, or in the case of Hazeltine creek in front of us, the lack thereof.

Kim Goforth, resident of Quesnel Lakes’s Mitchell Bay, aboard his boat at the mouth of Hazeltine Creek. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

A sign posted by the Mount Polley Mining Corporation notifies the public of game cameras posted around the mouth of Hazeltine Creek. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

While these signs stating ‘no public access’ can be found all around the Hazeltine Creek, locals say the land is crown land and therefore accessible by the public. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

Fisheries coordinator Dave Feil is unimpressed by the millions of dollars the company has spent on landscaping and rebuilding the Hazeltine streambed. He is interested in the health of salmon that migrate up the Fraser and end up here, because these fish are intercepted all along the way by many First Nations.

Concerns about metal accumulations in the fish, which is subsistence food for so many, is top of mind. Unlike the nearby Gibraltar mine, owned and operated by Taseko Mines Ltd., he tells us, Mount Polley, owned by Imperial Metals, won’t pay for them to test and measure metal accumulations in the fish that live and rear in Quesnel Lake.

What about the return of more than 800,000 sockeye to the Quesnel Lake system this year? Isn’t that good news?

Feil laughed, “that’s the running joke right now: ‘Mount Polley has made everything so much better!’ ”

Anger over continued dumping

When I meet Doug Watt at the Likely Pub late later that night, there are points when he speaks in a low voice, so as not to be overheard by the owners, who support the mine. He estimates there are 25 to 30 families in the area that rely on Mount Polley for income, so his advocacy has come at a personal cost.

He worked for six years at Mount Polley as a metallurgist, preceded by stints at Gibraltar, Equity Silver and the Snip mine up in the Stikine. Now he is channeling 45 years of mining knowledge into his work for the Concerned Citizens of Quesnel Lake.

There are two things that rile Watt about the four-year anniversary of the Mount Polley disaster: mine owner Imperial Metals has not paid a cent in fines, and the province continues to allow the company to dump tailings effluent into the lake.

This disposal goes back to at least 2015 — occurring by direct releases into Hazeltine Creek, and through a pipeline that drains deep into the lake offshore of Hazeltine creek.

Watt says the company broke the terms of its April 2017 discharge permit almost immediately after it was issued. The B.C. Ministry of Environment confirmed that in a single month, the company was caught three separate times — exceeding maximum levels for dissolved aluminum, total copper and dissolved cadmium.

The lower portion of the remediated Hazeltine Creek, which now contains a series of contained settling ponds.

An aerial view of the lower portion of Hazeltine Creek. The discharge pipeline right of way can be seen trailing alongside Hazeltine Creek, centre left, tracing a line to the tailings pond and the Mount Polley mine.

A sign posted by the Mount Polley mine at the mouth of Hazeltine Creek warns visitors of the buried pipelines entering Quesnel Lake. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

A stake marks the pipeline that runs from Mount Polley mine’s tailings pond to the mouth of Hazeltine Creek. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

Upturned trees, placed in the ground in an effort to provide perches for birds of prey as part of remediation work at the mouth of Hazeltine Creek. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

And since 2017, the province has issued the company six advisories and two warnings for various infractions, all in the form of written notices.

The permit clearly states that breaking the terms is a violation of the Environmental Management Act and “may lead to prosecution.” Under Section 120(6) of the Act, a permit holder breaking the rules is liable on conviction to a fine up to $1 million or imprisonment for up to six months, or both.  

Meanwhile, the Administrative Penalties Regulation also specifies fines up to $40,000 per incident per day for failure to comply with a requirement of a permit.

But somehow, as with the spill itself, the company continues to break rules that on paper have strong deterrent penalties, but in practice have no teeth. At least so far.

Quashing the permit?

A major preoccupation of the Concerned Citizens group is to get Mount Polley’s 2017 discharge permit revoked. One of the members, Christine McLean, has taken the fight to the Ministry of Environment’s Environmental Appeals Board. (She has a hearing in May 2019).

It was through this process that she learned Mount Polley has requested a relaxation of the permit rules for dumping effluent into the lake.

Mount Polley mine’s owner Imperial Metals did not respond to an interview request. The B.C. Ministry of Environment confirmed the company “contends the [existing] permit is too restrictive,” including how water is tested in the lake.

“It’s so demoralizing when the government allows the same company that let this disaster happen, to lay a pipe into the lake and discharge directly,” McLean told me later. “It’s adding insult to injury.”

Daniel Selbie, who heads up the lakes research program for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, has been studying metal accumulations in Quesnel Lake fish. He says the 2017 decision to allow the discharge has made the task of determining the impacts of the 2014 spill on the wider ecosystem that much harder.

“Now there is water that’s been discharged into the west basin, which is coming from the mine, which has higher levels of metals,” he said. “It complicates the picture.”

He added that the decision to approve the discharges was made by the provincial government. “I can tell you many, I won’t say who, were opposed to it.”

Mist clings to the forested slopes above Horsefly Bay on Quesnel Lake. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

A dead, spawned salmon floats in the shallow waters of Quesnel Lake near the start of the Horsefly River. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

A lone loon rests on Quesnel Lake’s Horsefly Bay. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

They can’t catch Lionel

The next morning, photographer Louis Bockner and I tour the disaster site and surrounding wilderness by road. At 10 a.m. our guide Lionel Guiltner pulls up to the Hazeltine Creek bridge crossing, riding a battered quad with a chainsaw strapped to the back.

It’s hard to imagine anyone knows the unmarked dirt roads and game trails that snake through this area like Guiltner, a former school teacher who lives nearby. Not even giant wind-blown trees across the trail stop him — he just fires up the chainsaw and moves on.

During the first months after the spill, Mount Polley staffers regularly stopped and threatened him as he rode through Crown land in this area. It never got violent, but their policy was to keep all eyes off the disaster site. This in turn earned Guiltner’s scorn. (Years later, he’s still indignant — “I have been wandering this area for 40 years!”)

None of the staffers in their giant pickups could chase him through the labyrinth system of trails he knows so well — if they turned him back at one spot, he would reappear somewhere else nearby, moments later.

“I’m not against mining…” he begins. This is a common preface in this area, but it’s not intended to mask environmentalist sympathies.

Mining is in the blood here: back before the B.C. mainland was a British colony, there were 5,000 people in nearby Quesnel Forks.

The two communities closest to the spill — Likely and Horsefly — wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the influx of mostly placer miners that began after 1860, when gold was found on the Horsefly River. In turn, fishing, ranching and forestry followed as sustaining industries, but mining continues to be the bread and butter.

Much of the area around Quesnel Lake and the Horsefly river has been worked over by miners over the last 150 years.

At one point the mainstem of the Quesnel river itself was dammed to excavate the riverbed for gold (salmon be damned), and just above Likely, the Bullion gold mine used pressurized water to erase entire mountainsides along the same river.

The Mount Polley gold and copper mine was built in 1997, filling an economic vacuum left by the decline of forestry. In the ’70s and ’80s there were three sawmills around Likely, but they are long gone. Guiltner, a retired school teacher, says there were 125 kids going to school in Likely in the 1980s; today there are 12.

So Mount Polley is a necessary neighbour to many, but locals like Guiltner also consider them a lousy neighbor. “They get away with too much,” he spits.

Inexplicably, our guide “cannot walk and talk at the same time,” which means we spend much of our tour standing around, but I’m surprised how much we get to see. First we visit the banks of Polley Lake, a large kidney-shaped lake directly west of the tailings dam.

A reflection along the muddy road that leads to the mouth of Hazeltine Creek. Photo: Louis Bockner/ The Narwhal

Sunrise on Quesnel Lake near the mouth of Hazeltine Creek.

Sunrise light on Quesnel Lake. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

When we’re confronted by pick-up trucks driven by Mount Polley staff, Guiltner announces his intention to go on through. They wave us through.

Eventually we’re standing at the base of the new tailings dam, a mountain of rock and earth, near the very point that breached in 2014. Back in late 2015, an investigation led by B.C.’s Chief inspector of Mines concluded that the dam failed because the strength and location of a layer of clay underneath our very feet was not taken into account in the design.

Guiltner shares a hopeful theory. Mount Polley has given the entire B.C. mining industry a black eye and it’s the peers of Imperial Metals that are most likely to influence the company behind the scenes, forcing them to do a better job of running their mine.

“If anybody is going to have an impact, it’s the mining fraternity,” he says, motioning up at the colossal tailings dam. “They are all watching this.”

Water woes separate friends and family

We drive back to Likely along an old logging road that skirts Quesnel lake, just in time to make our meeting with a retired insurance executive and part-time placer miner named Craig Ritson.

He’s bought up all the placer mining claims closest to his home, for the fun of and profit of finding gold, but also to ensure no yahoos come in and mess the place up.

His huge, beautiful home is located on a street that runs right along Quesnel lake — this line of well-kept, water-front lots is the closest thing this area has to suburbia.

There was one reason Ritson chose this place to live back in 2002, he tells us: “It had the best water in the world.” Four years after the disaster, he continues to drink water from the lake, although doing this entails a lot more effort now.

Down in the basement Ritson shows us the mini water treatment plant he devised after the 2014 breach. Lake water flows into a pressure tank and through two filters, which trap particles 50 and two microns in size respectively. Then it goes through an ultraviolet treatment system to kill bacteria like fecal coliform.

Craig Ritson sits in his home on the banks of Quesnel River in Likely, B.C. Ritson installed a UV filtration system for his drinking water in an effort to mitigate the pollution in Quesnel Lake following the Mount Polley Mine spill. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

Craig Ritson shows the $52 filter that provides the main filtration for his home’s water. Depending on the time of year he may replace the two filters once a month. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

All in, the system costs about $400 a month to run. The filters last anywhere from 17 days to 1.5 months depending on usage, before clogging up with fine gray silt.

While Ritson has stayed, his former neighbour and mining partner Doug Brassington, who was visiting during our interview, has moved to Salmon Arm. Water was the reason. After the spill, he felt it was impossible to trust the safety of the water. The only source of information was the company, he says, and by that point, he didn’t trust them.

Brassington misses life here immensely, but doesn’t regret leaving, especially since they started dumping effluent back into the lake.

“I know people all along this street who drink water from the lake. People still eat the fish. Who’s protecting those people? Nobody.”

Though retired, Ritson maintains the air of an executive, chairing a board meeting around a great dining table with panoramic views of the water and sprawling lakeside property.

“First Doug moved his family, then my son Brett…” he chokes up with emotion and can’t speak for a moment. “…now my son has moved his family away as well.”

He recovers quickly and becomes the executive again.

Jacinda on the Horsefly

Running right through Horsefly, B.C., population 150, is the river of the same name, which in early September is packed with crimson sockeye.

As we watch from a bridge in town, a hyper-aggressive female chases off other fish, defending her egg nest (called a “redd”) to the end. The humpbacked males meanwhile will fertilize as many redds as they can until they die.

Jacinda Mack. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

On the day I arrived here, Jacinda Mack was here too, to see the returning sockeye. Born and raised in her mother’s home community at Xat’sull near Williams Lake, Mack is one of the women behind Stand For Water — a project of First Nations Women Advocating Responsible Mining, a movement to raise awareness of the threats mining poses to water in the Pacific northwest.

Her mother, former Xat’sull Chief Bev Sellars, launched a private prosecution against the Mount Polley owners, a case that was killed by the province in January 2018. But that’s not the end of it: Mack tells me the Xat’sull First Nation and others from the Secwepemc, as well as Tsilhqot’in and St’at’imc First Nations have all filed suits against the company.

“All are waiting on the ongoing [federal government] criminal investigation to see if any culpability or evidence will be disclosed that may impact their legal actions against the company.”

The Mount Polley disaster had one notable positive effect on the world, according to Mack.

“Before the disaster people were largely unaware about anything to do with mining. It was out of sight and out of mind,” she says. “But there’s been more scrutiny of British Columbia mining in the last four years than since the goldrush.”

She says B.C.’s outdated mining laws have to change, and points to lawyer Mark Haddock’s recent recommendations to the province, which call for changes to the current system of “professional reliance” employed by resource companies like Imperial Metals.

It’s a system of relying on industry-hired specialists — like consultant biologists that test water quality — to produce science that government itself used to do. An underlying problem with this, is that when a company pays the wages of consultants (and the consultants rely on continuing work), there is undeniable pressure for science to conform to the interests of the company. The B.C. government announced reforms to the “professional reliance” system on Monday.

This issue is highly relevant to the Mount Polley disaster. In late September 2018, the regulatory body that oversees B.C.’s engineers accused three engineers — former Mount Polley contractors who worked on the dam — of  “negligence and/or unprofessional conduct in the course of their professional activities.” Meanwhile the company, by this reliance on consulting experts, appears to have escaped direct responsibility for the tailings breach.

“You can view the Mount Polley disaster as a failure of government in terms of their approach of self-regulation,” says federal NDP Fisheries Critic and B.C. MP Fin Donnelly, who before politics, swam the 1,375 kilometre length of the Fraser twice, to draw attention to salmon and the wider ecosystem. “This has to change.”

A dead Sockeye Salmon on the banks of the Horsefly River near Quesnel Lake. Photo: Louis Bockner / The Narwhal

Donnelly says two positive outcomes are still possible four years after the disaster. One is to change the system of professional reliance brought in by the BC Liberals, and second, for the federal government to hold the company accountable for the spill.

“It’s an outrage that there have been no charges laid for the breach.”

Fines and the captains of industry

Over breakfast on my last day in Likely, a biologist named Richard Holmes tells me the company could be on the hook for anywhere between $150,000 and $8 million if convicted under the Fisheries Act — which deems it a serious offence to release a substance “deleterious” to fish.

The 2014 dam breach was already Mount Polley’s second offence under this legislation — the first happened when the company damaged a rainbow trout spawning creek that flows into nearby Bootjack Lake.

Holmes says that in addition to not pressing charges, the province rejected the B.C. Auditor General’s 2016 recommendation that called for a separation between the B.C. Ministry of Mines and Energy’s dual role as promoter and regulator of mining.

Biologist Richard Holmes on the banks of the Quesnel River. Photo: Christopher Pollon / The Narwhal

But that was then.

Will the NDP government do a better job of regulating resource extraction?

Holmes is a good person to ask.

The independent biologist, who works mostly with First Nations on fisheries issues, was in a boat with then-NDP opposition leader John Horgan in the days following the disaster. (At the time, Horgan suggested the BC Liberals were involved in a “cover-up.”) He recalls the experience left Horgan visibly shaken.

“The regulatory base we have to work with has not changed,” says Holmes of the transition of political leadership. “Mining, forestry, aquaculture — it hasn’t changed. Power is entrenched with the businesses operating in the province which stand to make money.”

Holmes thinks the real power in B.C. lies with captains of industry like Jimmy Pattison, or even oilsands billionaire Murray Edwards, who owns 40 per cent of Imperial Metals and threw the now-infamous million-dollar Calgary fundraiser for B.C. Premier Christy Clark in 2013.

“It will be tough to change that.”

After breakfast we walk across the road to the Quesnel River, where I take a few clumsy photos of Holmes on the bank before I depart for good. His eyes are shut for most of them, squinting at the blazing sun, which illuminates the backs of a few sockeye struggling against the powerful river. Two bald eagles circle above us through the morning mist, completing the near postcard perfection of the scene.

If you didn’t know Mount Polley’s new tailings dam was perched high above all of this, you would never suspect anything was wrong.

Update, November 7, 2018 11:35am pst: The word slurry has been replaced with effluent in this piece to more accurately reflect the nature of the tailings being deposited into Quesnel Lake.

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Jacinda Mack will never forget the day the tailings pond collapsed at the Mount Polley mine in her nation’s traditional territory, spilling an estimated 25 million cubic metres of contaminated waste into Quesnel Lake.

Once a source of drinking water and home to nearly a quarter of the province’s sockeye salmon, Quesnel Lake is still laden with the toxic tailings that spilled into its depths that August day in 2014. An underwater deposit of tailings, estimated to be about 600 metres long and a kilometre wide, rests on the lake’s floor where local residents worry it may be disturbed by upwelling.

For Mack, the accident marked an irrevocable change to the world she knew and transformed how she saw not only the Mount Polley mine but British Columbia, which she recognized for the first time as under siege by one of the world’s most powerful industrial forces.

At the time of the spill, the B.C. government was on a renewed mission to fast-track permits for new mines — some of which require tailings facilities many times the size of Mount Polley’s to be maintained in perpetuity.

There are lessons to be learned from the Mount Polley disaster that so far have fallen on deaf ears, Mack fears. Those who stand to learn the most from her experience are the small and mostly Indigenous communities currently being courted by mining companies across the province.

For the last several months, Mack, a member of the Xat’sull (Soda Creek) First Nation, has toured across B.C. with the Stand for Water tour, cautioning against the polished story mining companies often bring to rural towns hungry for jobs and economic activity.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: Let’s go back to 2014. Can you talk about what the Mount Polley experience was like for you?

I think for a lot of people who haven’t been to the mine site it’s hard to grasp what the spill meant, but when I heard that the dam had collapsed, I felt sick to my stomach.

I opened up a video from the scene and I was almost physically ill. I started to cry, I was just like, ‘oh my god, what are we going to do?’ ”

I knew about the heavy metals, the processing chemicals, I knew about all of the treated waste and I knew about the force behind that tailings pond and that Quesnel Lake was down below.

It was a shock. All the communities around there when that happened had an emergency meeting. People were crying and talking about it like there had been a death.

We did a ceremony there on the banks of the Quesnel River in Likely. We did a ceremony you do in a time of grief, of great loss and that’s exactly how our communities were all feeling.

An aerial view of the Mount Polley mine disaster, August 2014, shows the mine’s collapsed tailings impoundment, with waste flowing past Polley Lake and right into what was the Hazeltine Creek. Photo: Cariboo Regional District via Youtube

There was this fear of the future…this grieving of the salmon, which were returning home. This should have been the time of year for celebration when the salmon were returning. People would normally have been preparing for that.

It was the complete opposite. Everyone stopped fishing, everything stopped. We weren’t getting information, people were angry and scared and hurt.

They were fearful that nothing was going to happen, that nothing was going to change, that there would be no consequences, there would be no justice.

“Here we are almost four years later and there haven’t been any charges laid by the government.”

I think people were getting really anxious: is anything going to be done or is the mining industry so entrenched, with such deep pockets that they can have a world-wide event — everyone in the world was watching Canada, this hub of mining in the world and this supposedly cutting edge mine has this major disaster — and nothing happens from it.

It’s like, ‘wow, how does that happen?’

Q: How did that experience change your understanding of the mining industry?

I think that the industry is definitely powerful, definitely has deep pockets.

But I also think people are becoming more aware because of Mount Polley. They’re becoming more aware of those connections, more aware of those injustices and more aware of what’s in their watershed.

They saying, ‘oh hey, we’re downstream in southeast Alaska and there’s a proposal for 10 new mines in B.C. and one of them is built by the exact same company that failed at Mount Polley. Maybe we should look into this. Maybe we should be concerned. Maybe we should be asking questions and start talking to our neighbours about what their experience has been.’

That’s how I got drawn into the whole story, especially of tranboundary mines.

It started with me just sharing my experience.

Active, proposed and terminated mining projects in B.C. as of 2017. Click to enlarge. Map via the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources.

Q: What do you most often find yourself sharing with communities facing mining projects on their lands?

I’m driven by communities needing to be informed about these lifelong, intergenerational decisions that they’re making.

I want them to be able to go in with their eyes open about what it is they’re agreeing to because a lot of time people don’t really understand what that full long-term picture is.

I think anywhere that I’ve spoken where they have a proposed mine development, I bring up a lot of things we’ve experienced that maybe they haven’t thought of because they haven’t had a major mine development in their area before.

I say, ‘make sure you ask about how much water they’re going to use. Make sure you ask about how water is treated because they’re going to be using water that needs to be treated at some point, especially if they’re going to discharge.’

I ask, ‘what are your values around water? Do you have a long-term water plan? Do you have a land-use plan?’

I also talk about something that’s been in the news recently, which are these man camps — these several hundred men that come into the community during construction phase of a new projects and how that shifts things in a community.

There was a report out by the Firelight Group with the Lake Babine Nation and Nak’azdli Whut’en that talked about local communities having to order in 200 rape kits to prepare for a new man camp.

It’s like, wow, that’s the mitigation? Not actually stopping the violence from occurring but just to deal with it with rape kits?

“Man camps really highlight a certain power dynamic at play. You have this often small and remote Indigenous community that’s out there and you have a big project that’s coming in and you’re flooding this area with people who have no connection to this place or these people, who are there short term, who are making a lot of money in an often impoverished place.”

When you’re dealing with rape and sexualized violence in that way it also speaks to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women situation where Indigenous women aren’t valued in the same way as a non-Indigenous woman would be.

It speaks to this power dynamic, it speaks to racism, it speaks to the vulnerability of these small communities coming up against large multinational, multi-billion dollar companies.

And so it shifts your community in ways you don’t anticipate.

I think there really need to be an honest, inclusive conversation with people who are being impacted, with people who are coming forward with solutions for their communities.

Q: You’ve spoken with communities about value clashes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities and how that affects the way ‘success’ is spoken about by mining companies. Can you say more about how and where you see those clashes occurring?

Well when it comes to mining I think it’s important to hear a critical voice coming from an Indigenous perspective because there are different values.

It’s getting harder and harder for us to maintain our connection with the land because there is so much development.

Especially in the Cariboo there’s so much exploration, placer mining, there’s hard rock mines and so a lot of times we’re just locked out because of these mineral tenures and licences.

It’s harder to harvest, harder to hunt. We end up going further and further.

Quesnel Lake was our last stronghold and now the lake is being poisoned more and more every day.

And just different values too around what is seen as successful like, for example, having trout survive in a tailings facility. In 2012 I went to the Taseko Gibraltar mine and that was the first time I saw trout in a tailings facility.

Their tailings pond is huge, four times larger than Mount Polley’s. You can’t see from one side to the other.

And we saw all of these massive trout. They said, ‘look at how good our water is, you know, fish are more sensitive to the changes in water than we are.’

I said, ‘well do you eat them?’ And they said, ‘oh God no. We have our tailings facility restocked on a regular basis.’

And I was like, ‘well that’s the whole point isn’t it? That we have a healthy ecosystem that everyone can benefit from?’

I felt really bad for those fish. They’re living in a waste facility to prove a point for a mine rather than being in a natural environment with an opportunity of accessing actual clean water.

Worldview differences.

Jacinda Mack in Victoria to speak with MLAs about mining reform in B.C. Photo: Taylor Roades / The Narwhal

Q: Do you see government as primarily accountable in setting the stage for industry?

It’s interesting that you say government is ‘setting the stage’ for industry, because that’s what happens now and has actually created a conflict of interest for government.

By that I mean, they’re supposed to be the watchdog but they’re also promoting industry.

Then you have the issue of professional reliance coming into this where you have companies basically watching themselves, doing their own testing, doing their own analysis and reporting and saying, ‘yup, we’re following all the rules!’

Until that whole system changes we won’t see the real accountability we need in communities.

Communities need to be more involved. I think we need Indigenous guardians, having Indigenous people on the land, who know the territory, who know the laws and protocols of their own people, who are then working with government and industry.

“I truly believe if we had Indigenous guardians in our territory and we had them watching Mount Polley, I honestly believe Mount Polley never would have happened.”

Because we would have held them in compliance. We would have reported all their problems.

The mine is only going to look at when they’re there and how much they can make. Their focus is immediate, on getting their resource out as quickly as they can while the markets are good.

We need to have a whole different conversation about how the land is valued, thinking about 20 years post-closure. What will that look like?

What is the highest value we have? In two generations, how will those values be affected?

Should we be looking at cumulative impacts of all of these industries on our water sources?

I think so. I think it’s madness not to look at the cumulative impacts because you’re making decisions completely out of context.

We’re not going to do a system-wide analysis of everything that’s going into this water. It’s very thread by thread with blinders on.

It’s not sustainable and it’s creating chaos.

Q: Right now the B.C. government is reviewing its environmental permitting process for large projects like mines. Do you view this as a significant opportunity for change?

There are definitely some opportunities within the environmental assessment review to look at ways of incorporating some of those social impacts, looking at the values, updating this point of reference, instead of coming at it from the point of view of the gold rush.

Let’s take stock of where we are now: what are the breaking points?

And let’s learn from Mount Polley and how we can prevent something like this from happening again.

Mount Polley is this crisis that is being wasted in a lot of ways. How can we change things for the better?

One change that would make a huge amount of difference is addressing the free entry system. Free entry really flies in the face of supposed ‘good faith’ consultations with First Nations.

The free entry system privileges mining laws over basically any other law.

You could be in treaty negotiations and in the final stages and still getting mineral tenures that are being purchased online by whomever, who’s maybe never been in your territory but they have a credit card and an online connection.

They can just pick up a mineral licence without any conversation or relationship with anybody. It’s just crazy. Zero consultation.

With the man camps, if that’s considered in the environmental assessment process that could be addressed. And we could look beyond just scientific data and models to other situations to say, ‘how can we learn from what has already happened?’

Right now there are no financial assurances to make sure the site is being taken care of over the long-term in a way the community deems as proper.

Every mine should have a disaster response plan.

There shouldn’t be total discretion over every single mine site saying, ‘oh this mine is going to have a $14 million bond but this one is only going to have a $7 million bond.’

The financial assurances piece is really important and land-use planning is really important, so you can get ahead of the curve  — even before a project is developed, you know if a community will support a project or if they consider that a no-go zone.

That’s where you can address Indigenous rights and the principles of Free, Prior and Informed Consent and support the Indigenous guardians.

These things really need to be considered within the environmental assessment process.

That could change this relationship where industry is monitoring itself to really restoring and balancing that power, giving it back to communities that are impacted.

Q: Do you see Indigenous communities becoming more empowered in their negotiations with resource extraction companies?

I feel like the industry drives at this incredible pace, it’s so fast. It’s hard to keep up to a company that’s got three engineering companies employed, a whole team of lawyers, they’ve got their executives and whatever and you’re one person.

“When I was in Soda Creek I was one person in a community that didn’t receive any funding to address consultation and permitting responsibilities. I felt like a mosquito trying to hold back the tide.”

But now stepping back from the front lines and looking at it from a different perspective, I can see there is a lot of work being done by a lot of people.

There are these intersections between groups that are working to protect clean water, saying water is life.

They want government to follow through with their promises and they want there to be consequences.

We as communities and Indigenous peoples need to get in front of that conversation to say, ‘this is what we mean by Free, Prior and Informed Consent, here is our land plan, here are our guardians.’

To me that would be a really exciting future because it would be inclusive, it would be community-based. There would be more power sharing, more economic opportunity for people.

Maybe I’m utopian in my view but I feel like things would be a lot better if more people had a say and had more ownership over these decisions.

Part of the new story where we are now is talking about this new generation of Indigenous leadership coming up. I am super stoked on this new generation because they’re even stronger, smarter, faster, better than me.

Our identity is shaped by the land and now my genetic line, my children and their children will have to be dealing with the Mount Polley mine for the rest of their bloodline.

But we are not defined by this disaster, we’re defined by how we respond to it and what we do, how we activate others, how we lead and share.

Indigenous communities are connecting, even across borders. I think even a year from now that’s going to be a stronger, a bigger, wider, deeper story.

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Thursday marks two years since the Mount Polley mine disaster in Likely, B.C. where a tailings pond collapse spilled 25 million cubic metres of mining waste, laced with contaminants like arsenic, lead and copper, into the once-pristine Quesnel Lake, a major salmon spawning ground and source of drinking water.

To mark the occasion, B.C. Minister of Energy and Mines Bill Bennett issued a press release praising the government’s world-class mining standards, saying the province is now “at the forefront of global standards for the safety of [tailings storage facilities] at mines operating in this province.”

“We’ve taken a leadership position and have done all we can to ensure such a failure can never happen in B.C. again,” Bennett said.

B.C. Mining Still Far From ‘World-Class’

But experts and victims of the spill say the province has all but ignored the impacts of the spill, which to this day remains the largest mining disaster in Canadian history.

And rather than taking a precautionary approach to mining in the province, the government is doing everything it can to put British Columbians and Alaskans at risk of another Mount-Polley style disaster, according to Robyn Allan, economist and risk analysis expert.

“All the discussion about world-class and changes that are going to avoid these problems in the future is nothing more than rhetoric,” Allan told DeSmog Canada.

“It’s shocking to me that a disaster of this nature could take place and our regulatory bodies spend more time covering up what’s going on than ensuring a proper cleanup and remediation.”

Allan said government and industry have discussed small changes to mining rules but more is required to ensure British Columbians are protected from another Mount Polley.

“There is very good evidence that says we can expect two of these every decade,” Allan said, adding a recent investigation by B.C. Auditor General Carol Bellringer found serious, chronic and unresolved problems with mining regulations.

“Even under these facts the provincial government is doing nothing to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Allan said.

“We’re in a situation where we’ve seen what can happen and what will happen and nothing meaningful is being done to stop it but all the government rhetoric that is being used is providing a false sense of security for the public.”

“It’s not getting better. It’s worse than it’s ever been,” Allan said.

Government Painting Rosy Picture of Mining Regs

Jacinda Mack, member of the Xat’sull First Nation and coordinator of the First Nations Women Advocating Responsible Mining, echoes Allan’s sentiments.

“Right from the beginning Minister Bennett has tried to sweep this under the rug and minimize it,” Mack told DeSmog Canada.

“The province says they have the best [tailings pond] regulations in the world when really all they’ve done is come up to a minimum standard of where they should have been years ago.”

Mack said B.C., compared to other jurisdictions around the world, is way behind on mining regulations. For example, she said since Mount Polley there is now a requirement that a qualified person be responsible for managing tailings facilities.

“I would have assumed a qualified person was in charge of those dams,” Mack said.

“If meeting only the basic minimum requirements means they’re world class, that really shows how bad the situation is in B.C.”

Mack said she didn’t want the two-year anniversary of the Mount Polley disaster to pass marked by only a positive government press release.

“The rosy picture the province and mining industry have been painting, it’s really not the situation in the communities and we want to speak truth to power.”

Taxpayer Funds Subsidized Cleanup

In the wake of the Mount Polley disaster, the government was quick to assure British Columbians that Imperial Metals, owner and operator of the Mount Polley mine, would take responsibility for the cost of clean up.

The ministries of environment and mines assured the province “cost of the clean up of the breach is the responsibility of Imperial Metals, and is not a cost borne by B.C. taxpayers.”

This past June the province reiterated the claim that a robust a polluter-pays system is in place for mines: “The Environmental Management Act ensures that those that pollute are held responsible under a polluter pay principle so the taxpayer does not have to assume these clean up costs.”

But that talking point just doesn’t hold water, according to Allan, who recently reported in an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun that an Imperial Metals shareholder report shows B.C. taxpayers subsidized Mount Polley clean up to the tune of $23.6 million.

“On top of everything else we’re being misled about the polluter pay system that doesn’t exist,” Allan said.

“To layer onto an incredibly dangerous situation deliberate misinformation is reprehensible.”

Still No Government, Industry Accountability

Richard Holmes, fisheries biologist and resident of Likely, B.C. said despite what the government says in press releases, the clean up and response to the spill has been disappointing.

“I thought we would have been a lot further ahead of where we are by now.”

Part of the frustration of local residents, who live with the knowledge that the millions of cubic metres of spilled mining waste remains in Quesnel Lake, is the difficulty of dealing with a company that is first and foremost concerned about the bottom line, Holmes said.

“These companies don’t carry enough money to respond to these disasters,” he said. “And Imperial Metals is getting a ride on this whole breach because of the government.”

Holmes said despite the damage to the lives of local residents and business owners — some of who are pursuing litigation against the company — neither Imperial Metals nor the government have taken responsibility.

“There is no ownership of this disaster. Neither of them will say sorry,” he said. “That’s something that would go a long way to easing relationships in the community.”

“But with them it’s always the same: deny, deflect, defend.”

Holmes said despite multiple government reports and investigations no one has laid any blame or assigned responsibility. Yet, he said, there has been plenty of finger-pointing.

“Now Imperial Metals is suing the two engineering firms it contracted to manage the tailings pond. That suggests to me that the Mount Polley legal team recognizes now they may be in a little trouble so they’re trying to put the blame somewhere else.”

Quesnel Lake Remains Dumping Ground for Mine’s Waste

Christine McLean, member of Concerned Citizens of Quesnel Lake, said trying to hold the government accountable has been a “daunting task.”

No compensation has been paid out to local property owners like McLean or to affected businesses that have suffered a decline in customers since the spill.

“We’re really disappointed in how the government and the mine have moved forward,” McLean said, adding this summer the province granted Mount Polley a waste discharge permit that allows the company to resume full operations and release more mining waste into Quesnel Lake.

“As concerned citizens it’s bad enough that all that waste went into the lake,” McLean said. “Now it’s made so much worse by the fact that the government has given the mine the rubber stamp to directly dump their waste into the lake.”

“I don’t feel like anyone in our province is working for us,” she added. “They are working for the mine to make it as easy as possible to resume operations.”

McLean, who sits on the mine’s public liaison committee said she fears the discharge permits will create a new normal, where the lake is used as a perpetual dumping ground.

“These permits are like taxes: once they’re in they’re hard to get out.”

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