Indigenous leaders from the Similkameen Valley are “deeply disappointed” by a provincial decision to approve a contentious mine expansion in their territories — emphasizing that they did not give consent for the project to move forward.

On Monday, the B.C. government announced it had issued Mines Act and Environmental Management Act permits for the New Ingerbelle expansion of the Copper Mountain mine near Princeton, B.C., in smǝlqmíx (Upper and Lower Similkameen Indian Band) territory.

The expansion project will see the century-old mining operation revive its old Ingerbelle open-pit gold and copper mine site near nməlqytkʷ (the Similkameen River). The expansion will extend the mine’s operation until 2047, the province said.

In the province’s statement, it acknowledged that the mine is in the Upper and Lower Similkameen Indian Bands’ territories.

“The permitting review process included engagement with both First Nations, along with technical review by provincial agencies to assess environmental impacts, tailings management and public safety,” it said.

However, a joint statement issued Monday by leadership of both bands says that “chiefs, councillors, natural resource departments and community members of the bands did not give consent for this project to move forward.”

“The smǝlqmíx and our neighbours that choose to be here forever will have to deal with the consequences long after the profits and monies have left the valley,” said the statement.

“The chiefs and councils of the Upper Similkameen Indian Band and the Lower Similkameen Indian Band are deeply disappointed by the Province of British Columbia’s decision … to approve the New Ingerbelle Expansion Proposal for the Copper Mountain mine.”

The First Nations noted that participation agreements they signed with the mine earlier this month “expressly state that advance consent to New Ingerbelle was not provided.”

The new participation agreements with the mine that were signed by the bands replace older ones that were signed in 2019. They include “community benefits and environmental terms related to the mine operations and protecting the Similkameen River,” “stability and certainty” for mining operations and “structured processes” between Upper and Lower Similkameen and the mine “to work together on monitoring mine operations and mitigating its environmental impacts.”

The bands said they will now review the approval conditions and reasons for the decision, and “assess all available options to ensure that the waters, all living things and the lands will be taken care of.”

Separating the Ingerbelle pit from the mine’s main site is the 197-kilometre-long Similkameen River. Part of the expansion project will see a bridge constructed over the river to connect the two sites.

The mine’s already existing 192-metre tailings dam — roughly equivalent in height to a 58-storey building — will also be increased by an additional 87 metres, according to the province’s Environmental Assessment Office (EAO).

Meanwhile, Robert Carter, senior vice-president for Hudbay Minerals’ operations in Canada, thanked the province and the Upper and Lower Similkameen “for their open and efficient collaboration throughout the process.” 

“Through our strong commitment to responsible resource development and the expansion of copper production from Copper Mountain, we will be continuing to provide a metal that is vital for electrification and the global energy transition and supporting B.C.’s Critical Mineral Strategy,” Carter said in a release on Monday.

The project’s approval comes less than a month after the Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals told IndigiNews that the expansion proposal still required further consultation with the Upper and Lower Similkameen.

The spokesperson also said the expansion plan had to “meet or exceed B.C.’s world-class environmental standards.”

Last May, a pipe failure at the mine site resulted in 3,000 litres of mine tailings seeping into an area beside the Similkameen River. The B.C. Ministry of Environment and Parks told IndigiNews that it’s unknown if the mine water entered the river or was absorbed into the ground.

In 2024, the provincial Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy issued six fines to Copper Mountain mine totalling $105,348. 

The string of offences, which occurred between 2019 and 2022, all relate to the mine’s unauthorized seepage and discharge of mine water from its tailings pond into the surrounding waterways of the Similkameen River and Wolfe Creek, which both flow through the mine’s area of operation.

In 2021, the mine at one point exceeded the legal limit of copper waste discharged from its tailings pond into Wolfe Creek by more than 4,500 per cent.

Two years ago, one Lower Similkameen member spoke of a time where you could drink the water from Wolfe Creek, which is a tributary of the Similkameen River. Despite a series of mine contamination events into the creek, a senior representative for the Copper Mountain mine told the community that she would still drink the water.

In January, a province-wide council of outdoor recreationists declared the Similkameen River among the province’s most endangered rivers – citing the mine’s expansion as the main threat to the waterway.

Last November, y̓ilmixʷm (Chief) kalʔlùpaɋʹn Keith Crow of Lower Similkameen told regional officials that leaders were failing the Similkameen River, which “had been black for the last month” due to poor water quality. 

Lower Similkameen Elder Rob Edward listed the mine as one of the reasons for the river’s decline. He noted that he hasn’t been able to fish out of the Similkameen River since 1982. 

In 2022, Crow told IndigiNews that the Similkameen River is the lifeblood of the valley.

“If we lose that, we lose our identity. We lose who we are,” he said.

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A short walk down the beach from the marble-gilded interior of the Trump Hollywood luxury condos in Florida, a throng of suited executives and investors gathered in late February for the annual Bank of Montreal mining and critical minerals conference. The vibe was buzzy.  

“You can feel that optimism in the air,” Josh Goldfarb, managing director of the metals and mining group at BMO Capital Markets, said in a podcast taped at the event. 

After years of muted investment, the mining industry is seeing a resurgence, as demand soars for minerals deemed “critical” by governments for everything from weapons to renewable energy.

“Metals are the new oil,” John Steen, an associate professor and a distinguished scholar in global mining futures at the University of British Columbia, tells The Narwhal. “That’s the situation we’ve arrived at in 2025.”

U.S. President Donald Trump’s desire to annex Canada and acquire its critical minerals in the process is a “real thing,” according to former prime minister Justin Trudeau — and the U.S. has also set its sights on Ukraine’s largely untapped supply. 

As B.C. responds to fast-changing geopolitics and the U.S.-Canada trade war, the province is wielding critical minerals as a power tool, promising to expedite mining projects to buffer against the economic shocks of U.S. tariffs, focusing on new trading partners now that the U.S. has gone AWOL. Amidst all the uncertainty, one thing is clear: much more mining is on the horizon for B.C.

According to the Mining Association of BC, the province has 17 new critical mineral mining projects in the works, including for copper, nickel and molybdenum, which is used to make steel alloys. Seven projects will mine gold, which the federal government doesn’t include on its list of metals deemed “critical.”

As Trump angles to weaken the Canadian economy and gain access to Canada’s water and minerals, B.C. is using critical minerals as a climate-friendly political football of its own. But there’s no guarantee the province’s critical minerals will be used for the energy transition instead of for weapons manufacturing. And some observers are worried the B.C. government’s new plan to fast-track B.C. mining projects will hinder environmental scrutiny and the province’s commitment to uphold Indigenous Rights. 

B.C. has ‘unlimited’ potential for mining: Eby

In February, a hard-hatted Premier David Eby stood in front of a ship filled with copper concentrate mined in B.C. and destined for Asia. Eby described the load of copper as “an example of the kind of work we’re going to expand.” 

“There is unlimited potential,” he said. “We have what the world needs here.”

The next day, on Feb. 4, the B.C. government released a list of 18 energy and mining projects it will expedite, including four mines in various stages of development. 

They include the expansion of two existing gold and copper mines, building a new gold and silver mine and expanding the Highland Valley Copper mine, Canada’s largest copper mine, southwest of Kamloops, B.C. Eby has also hinted the government will soon expedite more mining projects.

Eby’s fast-tracking announcement didn’t sit well with some First Nations, including Tahltan Nation, whose territory will house two of the fast-tracked mines. In a statement, the Tahltan said the province didn’t engage with the nation before announcing projects will be expedited. 

“If you want certainty and you want it quickly, the only way you can achieve that is with free, prior, informed consent of the First Nations that are impacted,” Allen Edzerza, a Tahltan Elder and advisor on mining reform, said in an interview. “There’s no shortcuts in that regard.”  

Edzerza is concerned B.C.’s expedited approach could have a negative impact on First Nations’ rights and the environment.

One mine slated for fast-tracking in Tahltan territory, the Red Chris Porphyry Copper-Gold project, was flagged in a report about B.C.’s highest-risk mines for tailings dam failures. The mine’s owners, Denver-based Newmont Corporation and Vancouver-based Imperial Metals, are proposing to switch to underground mining, which requires careful planning to avoid potential ground collapse. 

On March 18, the government also announced the Gibraltar copper-molybdenum mine in south-central B.C. will not undergo an environmental assessment for its expansion plans, a decision opposed by Xatśūll Nation, whose territory faces lasting effects from the Mount Polley tailings dam failure in 2014. 

And then there’s the question of how B.C.’s critical minerals will be used. On one hand, they’re vital for helping the world reduce dependence on fossil fuels — renewable energy technologies like wind and solar are voracious mineral consumers. The International Energy Agency estimates critical mineral production will need to quadruple by 2040 to keep global warming below 2 C.

But Thea Riofrancos, strategic co-director of the U.S.-based Climate and Community Institute think tank, says those demands aren’t set in stone. Riofrancos’ research found U.S. lithium demand could be reduced by up to 92 per cent by 2050, through actions that include using smaller electric vehicles, better battery recycling and reducing car dependency.

There’s absolutely no guarantee critical minerals — found in a vast array of products from iPhones to bombs — will be used for renewable energy projects that help the world reduce reliance on fossil fuels. “There’s a whole set of questions that are immediately pretty obvious when we start unpacking this term,” Riofrancos, who is also an associate professor of political science at Providence College in Rhode Island state, says in an interview. “Whose economic needs are being prioritized here?”

Riofrancos, whose research focuses on resource extraction, climate change, the energy transition and the global lithium sector, says the term critical minerals is being thrown around “without a lot of attention to what it means.” Under the term’s ubiquitous banner, goals of national security, economic growth and climate action tend to get jumbled together. 

“There’s no questioning of what is critical for whom,” she says. 

Critical minerals used for weapons as well as renewables

There’s nothing inherently “critical” about critical minerals; they’re a label governments use to identify mined products that dovetail with national interests. 

“There’s a Venn diagram between ‘really need it’ and ‘could potentially be scarce,’ ” Bentley Allan, an assistant professor of political science and an affiliate of the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute at Johns Hopkins University, tells The Narwhal.

Canada lists 34 critical minerals, with a special emphasis on lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, copper and a universal category of 17 magnetic minerals known as “rare earth” elements. So far B.C. hasn’t created its own critical minerals list, but last year it produced an atlas documenting its mineral resources and the countries that want them. 

Minerals deemed critical are perhaps best-known for their use in renewable energy. An average wind turbine, for example, requires an elephant’s weight in copper. Solar panels use minerals like cobalt, lithium and chromium, as do electric vehicles and their batteries. 

But critical minerals are also used to make tech products like semiconductors, which are the building blocks of chips in iPhones and the “picks and shovels” of the artificial intelligence boom. 

And then there are military uses; B.C. has significant inventories of minerals used to produce many tools of warfare. Molybdenum hardens armour, while tungsten creates weapons that can pierce through it. Cobalt can be used to strengthen jet engines. Germanium, a black and white metal, is used in infrared-detecting drones and night vision goggles. 

The fast-tracked Highland Valley copper mine is already producing molybdenum, while Vancouver-based Happy Creek Minerals plans to mine tungsten in south-central B.C. Along with China, the province is one of the world’s few exporters of germanium, which it imports from Alaska and processes at Teck Resources’ refinery in Trail, B.C. 

Thanks to B.C.’s geological position alongside shifting tectonic plates, many of B.C.’s critical mineral reserves bubbled up through the earth’s crust over time, forming deposits in places like the Golden Triangle in northwest B.C., mainly in Tahltan territory, where gold, silver, copper and molybdenum are abundant. B.C. is Canada’s largest supplier of copper, a critical mineral on the federal list. Of Canada’s 34 listed critical minerals, B.C. has significant potential to mine 14, according to the provincial government. 

For companies that extract and process minerals, getting on Ottawa’s coveted “critical” list can be advantageous. Inclusion on the list provides access to Canada’s $1.5 billion fund that invests in infrastructure like highway expansions around mines. “There’s more money available if you’re on the critical minerals list,” Allan says. Last year, for example, mining advocates succeeded in getting Canada to add high-quality iron ore to the list, but attempts to add steelmaking coal did not succeed. 

U.S.-Canada plans for shared mining projects soured as tariffs hit 

Although mining has long been part of B.C.’s history, like many other regions the province has grown increasingly reliant on products mined and processed elsewhere. 

China’s ownership of the critical minerals supply chain has exploded — it extracts about 60 per cent of the world’s rare earth minerals and hosts 85 per cent of the factories required to turn them into usable products. Kristen Hopewell, a professor and director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia, says China could decide to cut off that supply.

“There’s growing concern about the fact that China is so dominant,” Hopewell, the Canada Research Chair in Global Policy at UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, points out. 

Concerns about critical minerals supplies in Western countries grew in the 2010s as Trump’s first administration created an early wave of protectionist laws. Former U.S. president Joe Biden continued the trend, imposing trade limits on U.S. computer chips, while China responded with its own tariffs. “This [was] ratcheting up in the background,” Allan explains. “There’s this tit for tat.”

At first, Canada and the U.S. buddied up, signing an agreement to help keep each other stocked. The two countries even made joint investments in a Northwest Territories mine producing the critical mineral bismuth, a rocket propellant, and a plant turning graphite into battery materials in Quebec.  

As a supplier of 17 minerals the U.S. deems “critical,” Canada launched its critical minerals strategy in 2022, with a $3.8 billion investment in the sector. B.C. followed suit last year with its own critical minerals plan, including the establishment of a new critical minerals project advancement office and a commitment to expand the sector through investments in power infrastructure, training and subsidies, among others. 

Those plans soured when Trump threatened 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian exports after he returned to office in January, triggering fears of an economic recession. After two last-minute, one-month reprieves, some tariffs are still slated to take effect on April 2. “This is an existential threat for Canada,” Hopewell says. “The potential impacts are totally devastating.”  

Yet it’s unclear if the B.C. government’s commitment to fast-track mines will get those projects off the ground any sooner. A study in FACETS journal found recent B.C. mines were delayed because of economic factors and commodity prices, not regulatory red tape.

But industry groups like the Mining Association of BC argue otherwise. “It takes too long to permit and authorize a mining project in B.C.,” the association’s president and chief executive officer Michael Goehring says in an email in response to questions from The Narwhal. The association said recent mine approvals took eight to 11 years to complete, and expediting projects supports “small, medium and Indigenous businesses and communities, workers and families throughout B.C.”

Modern mining is also not particularly labour-intensive, and companies tend to overstate job opportunities in their assessments — the same FACETS study found a group of B.C. mines employed roughly half the people they’d promised. 

Details lacking about how four mining projects will be fast-tracked

There’s also the question of whether Eby’s announcement will indeed herald sweeping changes. Many tools to speed up project approvals had already been introduced prior to the announcement, so it’s still unclear how B.C.’s new fast-track commitment will impact how mining projects are assessed. Three of the four mining projects Eby moved to the fast-track lane were already undergoing environmental assessments. 

The Eskay Creek gold and silver mine, slated for Tahltan territory, is a new open-pit operation. Two other fast-tracked projects are existing mines seeking to expand: the Red Chris Porphyry copper and gold project wants to switch from an open-pit mine to underground caving — a method to help extract metal from deep underground that comes with added risks of dam failure, according to proceedings from the Eighth International Conference and Exhibition on Mass Mining. 

The Highland Valley copper mine is also seeking an amendment to its environmental assessment certificate so it can expand. The mine’s owner, Teck Resources, is currently in a dispute resolution process with Stk’emlupsemc te Secwépemc Nation, which opposes the expansion, while other nations like the Kanaka Bar First Nation and the Lower Nicola Indian Band have consented.

The Mount Milligan copper and gold mine in Fort St. James, which rounds out the quartet of fast-tracked projects, has not yet announced any expansions or proposed amendments to its environmental assessment certificate. In an email, B.C.’s Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals said it anticipates receiving applications for such changes “shortly.”

In B.C., major mining projects must go through an environmental assessment process and receive a government-issued certificate as well as permits. Typically, those permits wouldn’t be granted until the environmental assessment is complete. But B.C.’s new processes mean they’ll happen in tandem. “They both will go parallel, in other words,” Jagrup Brar, B.C.’s new minister of mining and critical minerals, says in an interview. 

The province also introduced a single application process for both environmental assessment and permits. In its email, the ministry said this will help “reduce duplication.” 

Brar says B.C. has launched a concierge service within its new critical minerals project advancement office for early-stage mining projects “with a significant potential to boost the economy.” So far, the office’s sole project is the Baptiste Nickel project, a mine proposed by FPX Nickel in Tl’azt’en Nation’s territory in north central B.C. The nation terminated its memorandum of understanding with the company in 2023, stating it does not consent to the company’s activities.

The mining ministry said it has recently convened a group of deputy ministers involved in mining approvals to “clear obstacles” and move projects forward faster and will put a “greater focus” on its new processes of pairing up permit reviews and environmental assessments. 

Meanwhile, the ministry’s recent service plan hints more overarching changes are in the works — among them, a commitment to set fixed timelines for mine approvals and “dramatically reduced” permit wait times.

B.C.’s new focus on fast-tracking mines leaves some observers asking if the plan will hinder environmental scrutiny or B.C.’s commitment to uphold Indigenous Rights. 

“My simple answer is no,” Brar says. “Our focus is streamlining.” 

But it’s difficult to square how the government will meet the fixed deadlines it has promised to implement with only tweaks to existing processes. 

Nasuʔkin (Chief Councillor) Cheryl Casimer, with the First Nations Summit political executive, worries Eby’s focus on fast-tracking speaks to a culture of jamming projects through. 

“Whenever I hear the word fast-tracking, it worries me,” Casimer, a citizen of the Ktunaxa First Nation, tells The Narwhal. “That means that you go ahead and you do it no matter what.” 

Casimer is also wary that fast-tracked mining will steamroll over Indigenous Rights. 

B.C. has committed to changing laws to align with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, but it still allows companies to explore for minerals and apply for environmental assessments without the consent of First Nations. Companies aren’t required to include First Nations in the early stages of project planning. 

“There’s a lot of things that could be done right at the outset to make sure that there’s that level of certainty,” Casimer says.

Concerns raised about environmental impact of fast-tracking mining projects

Casimer’s territory in southeast B.C. has suffered the aftermath of mining gone wrong. Selenium pollution from coal mines in the Elk Valley has leached into the waterways and the eggs of female fish, sometimes deforming their spines and heads or killing them before they hatch. 

Acid rock drainage occurs when blasted rock is exposed to oxygen and water, causing it to leach heavy metals like selenium. It’s not limited to coal mining — mining for critical minerals can trigger acid rock drainage, too. Both waste rock and tailings — the ground-up bits of rock left over from mineral extraction — can leach into waterways if left untreated. 

Teck Resources, until recently the owner of the Elk Valley coal mines, was fined for its pollution, but Casimer says she has seen little change. “All they do is pay their fine and carry on.”

Nadja Kunz, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia who is the Canada Research Chair in Mine Water Management and Stewardship, is also concerned by fast-tracking commitments. 

Kunz says companies often provide subpar information on issues like water quality during the environmental assessment process, and mining’s long-term risks to water make it critical to get the details right. 

“It is really important that we don’t encourage government to shortcut on this, because the legacies from mining are felt so widely in Canada already.” 

“There are plenty of mines in B.C. or Canada where we’re going to have to be treating that water forever,” Kunz, who is jointly appointed across UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering, points out.

Tailings pond stability presents another major risk. Just over a decade ago, the Mount Polley copper and gold mine’s tailings pond breached, spilling roughly 10,000 Olympic swimming pools worth of toxic tailings into Polley Lake in B.C.’s Interior. 

B.C.’s auditor general prescribed a list of actions to avoid similar disasters, including using the best available technologies to reduce or eliminate water in tailings. But B.C. still doesn’t require companies to use those technologies, which are more expensive to implement.

“You’re still getting economics as the main driver,” Nikki Skuce, a director of the non-profit Northern Confluence and co-chair of the group BC Mining Law Reform, says in an interview. 

For new mines, those waste rock piles and tailing ponds are likely to be even bigger, compounding the problem, Skuce says. “We’ve mined all the easy stuff first.” As sites with the highest concentration of minerals get mined out, she says companies increasingly target sites where minerals are more spread out, meaning there will be more waste material. 

“The waste dams in British Columbia are bigger and taller, and therefore there’s more risk,” Skuce says. 

Casimer says it’s important to have a conversation about the needs and benefits of critical minerals. 

“If somebody needs critical minerals, then yes, let’s take a look at what that means,” she says. 

“But we need to be decision-makers at the table.”

Updated on March 24, 2025, at 4:57 p.m. PT. This story was updated to say Canada is a supplier of 17 minerals the U.S. deems critical, as per an email from Natural Resources Canada that was received following publication.

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The Mount Polley mine in B.C.’s Interior is home to the most notorious tailings dam in the province. But it’s far from the only mining waste storage facility raising concerns. 

Dozens of tailings dams like the one that failed in 2014 at Mount Polley still dot B.C., and little has been done to change the way the companies that own them store their mine waste, according to MiningWatch Canada co-founder Jamie Kneen.

Kneen said a tailings dam map, published by a coalition calling for reform to B.C.’s mining laws, shows a number of “high-risk sites.”The map provides communities with information about the risks posed by “billions of cubic metres of toxic wet mine waste, called tailings, stored behind some of the highest dams in the world.” An accompanying report identifies mine tailings dams that would have the most severe consequences if they fail.

“We know that, mathematically, the probability that something will happen in the next 10 years is pretty high,” Kneen said in an interview.

On Aug. 4, 2014, the Mount Polley tailings dam burst, sending 25 billion litres of toxic sludge into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake. The total volume of the waste — a mix of mine wastewater and toxic mining byproducts —  would have filled about 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

In a statement to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the disaster, B.C. Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation Minister Josie Osborne said changes to mining regulations have made B.C. “a world-leading mining jurisdiction.” 

Osborne said tailings storage facilities in B.C. “must conform to one of the most stringent [tailings] regulatory frameworks in the world.”  

“We have significantly reduced potential safety, health, environmental and business risks associated with tailings storage ponds,” the minister stated.

But ecologist and mining researcher Adrienne Berchtold, who works for the non-profit group SkeenaWild Conservation Trust, said B.C.’s changes to tailings dam regulations have resulted in “very little practical change on the ground” to reduce the risk of breaches like the one at Mount Polley.

Tailings storage facilities can last long after mines that relied on them have shut down. B.C.’s mines code requires companies to take action to reduce the “physical, geochemical, ecological and social risks” of their mine waste. But tailings ponds remain a permissible storage option.

Berchtold pointed out the independent panel the province established to examine the Mount Polley disaster was clear B.C. needs to move towards eliminating water in its tailings facilities —  “and yet no one in government or the mining industry seems to be really asking how this goal can be achieved.” 

“New mines are still being proposed with bigger and bigger wet tailings facilities, and there has been no concerted effort to remove water from closed tailings facilities,” Berchtold said in a written response to questions from The Narwhal.

Here are five tailings dams in B.C. that should be on your radar. Four would have ‘extreme’ consequences if they failed and one would have ‘very high’ consequences, according to the tailings dam map.

1. Copper Mountain mine aims to nearly double its tailings pond capacity 

If you’ve driven east from Hope on Highway 3, you’ve likely noticed a solid wall of concrete high on a mountain as you’re approaching Princeton. 

The Copper Mountain mine tailings dam, in the Similkameen Valley, is 192 metres high — four times the height of the Mount Polley tailings pond dam that failed. 

The mine’s owner, Copper Mountain Mining Corporation, is looking to increase the permitted height of that tailings dam to 260 metres — higher than the tallest skyscraper in Vancouver. If approved, the increase would make Copper Mountain’s tailings dam the tallest in Canada.

The expansion would also more than double the mine’s permitted discharge into the Similkameen River, from 60 litres per second of treated wastewater to 200 litres per second. 

The mine was fined $51,000 in November 2020 for exceeding discharge limits and contravening B.C.’s Environmental Management Act with unauthorized discharges.

Copper Mountain’s tailings pond sits in a natural valley at the mine’s site. According to the company, as of January 2019 it contained about 150 million cubic metres of settled tailings — a sludgy mix of solid mine waste — and is permitted to contain 240 million cubic metres. The expansion would increase the tailings pond capacity to 420 million cubic metres. 

For comparison, Mount Polley contained about 44 million cubic metres of tailings, and released about 17 million cubic metres of water and eight million cubic metres of tailings in the 2014 spill.

In December 2023, the Lower Similkameen Indian Band requested a full environmental review of the proposed expansion at the Copper Mountain mine. The band’s request was backed by nearly two dozen Canadian and U.S. environmental groups, including the Wilderness Committee, David Suzuki Foundation, Okanogan Highlands Alliance and SkeenaWild Conservation Trust. 

The submission was rejected by B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Office, on the grounds that engagement and consultation with the Lower Similkameen Indian Band was satisfactory and that the proposed expansion did not meet the threshold for an assessment. The assessment office said the province’s major mines office and Environment Ministry could “fairly, effectively and appropriately address” the band’s concerns about the project. 

A Copper Mountain tailings dam failure would have ‘extreme’ consequences, according to the map.

2. Gibraltar dam is ‘another Mount Polley situation waiting to happen’ 

The Gibraltar copper mine, which sits upstream of the Tsilhqot’in Nation community of Tl’esqox, is the fourth largest open-pit mine in North America.

Owned by B.C.-based Taseko Mines Limited, Gibraltar’s tailings storage facility holds about 757 million dry metric tons and is about three times taller than Mount Polley’s tailings storage facility. The mine opened in 1972, before environmental assessment legislation was in place, so no formal advance study of potential environmental impacts took place. 

Tl’esqox Chief Francis Laceese told The Narwhal last year the mine is “another Mount Polley situation waiting to happen.”

For decades, the mine has been accumulating water through snowmelt and rainfall. Billions of litres of water are taking up space in the tailings facility, putting the dam at greater risk of failure, according to a 2023 report by SkeenaWild Conservation Trust and BC Mining Law Reform.

Since 2009, the province has allowed Gibraltar to release untreated mine water into the Fraser River as long as the discharge meets certain requirements. The mine’s permit was updated in 2015 and again in 2019, allowing a total 50 per cent increase in waste discharge volume — the equivalent of about 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools per day. 

The Tsilhqot’in Nation challenged the increase, citing potential negative impacts on the nation’s Rights and Title and questioning the province’s consultations and whether the permit amendments were “adequately protective of human health and the environment.” 

B.C.’s environmental appeal board dismissed the challenge in December 2023. 

The map says a Gibraltar mine tailings dam failure would have ‘extreme’ consequences.

3. Red Chris mine dam failure potentially ‘more significant’ than Mount Polley breach 

In the wake of the Mount Polley breach, Red Chris — another open-pit mine once owned by the same company, Imperial Metals — came under intense scrutiny. Located on Todagin Mountain, near the Tahltan village of Iskut in the province’s northwest, Red Chris began operating in February 2015.

The mine’s tailings storage facility includes two dams, one measuring 80 metres and the second 53 metres, according to the company’s July 2023 disclosure statement.

The Tahltan Nation was initially critical of the mine and demanded an independent review of the mine’s tailings dam design. That 2014 review, conducted by engineering consulting firm Klohn Crippen Berger, flagged issues with the design and concluded “any failure of the Red Chris impoundment will likely have a much more significant environmental impact than the Mount Polley failure.”

In response to the review, Imperial Metals conducted further assessments of the terrain on which the tailings storage facility was built and “made adjustments” to address the review’s recommendations. The Mines Ministry was satisfied with the changes. However, the “basic conceptual model” of the tailings storage facility stayed the same, according to a ministry spokesperson.Today, the nation supports the mine, now majority-owned by U.S.-based Newmont Corporation. In November 2023, the Tahltan Central Government inked an agreement with the province to collaborate with the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office on environmental assessments, permitting and approvals for the mine. 

“With this agreement, we ensure that amendments involving substantial changes to Red Chris can only proceed with our consent, highlighting our commitment to environmental stewardship and a sustainable future,” then-Tahltan Central Government president Chad Norman Day said in a news release issued by the provincial government. “Reconciliation and economic development can indeed coexist, guided by strong environmental, social and governance standards, as envisioned by the Tahltan people.”

The company has applied to shift Red Chris’ operations from open-pit to underground block cave mining, which is considered less risky and environmentally damaging than open-pit operations. The change will require amendments to the mine’s permits, requiring Tahltan consent to proceed.

A Red Chris tailings dam failure would have ‘very high’ consequences, according to the map.

4. Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell tailings dam would be Canada’s tallest

The Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell project proposed by Seabridge Gold is in British Columbia’s Golden Triangle, a mineral-rich region in the northwest.

The $8-billion proposal to mine gold, copper, silver and molybdenum was given the greenlight by the province in 2014. The certificate required the company to substantially start development by 2019. Five years and two extensions later, Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell received its substantial start designation from B.C.’s environmental assessment office in late July. Projects can be deemed substantially started once land-based physical activities that affect the environment are underway.

The mine’s proposed tailings storage facility is 239 metres high, which would make it the tallest tailings dam in Canada and the seventh tallest tailings dam in the world. It will be able to hold 2.3 billion tonnes of wet tailings, becoming one of the largest tailings storage facilities in the world.

“The mine’s wastewater, containing elevated metals and selenium, will require treatment for hundreds of years before release to the Unuk watershed — a watershed that supports salmon stocks of concern,” notes the 2023 report on high-risk mines in B.C. compiled by SkeenaWild and the BC Mining Law Reform coalition.

“The Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell Project has been designed with rigorous environmental measures to minimize its impact on the surrounding ecosystem and we are dedicated to ensuring that our mining activities meet the highest standards of safety and sustainability,” R. Brent Murphy, Seabridge Gold’s senior vice-president of environmental affairs, told The Narwhal following the report’s release.

A tailings dam failure would have ‘extreme’ consequences.

5. Highland Valley Copper dam breach could flood homes in Hope, B.C.

The Highland Valley Copper Mine is in the Fraser River watershed on Nlaka’pamux Nation territory. One of the mine’s five tailings storage facilities contains 1.2 billion cubic metres of tailings — equivalent to about 480,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. The consequences of a failure at Highland Valley Copper sites are rated from low to extreme, according to the analysis by BC Mining Law Reform and SkeenaWild.

In the event of a breach of the mine’s biggest tailings dam, the wave of wastewater could be approximately 25 to 30 metres deep and flood an estimated 1,680 homes in Hope, about a two-hour drive west of Vancouver. About 4,000 people live in the “inundation zone” for a tailings breach failure, according to the company’s tailings storage facility operations, maintenance and surveillance manual. 

The consequences of a tailings dam failure would be ‘extreme,’ according to the research by SkeenaWild and BC Mining Law Reform.

— With files from Francesca Fionda 

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Sunday marks the tenth anniversary of the worst mine-waste disaster in Canadian history at the Mount Polley mine on northern Secwépemc Territory, near the small B.C. Interior town of Likely. On the morning of Aug. 4, 2014, a failing containment dam owned and operated by Imperial Metals plunged a 25-million-cubic-metre torrent — about the volume of 10,000 Olympic swimming pools — of heavy metal-laden waste into Te T7iweltk (Quesnel Lake), which sits in the heart of a unique inland temperate rainforest.

Two years later, Environment Canada revealed some of the disaster’s impact: 2.14 tonnes of mercury and 134 tonnes of other heavy metals were released, accounting for 92 per cent of all lead and mercury in Canadian waterways that year. Even though Imperial Metals assured communities the metals wouldn’t enter the food chain, numerous studies proved otherwise.

Despite the magnitude of the disaster, the Mount Polley mine resumed full operations and shortly after that received B.C. government approval to pipe effluent directly into Te T7iweltk (Quesnel Lake). In the months prior to the disaster, employees raised concerns about the questionable management of the tailings facility. In 2012, the global firm Knight Piésold, the tailing dam’s original engineers, withdrew responsibility for the tailings facility, noting, “the embankments and tailings impoundment are getting large.”

Since the disaster, governments and Imperial Metals have demonstrated a shocking lack of discipline. Both the provincial and federal governments let the deadlines for laying charges pass without taking action. The only significant discipline came from Engineers and Geoscientists BC, a professional body that sanctioned three engineers who worked at the mine. When a private prosecution was filed by the former Chief of Xatśūll Nation, charges were stayed by the province.

Now, 10 years later, it’s fair to ask: why is there such a gap between the scale of the disaster and the government’s response?

Over the past decade, many have argued the disaster exposed a broken regulatory system. B.C.’s auditor general also raised serious concerns about the influence of industry, undermining the B.C. government’s ability to regulate responsibly. 

While we agree with the auditor general’s view that the B.C. government’s capacity to govern effectively is compromised by industry, this issue extends far beyond recent governments.

Instead of viewing the disaster as a symbol of government failure, it’s more productive to see it for what it is: a governance system in B.C. that has always prioritized socially and ecologically destructive extraction.

In the spring of 1858, as many as 30,000 people flooded into Nlaka’pamux Territory to engage in ecocidal and genocidal mining practices. A few months later, the Colony of British Columbia was established with a primary focus on facilitating this destructive approach to resource extraction. Precious life-sustaining habitats were systematically dismantled and contaminated, with recent research estimating that 58 million cubic metres — well over twice that of the Mount Polley mine disaster — of mercury-laden mine waste was flushed into the Fraser River and its tributaries. Colonial archives tell of an immediate wave of poverty from destroyed salmon habitat among nations along the Fraser River. 

In B.C., between 1862 and 1863, Indigenous mortality rates from smallpox ranged from 50 to 80 per cent. In this new extraction-focused colony, there were huge incentives to ignore vaccinations and intentionally spread disease. Tellingly, at this same time, on the Prairies, the Hudson’s Bay Company — engaging in economic activity that benefitted from Indigenous survival — had been running an effective vaccination program for decades.

You might be thinking that “times have changed,” and new environmental laws and reconciliation efforts can safeguard from this outcome. But all the regulatory tweaking and half-hearted reconciliation efforts don’t address the deep-seated preference for a damaging — yet profitable — approach to extraction of which the Mount Polley mine disaster is a product. 

The failure of regulatory tweaks to change industry practice shows a system stuck in a precarious dance. Instead of genuinely addressing these concerns, regulations are tweaked just enough to appease voters while still upholding this task of prioritizing destructive extraction.

What would it take to solve such a deeply rooted problem?

A good start would be for the B.C. government to implement policies that prioritize precaution over profit.

This means: lowering thresholds for mandatory environmental assessments and closing loopholes for avoiding environmental assessments by splitting projects into smaller parts; ensuring the B.C. environment minister bases decisions on science and removes the political cushioning from deferring decisions to “statutory decision-makers” and the B.C. government’s self-regulating professional reliance system that grants industry the freedom to curate its own scientific oversight; increasing bonding rates for industry to account for worst-case scenarios; raising fines to levels that actually deter reckless behaviour and addressing industry’s disproportionate access to government.

But herein also lies a major impasse: implementing effective policy would mean ending this sacred relationship of industrial primacy. Given how entrenched governance in B.C. has been with the needs of major extraction, there is an urgent need to rethink how the problem is framed and what solutions are considered.

Overcoming this impasse is straightforward, according to Ron Ignace, Canada’s Commissioner of Indigenous Languages and former Chief of Skeetchestn Indian Band, and Marianne Ignace, a professor of linguistics and Indigenous studies at Simon Fraser University. If 1858 marked a shift towards destructive practices, the solution lies in looking to the colonial terms of exchange prior to 1858. In their book, Secwepemc People, Land, and Laws, they draw from trading post journals to show how European extraction prior to 1858 followed Secwepemc laws, resource management practices and land tenure systems.

Laws of Indigenous nations can be respected while profits achieved

What would it take, then, to return to this time when profits were achieved while still respecting the laws of Indigenous nations? Many examples exist in B.C. where Indigenous nations have taken charge of their own impact assessments: Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc and the Ajax Mine, Squamish Nation and the Woodfibre LNG project, the Northern Secwepemc te Qelmucw mining policy, to name a few. These efforts are enhancing environmental oversight, preventing agency capture and stamping out high-risk projects.

Since 1858, nations have pushed back against a colonial system that has tried to erase Indigenous environmental governance. What is needed now is to scale up these values to work alongside other governance systems in B.C. A Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs discussion paper, “Centering First Nations Concepts of Wellbeing: Toward a GDP-Alternative Index in British Columbia,” offers a roadmap for making this shift.

Still sound unrealistic?

Think again. Aotearoa/New Zealand’s national treasury draws on Māori beliefs with its “Living Standards Framework,” which guides key economic decisions “across the different dimensions of wellbeing.” 

Prior to 1858, Indigenous nations across B.C. had strong and thriving systems of knowledge, law and governance that understood the interconnectedness of everything. Secwépemc ways of being are built on this principle: “Take care of the land and water, and it will take care of you.” Today, numerous Indigenous-led initiatives, like Guardians programs, are working to uphold these values.

These are just a few ways Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous people alike can end the dispossessing and ecologically devastating regulatory deadlock that characterizes B.C.’s history — and ensure that devastating outcomes like the Mount Polley mine disaster stay in the past.

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It was a Monday morning and the sun had just begun to rise when Doug Watt received an alarming phone call from his local fire and rescue department on Aug. 4, 2014.

A tailings pond dam at Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley mine in B.C.’s Interior had failed, releasing 25 billion litres of toxic sludge into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake, where Watt’s small community of Likely stretches along the shore. 

“They informed me that the dam had burst overnight and was pouring down into the lake and we should be prepared to evacuate,” Watt, who worked at the Mount Polley mine until 2001 as a metallurgist and shift supervisor, says in an interview.

When Watt went outside to pull his boat out of the water, he heard “a roaring, like Niagara Falls from a distance” — the sound of billions of litres of Mount Polley mine wastewater and toxic mining byproducts, referred to as tailings, pouring downslope into the fish-bearing Quesnel Lake.

The waste surge — with a total volume that would fill about 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — turned the tiny, overgrown Hazeltine Creek into a broad, bleak channel lined with stumps and debris.

About 19 billion litres of tailing slurry gushed into the water where the creek entered Quesnel Lake, the deepest lake in B.C. and possibly the deepest fjord lake in the world. The heavier elements eventually settled over six kilometres of lake bed in a waste plume between one and two kilometres wide and up to 10 metres deep.

All told, the tailings pond breach dumped tonnes of debris and heavy metal into the local watershed, including 134.1 tonnes of lead, 2.8 tonnes of cadmium and 2.1 tonnes of arsenic, according to a national inventory of harmful substances released into the environment. The spill contained 92 per cent of the lead dumped into Canada’s environment in 2014, Environment Canada estimated. 

It was, and still is, the worst mine waste disaster in Canadian history.

According to an expert report commissioned by the B.C. government, the Mount Polley tailings dam breach was the result of poor design that failed to account for a weak glacial silt layer underneath the tailings facility. For 14 years prior to the breach, the province had allowed Imperial Metals to increase the height of the dam by more than 40 metres, about as high as a 12-storey building. 

Eventually, the unstable ground underneath the tailings dam caused it to shift and shear, resulting in the breach, the 2015 report concluded.

In the wake of the disaster, Vancouver-based Imperial Metals pledged to take responsibility for the destruction, which affected the traditional territories of the T’exelc First Nation and the Xatśūll First Nation. (Both nations have confidential “participation agreements” with Imperial Metals and declined to comment for this story.)

Yet Imperial Metals has never been fined or faced legal repercussions for the tailings dam failure — and B.C. taxpayers covered $40 million in cleanup costs. Many questions remain about the company’s compliance with regulations. And the company, with provincial environment ministry permits in hand, is still pumping wastewater from Mount Polley into Quesnel Lake.

Imperial Metals is now seeking to expand the Mount Polley mine pit and extend the life of the mine into 2031. The company wants to extend the repaired tailings pond dam by another four metres and to continue discharging wastewater into Quesnel Lake. Notice of the public consultation period for the company’s application for the proposed tailings dam expansion is expected to go out by mid-August, according to an email from the B.C. mining ministry.

Imperial Metals says it paid $70 million to remediate creek

Bev Sellars was chief of Xatśūll First Nation at the time of the tailings dam breach. In 2017, she launched a private prosecution of Imperial Metals with 15 charges under B.C.’s Environmental Management Act and Mines Act. The day before the case was set to go to court, a news outlet informed Sellars the province had stayed the charges.

“The province didn’t even have the decency to phone me,” Sellars recalled in an interview published in the academic journal BC Studies, part of a commemorative issue marking the tenth anniversary of the disaster.

In 2018, Imperial Metals settled a lawsuit against two engineering firms involved with the tailings dam’s design and upkeep for $108 million. The company reports it paid more than $70 million to clean up the spill and remediate Hazeltine Creek. 

“Overall, it didn’t come out of their pockets to pay for the cleanup — and their cleanup basically was just trying to rehabilitate Hazeltine Creek,” Watt tells The Narwhal. “They worked away at that but it’s going to take 100 years or more before it’s back to where it was [before the spill].”

“Are we ever going to get restitution and restoration for the Mount Polley tailings pond spill?” Judy Wilson, the former elected chief of Skat’sin te Secwépemc (Neskonlith Indian Band) asks in the BC Studies commemorative issue. “Is there ever going to be any real concrete changes from it? Those are really important questions now that we’re going to be doing more mining in Canada and British Columbia.”

Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation Minister Josie Osborne’s office responded to questions from The Narwhal via email, after cancelling a scheduled telephone interview about the government’s work to strengthen oversight of the mining industry following the Mount Polley disaster.

“The Mount Polley disaster left an indelible mark on a fragile local environment and on the mining industry,” Osborne says in her emailed response. “However, it also evolved the way we regulate tailings storage facilities and conduct mining compliance and enforcement in the province. My ministry is committed to maintaining world-leading regulations and implementing robust oversight of all regulated mining practices.”

Biologist calls Mount Polley ‘most scrutinized mine in the world’

Imperial Metals didn’t wait very long after the breach to try and restart mine operations. In 2017, the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy granted the company a permit to discharge wastewater into the fish-bearing Quesnel Lake. That still worries Watt and other Likely residents.

“Their water treatment only removes solids. It does not remove any of the dissolved chemicals, like nutrients and metals,” Watt explains. “They’re still dumping that into the lake.”

In December 2020, the provincial environment ministry issued a $9,000 administrative penalty to Imperial Metals for failing to investigate and test long-term water treatment systems at Mount Polley in accordance with its permit. The company’s attempt to have the fine reduced was rejected by B.C.’s Environmental Appeal Board in September 2021.

One year later, in 2022, Imperial Metals re-launched gold and copper mining operations at Mount Polley, which employs about 350 people. The mine’s production target this year is to extract at least 30 million pounds of copper and 35,000 ounces of gold, according to the company website.

Given the lingering effects of the dam disaster and Mount Polley’s compliance record, Watt and others are calling for more transparent and rigorous provincial government scrutiny of the mining operations. 

The B.C. environment ministry says it has conducted 14 inspections since the wastewater permit was issued in 2017. In an email, the ministry says it issued five notices of compliance, five advisories, three warnings and the 2020 monetary penalty. The ministry’s most recent Mount Polley inspection took place in 2021; a ministry spokesperson says the mine is scheduled for reinspection “in the next couple of months.”

B.C. environment ministry requested more information about dam

According to a database of compliance and enforcement actions against natural resource companies operating in Canada, the ministry’s December 2021 review of the mine’s annual environmental and reclamation report found key information was missing. A January 2024 inspection to determine if Imperial Metals was obeying provincial greenhouse gas reporting rules found the company had underreported its emissions by more than 6,600 tonnes and failed to have its figures verified by a third party, as required. The company subsequently corrected its reporting, the environment ministry spokesperson says.

In its email responding to questions from The Narwhal, the mining ministry says officials have conducted five inspections at the Mount Polley mine since April 1, including the tailings storage facility and water treatment plant. Those inspections resulted in a warning for improperly storing aerosol cans, an advisory about the potential need for a permit amendment and requests for more information about the tailings storage and dam, according to the ministry.

Mount Polley will undergo “a minimum of 12 inspections” by the mines ministry in the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the ministry says.

“They’re probably the most scrutinized mine in the world,” Richard Holmes, a 50-year resident of Likely and a provincially registered biologist, says in an interview. “Unfortunately, it took that disaster to make that happen.”

Holmes views the B.C. mining industry’s relationship with provincial regulators as overly cosy, pointing to a 2016 report from the province’s auditor general, which stated the mines ministry was “at risk of regulatory capture” — a term used when regulatory agencies are dominated by the interests they’re meant to oversee instead of operating in the public interest. The auditor general recommended the province create an “integrated and independent” compliance and enforcement unit for the mining sector, emphasizing the unit should be separate from the ministry.

“That never happened,” Holmes says. “That’s probably the biggest disappointment.”

In 2020, the Mines Act was amended to separate responsibilities for authorizing new mines from conducting compliance and enforcement activities. This move, the ministry says, had the effect of “improving efficiency.” But that’s cold comfort for Quesnel Lake residents still impacted by the dam breach.

Researchers say high metal levels found in Hazeltine Creek flow

Christine McLean and her husband bought a property next to Quesnel Lake in 2012 and planned to retire there.

“We call it our happy place,” McLean says in an interview. But since the 2014 disaster, she looks at the lake differently. “Every time I walk down to the water, I wonder what’s in the water.”

McLean finds it tough to trust the claims Imperial Metals has made about the clean up and remediation. “Every time I see something change in the lake … it makes you wonder immediately if it’s something to do with the tailings in the lake.”

Tailings debris still coats the bottom of Quesnel Lake, where seasonal currents stir the material back up into the lakewater that flows out into the Quesnel River, a major tributary of the Fraser River.

“The fact that 10 years on we still see sediment enriched in copper coming out of the lake is quite amazing,” researcher Phil Owens says in an interview. 

Owens and his colleague Ellen Petticrew are both research chairs at the Quesnel River Research Centre and professors at the University of Northern British Columbia. They have detected concentrations of metal in zooplankton, a food source for local fish including lake trout and sockeye salmon. 

And the pair didn’t just find those metals in Quesnel Lake, where the tailings plume is located and Mount Polley wastewater is dumped. When Owens and Petticrew recently collected water samples from the bottom of Hazeltine Creek, they found creek water also contained high levels of metals, including copper, which can disrupt the migration of fish like salmon and make them more susceptible to disease.

“We don’t know where that’s coming from,” Owens, who teaches environmental science, says. 

“There’s a problem somewhere and they don’t seem to be willing to deal with it,” geography professor Petticrew added. “While they say that they’re finished remediation, it’s not fixed.”

Owens and Petticrew say they have shared their Hazeltine Creek findings with both the provincial environment ministry and Imperial Metals.

Owens described the ministry’s response as “surprisingly muted.” The ministry did not respond to questions from The Narwhal about whether it received Owens and Petticrew’s findings or acted on them.In July 2022, the pair were invited to present at a quarterly meeting of the Mount Polley mine public liaison committee, which the company was required to establish to help keep local residents, First Nations and other stakeholders informed about the mine’s activities. 

Owens says Imperial Metals asked to see the information he and Petticrew planned to present in advance of the meeting.

“When they saw our presentation, they were uncomfortable with the messages that were coming across and therefore we were disinvited,” Owens recounted. The Narwhal called Imperial Metals for comment and was asked to send a message to the company’s general email address. Imperial Metals did not respond by publication time. 

Watt and McLean both say ministry officials seem to take information produced by consultants hired by Imperial Metals at face value, while ignoring peer-reviewed evidence from independent researchers like Owens and Petticrew.

“It’s frustrating that Mount Polley’s so-called science is what the B.C. regulators are following in setting up their permit conditions and currently totally ignoring the research from the University of Northern B.C. scientists and their many associates,” Watt says.

“They are independent of the mine or ministry,” McLean points out. “This is the only place where the residents on the lake can actually get real facts that are not manipulated or presented in a way that favours the mine or ministry …  that’s the only place I feel like I’m actually not being bullshitted.”

B.C. yet to deliver on promised mining oversight standards

In the wake of the disaster, the B.C. government pledged to enhance oversight of the mining industry, including launching a robust inspection and audit process for the sector. But critics and community members say B.C. has yet to deliver the world-leading standards the government promised to implement.

Dozens of tailings dams like the one that failed at Mount Polley still dot the province, and little has been done to change the way the companies that own them store their mine waste, according to MiningWatch Canada co-founder Jamie Kneen.

“The tailings map that we’ve got on the BC Mining Law Reform website shows a number of relatively high-risk sites,” Kneen says in an interview.

“We know that, mathematically, the probability that something will happen in the next 10 years is pretty high.”

While countries such as China, Ecuador and Brazil ban the construction of tailings dams near communities and sensitive ecosystems, B.C. has no such restrictions. However, the Mount Polley disaster seems to have served as at least a small “wake-up call for the industry” according to Kneen, who notes that while B.C. has yet to ban upstream tailings dams, companies seem to have stopped trying to build them.

“None of the new proposals are for that construction.” he says. “So maybe we’re halfway there; at least the industry has recognized that this is not a viable method anymore.”

In her emailed response, Minister Osborne says the unique conditions of individual mines determine what type of tailings storage facility is most appropriate. “Limiting available [tailings storage facility] design options could lead to unintended increases in the risk to human and/or environmental health,” she says when asked about an upstream dam ban. 

The minister also notes the health, safety and reclamation code for mines in B.C. has been amended twice since 2014 “to maintain British Columbia’s status as a world-leading mining jurisdiction.”

“These amendments ensure that, in our province, [tailing storage facilities] are designed and operated according to industry best practices, all while introducing additional layers of responsibility and oversight over the facilities’ lifecycles,” Osborne says.

Even where regulations exist, companies do not always follow them and enforcement remains weak, Andrew Gage, an environmental lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, says in an interview.

“There’s very, very high levels of non-compliance in many industries, including the mining industry, and very, very low levels of the government doing anything about it,” he says.  “I continue to be surprised, given the magnitude of it — the largest mining disaster in Canadian history — that they didn’t do something more.” 

Updated on Aug. 1 at 7:40 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the timing of the Mount Polley public liaison committee meeting at which Phil Owens and Ellen Petticrew were scheduled to present their findings. The meeting took place in July 2022, not January 2023 as previously reported.

Updated on Aug. 1 at 3:38 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to add that B.C. taxpayers paid $40 million in clean-up costs following the Mount Polley dam breach.

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Public servants warned an Ontario cabinet minister last year about a “high-risk” loophole in mine safety rules that required “urgent attention” to avoid environmental disaster, an internal document obtained by The Narwhal shows.

One year later, it appears the politician who received the warning, Ontario Minister of Mines George Pirie, did not act on the bureaucrats’ advice.

Mine waste, called tailings, is often stored in human-made facilities that those in the industry call ponds. When the dams that hold tailings fail, the consequences can be catastrophic: waterways that were nearly destroyed after the 2014 Mount Polley tailings disaster in British Columbia will need decades more to recover, and the 2019 collapse of a dam in Brazil killed 270 people. Because of the high risk associated with tailings dams, many jurisdictions around the world have rules targeted at keeping them safe.

In Ontario, however, successive governments have not fixed a gap in the province’s tailings dam rules despite being aware of it since 2017, according to the internal briefing document prepared for Pirie in June 2022 and released through freedom of information legislation. Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government has been in power since 2018, preceded by the Liberals under Kathleen Wynne.

The province does have a law covering what are known as online tailings dams — those that are connected to existing lakes, creeks and rivers — which the Ontario Mining Association says make up a small number of the tailings dams in the province. But senior bureaucrats raised concerns that Ontario doesn’t have adequate oversight of the rest, which are called offline tailings dams, the briefing note says.

“Several tailings dam failures have stressed the need for appropriate oversight of tailings facilities,” said the document, part of an orientation binder given to Pirie shortly after he was sworn in as minister.

“In response to these failures, other jurisdictions have reviewed their approach to regulating tailings dams. There is little to no legislative authority to prevent similar situations from occurring in Ontario.”

The gap is outlined in a section of the binder dedicated to “critical decisions” to be made within Pirie’s first 30 days as minister. It noted concerns from senior bureaucrats, who told Pirie the hole in offline tailings dam rules was a “high-risk gap in the regulatory framework that requires urgent attention.”

A spokesperson for Pirie’s office, Dylan Moore, confirmed receiving questions from The Narwhal about the briefing document on July 11 and said the government was working to answer those questions on July 13. However, the minister’s office failed to follow through over the following week, providing no response to subsequent emails sent by The Narwhal on July 14, July 18 and July 20.

Before becoming a politician, Pirie spent 35 years in a variety of senior roles at mining companies, including stints as president and CEO of Placer Dome Canada, Breakwater Resources and San Gold.

The office of Northern Development Minister Greg Rickford, who oversaw mining from 2018 to 2022, did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did past Liberal ministers: Michael Gavelle, who held the position in 2017 and 2018, didn’t respond to a message sent on LinkedIn, while former MPP Bill Mauro, who had a brief tenure as interim mining minister in 2017, did not answer an email. Former premier Wynne said in an email that she did not recall discussions about the issue.

Steven Emerman, a U.S.-based geophysicist and mining expert, said the document obtained by The Narwhal raises serious questions about how the Ontario government has been evaluating the safety of offline tailings dams up until now.

“I think anyone would say this is an urgent issue,” he said.

The briefing document obtained by The Narwhal did not explain what exactly the gap in the rules entails.

The Ontario government publishes very little information about how its tailings management regime works in practice, and how they might be enforced, so it’s unclear what the process looks like or how effective it is. Pirie’s office did not answer questions from The Narwhal about how the government currently approves tailings dams and ensures they are safe.

Ontario does have some oversight of offline tailings dams: the Ministry of Mines inspects them for safety, and requires companies to submit detailed information about how tailings are stored as part of an eventual mine closure plan, which is required before a project can be approved. Companies are required to rehabilitate land after mining and put up various forms of financial assurance meant to cover the costs of that cleanup.

Ontario’s mining law also mandates that tailings be “maintained in a stable and safe condition,” but doesn’t include specifics. Other jurisdictions have detailed design standards for how tailings dams should be built and maintained, but Ontario only appears to have such precise requirements for online dams.

Chris Hodgson, president of the Ontario Mining Association, which represents mining companies in the province, said he was unaware of the regulatory gap described in the briefing note.

“If that’s the case, that’s news to our members,” he added.

Hodgson, a former Progressive Conservative MPP who was minister of mines from 1995 to 1999, also defended the existing Ontario regime, saying he believes the province’s safety standards are among the best in the world.

“[The Ontario government wants] to make sure that our companies are adhering to the best practices, and that that’s enforceable, and there’s good oversight on that,” Hodgson said. “That protects our shareholders as well as the public.”

Ontario does not publish data about offline tailings dams specifically, so it’s not clear how many are in the province. But the Ontario government oversees 400 privately owned tailings dams, both online and offline, according to a 2022 report from the province’s auditor general. That’s more than double the number in B.C.

In northern Ontario, tailings dams are scattered across the landscape and often close to communities. Sudbury, for example, has multiple tailings dams near where people live, according to a map published by the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum.

Jamie Kneen of the non-profit MiningWatch Canada said the problem outlined in the briefing document is “concerning.”

“The fact that there hasn’t been a major problem is more good luck than good management,” he said.

“The risks are there, and they increase over time as more tailings dams get built, but also the existing ones get older. If they’re not being properly built and maintained, the chances of something falling apart goes up.”

Industry association says Ontario government never reached out about changing tailings dam rules

Tailings are a noxious mix of water, leftover metals, chemicals used to process material extracted from mines and ground rock. Different types of tailings come with different types of risks. But in general, it’s not good for people or the environment when they spill.

Although Ontario hasn’t had a high-profile spill like the Mount Polley disaster, accidents do happen. The 1990 Matachewan tailings spill dumped 150,000,000 litres of heavy metal-packed sludge into the Montreal River north of Sudbury. The plume travelled about 150 kilometres downstream towards Lake Timiskaming and contaminated drinking water in the area with lead.

Another northwestern Ontario mine reported a tailings leak in 2006, although the company said it was able to contain the waste before it reached the surrounding environment. More recently, in 2019, the Ontario government fined mining company Goldcorp $34,650 for spilling a tailings slurry that included cyanide into the South Porcupine River east of Timmins. Seepage from one Sudbury-area tailings pond has been found in nearby Meatbird Lake, which was a recreational area until the mining company bought it in 2021.

It’s important that governments regulate tailings dams because mining companies can often be more motivated to cut costs and maximize profits than to improve safety, said David Chambers, a U.S.-based geophysicist and mine expert who is the founder and president of the Center of Science in Public Participation.

“I’m sorry, that’s just the nature of the beast,” Chambers said. “There are too many incentives and opportunities for things to go wrong.”

In Canada, different levels of government share responsibility for tailings safety. The federal government oversees uranium tailings, for example, and might review other types of tailings dams if mining projects are subjected to a federal impact assessment. Some federal laws might also be triggered if a tailings dam fails. But most of the responsibility falls to provinces, which are responsible for writing rules to govern general dam and tailings safety.

The June 2022 briefing document obtained by The Narwhal said staff at Ontario’s Ministry of Mines had already written a proposed policy to address the gap in tailings rules, but Pirie’s approval was needed to move it forward. The document didn’t spell out what the proposed policy would be, only that the ministry was planning to regulate all tailings dams — offline and online — under a new, comprehensive set of rules.

The first step, the briefing document said, was to get early feedback from the Ontario Mining Association, “so that changes can be implemented as soon as possible to mitigate against potential risk posed by tailings dams’ breaches or failures.”

It’s not clear what’s happened in the year since then. Ontario’s Environmental Registry, where the government is required to post notice of changes to environmental rules, does not show any recent updates to tailings dam policy. Ontario Mining Association’s Hodgson told The Narwhal the Ministry of Mines never reached out about any proposed changes to tailings dam rules.

The Ontario government did overhaul the province’s mining law this year. But the changes didn’t alter tailings dam guidelines: some were aimed instead at moving applications to open new mines through the system quicker, a key strategy for the Progressive Conservatives, who are looking to boost extraction of certain minerals. Other changes to the law made it easier for companies to go back and recover and sell minerals from old tailings.

Ontario’s current rules leave expert ‘not very confident’ in tailings dam safety

The former Liberal government created the policy gap in 2017 as part of a move to support businesses called the “red tape challenge” according to an archived provincial document. To “simplify and streamline” the dam permitting process, the Liberals made it clear that offline tailings dams were not subject to Ontario’s main dam safety law — The Lakes and Rivers Improvement Act, overseen by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry.

The idea at the time, the document said, was to “develop a short term transition plan” to move oversight of offline tailings dams to the mining ministry.

Since then, the Ontario government has been overseeing offline tailings dams using an “interim approach” it did consult the mining association about, the briefing note obtained by The Narwhal says.

That interim approach appears to include a regulation with a section about tailings dam safety, which was updated in 2019. Instead of setting firm requirements, the regulation says people involved in designing, building and maintaining tailings dams should “give due regard” to 11 guidance documents published by the Canadian Dam Association, a group that includes dam owners, operators, regulators, consultants and academics.

The list of 11 Canadian Dam Association guidance documents does not include the association’s most recent advice on tailings dam risk analysis, published in 2021.

Experts and critics consulted by The Narwhal said the current rules likely aren’t strict enough.

Emerman said he’d be a “little hesitant to have full confidence” in a dam constructed under a safety regulation that says to give “due regard” to best practices.

“What exactly does due regard mean?” Emerman added. “Due regard seems to have no enforcement mechanism.”

“I think the Canadian Dam Association is a reputable authority, but if all you’re doing is paying due regard to it, that’s pretty meaningless,” Kneen said.

The Ontario Mining Association provided The Narwhal with a second provincial government document, a 2020 guide titled “Closure Plan Requirements and Best Practices for Tailings Dams and Other Containment Structures.” The guide — which the government has not posted publicly and did not respond to questions about — outlines the types of information companies should give the government to satisfy the “due regard” requirement, like design drawings and reports signed off by qualified engineers.

Hodgson said the Ontario Mining Association worked with the previous Liberal government to develop the current regime and “got it in a pretty good spot in terms of protection for the public and the environment.”

In at least one case, the Ontario government does appear to have used some kind of enforcement mechanism: the 2022 report from the Auditor General noted an instance when ministry inspectors discovered an issue at a tailings facility that “posed a significant risk of failure” and the government ordered the mine’s owner to fix it. It’s not clear how often the government might issue such orders.

The government aims to inspect mines every five to 10 years but often doesn’t complete the inspections on its to-do list, the Auditor General’s report found. As of 2022, the government had not inspected nearly half of Ontario’s operational mines since 2011.

Though the government’s 2020 guide does ask companies for good information, Kneen added, the fact that the document isn’t available to the public makes it difficult to know whether Ontario is actually holding companies accountable.

Ontario’s rules also leave out principles from the 2020 Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management, Kneen said. The standard was developed by a worldwide expert panel convened by the United Nations Environment Programme, among other groups, to prevent catastrophic tailings dam failures.

Emerman said that although the government’s 2020 guide asks companies to submit information and design drawings, it doesn’t say anything about how or the government assesses the content of them. The guide also calls for the approval of the engineer of record, or the engineer in charge, but that person could be a mining company employee, Emerman said. “I don’t find this very comforting,” he added.

Chambers said that if companies were to strictly follow Ontario’s tailings dam safety guidance, as laid out in the 2020 guide and the regulations, they’d “effectively be following best practices.” The problem, he said, is that the wording of the guidance appears to make it voluntary, which means there’s very little the government could do to prevent companies from bending the rules.

“Many regulatory agencies give mining companies the benefit of the doubt, until something goes wrong,” Chambers said.

“Said another way, it usually takes an accident or a bankruptcy to make regulators move from voluntary to mandatory compliance.”

Chambers also said that while the dam association’s guidelines are good, they’re intended as recommendations that complement provincial law, not a binding safety code. “They’re well thought out, but somebody needs to go a step further,” he added.

For example, Chambers said, B.C.’s rules contain guidelines for how steep a dam embankment can be, a level of detail that’s absent from the dam association’s guidelines and Ontario’s offline tailings dam rules. B.C. tightened up its laws after the Mount Polley spill, but critics say they still don’t go far enough. And nine years later, with contaminated sludge from the disaster still lining the floor of nearby Quesnel Lake, the Mount Polley Mine has re-opened.

The Canadian Dam Association, which did not respond to a request for comment from The Narwhal, says on its website that it does not regulate dam construction or engineering.

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Chief Francis Laceese of Tl’esqox describes the Gibraltar mine as a “disaster waiting to happen.” 

Located about 60 kilometres north of Williams Lake, B.C., it’s the fourth-largest open-pit mine in North America. Laceese’s Tsilqot’in community, Tl’esqox, is directly downstream.

The Gibraltar copper mine is among B.C.’s most polluting and high risk mines, according to a report released today by SkeenaWild Conservation Trust and BC Mining Law Reform Network. 

Eleven mines are listed based on their proven or probable impacts to the environment, unsafe management of tailings waste, non-compliance with environmental permits and violations of Indigenous Rights. 

“A lot of them have significant issues with safely managing tailings or other mine waste and water contamination from the site,” lead author and researcher Adrienne Berchtold told The Narwhal. Berchtold is an ecologist and mining researcher for SkeenaWild Conservation Trust.

The report also highlights a number of key regulatory issues around how mine waste is managed and the increasing size of tailings storage facilities allowed by the government. 

The report titled, Dirty Dozen 2023: B.C.’s top polluting and risky mines, names the province’s free-entry system for mineral staking as the 12th case. The free-entry system allows companies and individuals to explore for minerals without consulting or seeking consent of First Nations or private property owners. The province currently uses an online system which allows anyone to make a mineral claim in an area of land, giving them exclusive rights to the minerals in that spot.

Gitxaała Nation and Ehattesaht First Nation just finished presenting their legal challenge against the automatic granting of claims in their territory to B.C.’s Supreme Court. This practice goes against their laws, the Crown’s duty to consult and B.C.’s commitments to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the First Nations argue. This is the first case to test B.C.’s 2019 declaration act; a decision will likely take months.

“B.C. has argued their archaic colonial mineral tenure system is consistent with the Canadian Constitution and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This is not honourable. This is not reconciliation,” Gitxaała Sm’ooygit Nees Hiwaas (Matthew Hill) told The Narwhal. 

The abandoned Yellow Giant mine on Lax k’naga dzol (Banks Island) is listed among the dirty dozen and is in Gitxaała territory. Exploration of Lax k’naga dzol started in the 1960’s, without the consent of Gitxaała. Eventually, Yellow Giant mine was built. In 2015 it spilled hundreds of thousands of litres of toxic waste, causing contamination to the community’s food sources and approximately $2 million in cleanup liabilities. The company went bankrupt and, according to Gitxaała’s written submissions, “the site remains unremediated more than seven years later.”

Gibraltar mine a ‘Mount Polley situation waiting to happen,’ Chief says

In 2014, Mount Polley’s tailings dam breached and spilled an estimated 25 million cubic litres of water and contaminated materials into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake — a source of drinking water and major spawning grounds for sockeye salmon. It remains the biggest environmental mining disaster in Canadian history.  

Laceese believes Gibraltar mine is “another Mount Polley situation waiting to happen.”

Owned by Taseko Mines Limited, a B.C.-based company, Gibraltar’s tailings storage facility holds about 757 million dry metric tons and is about three times taller than Mount Polley’s. Because the mine opened in 1972 before legislation was in place, it didn’t need an environmental assessment. 

For decades the mine has been accumulating water through snowmelt and rainfall. Billions of litres of water are taking up space in the tailings facility, putting the dam at greater consequence of failure, according to the dirty dozen report.

Gibraltar has been permitted to release untreated mine water into the Fraser River since 2009 if the discharge meets certain requirements, despite the Tsilhqot'in Nation calling to have the water treated before release.

“The Fraser River supports the largest migration route of Pacific salmon in B.C.,” Laceese said. “The continued environmental pressure being put on the Fraser River and our salmon is unacceptable and in direct opposition to our Indigenous laws,” Laceese previously told The Narwhal.

Despite the First Nation’s concerns, in March 2019, Taseko was given the go-ahead to temporarily increase the amount of discharge of tailings effluent going into the Fraser River to the equivalent of about 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools per day. 

The Tsilqot'in Nation submitted a challenge to the increase but the environmental appeal board still hasn’t made a decision on it. The permitted increase has expired and the nation hasn’t heard anything, Laceese said.

The Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy is responsible for reviewing and approving any discharges to the environment.

“Both Mount Polley and Gibraltar mine have permitted effluent discharges that have undergone significant technical and stakeholder review, including scrutiny by the environmental appeal board,” the Ministry of Environment told The Narwhal in a statement, noting environmental monitoring is ongoing and annual reports are made public.

“Permitting of effluent discharges is done following a rigorous approach that is protective of all aquatic life,” the statement said.  

Gibraltar’s regular discharge into the Fraser is currently paused because of high levels of nitrate, but Taseko has long-term plans to continue releasing mine water into the river, according to the report. The pause has added to the build up of more water on the site, like in open pits. In January, Gibraltar was fined $14,000 for discharging effluent in an area it was not permitted.

Nitrate is a byproduct from blasting during the mining process. Too much nitrate in the environment can limit plant growth and harm the health of waterways and soil, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. 

Gibraltar is currently working on a “biological treatment” to lower nitrate levels so surplus water can be discharged into the Fraser again, Sean Magee, vice-president of corporate affairs at Taseko told The Narwhal in an email. “The water quality standards enforced in this permit are highly protective of the aquatic environment.”

The mine monitors water quality regularly and conducts studies to find if the discharge has any effect on the aquatic habitat of the Fraser River, Magee said, in addition to its salmon sampling program. “This extensive monitoring program has demonstrated no consistent evidence of effect to Fraser River water quality, sediment quality, benthic invertebrate communities or fish health.”

Taseko is also in the process of getting a permit for a water treatment plant, Magee said. First Nations in the area have been calling for a water treatment plant for years.

B.C. mining cleanup cost concerns 

The current estimated cleanup cost for the Gibraltar site is more than $108 million, putting it among the most expensive reclamation estimates for mines in the province. 

The provincial government currently holds a bond to cover the entire estimated cost, but that gives little comfort to Laceese. “There’s other mines that have been over and done with, but there’s still a lot of garbage and a lot of poison left behind,” he said.  

Mines like Tulsequah Chief, about 100 kilometres south of Atlin, B.C., are the “poster-child for deficient financial responsibility and clean-up,” the report says. The abandoned mine has been leaching acid mine drainage into the Tulsequah River for decades. The rough estimated cost to clean up the site ranges from $87.7 million to $129.7 million, according to a statement from the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation.

The ministry’s goal is “ that no costs will be borne by the province,” the statement said. 

But in 2016 previous owners of the Tulsequah Chief went into a six-year receivership.

“The people that own the company face no real liability. They face no consequences of their decision-making,” Guy Archibald told The Narwhal. Archibald is the executive director of the  Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission, a consortium of 15 Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian Nations focused on protecting transboundary rivers from Canadian mining. 

The commission has raised concerns about a number of transboundary mines listed in the report including Seabridge Gold’s Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell (KSM) project. The proposed gold, copper, silver and molybdenum mine is about 240 kilometres north of Prince Rupert, close to the B.C.-Alaska border. “The mine’s wastewater, containing elevated metals and selenium, will require treatment for hundreds of years before release to the Unuk watershed,— a watershed that supports salmon stocks of concern,” the report reads. The proposed tailings storage facility is 239 metres tall and can hold 2.3 billion tonnes of wet tailings, making it one of the largest in the world.

Following publication, Seabridge Gold provided a detailed statement to The Narwhal in response to the dirty dozen report. “The KSM Project has been designed with rigorous environmental measures to minimize its impact on the surrounding ecosystem and we are dedicated to ensuring that our mining activities meet the highest standards of safety and sustainability,” R. Brent Murphy senior vice president of environmental affairs said. The province’s environmental assessment process “required Seabridge to evaluate and adopt an effective selenium treatment technology for the KSM Project,” Murphy said. The mine site plans to use a relatively new technology to reduce selenium from mine water. 

Archibald is eager to see a successful way to treat selenium, though he said this technology has not been used on a working mine as big as KSM before. “Selenium is incredibly detrimental to fish and it's not the only poison that will be coming down the river,” Archibald said. 

The impacts of mines travel beyond borders and through international waterways but, currently, Indigenous groups from outside of B.C. have limited opportunities to weigh in on decisions. As KSM has gone through the permitting process, “not a single U.S. tribe was at the table,” Archibald told The Narwhal.

“The Seabridge team extensively engaged with Alaskan tribes and [environmental non-governmental organizations] and is maintaining ongoing engagement with the U.S. federal and state agencies,” Murphy said. Seabridge gave presentations, meetings and site tours with Indigenous groups, according to Murphy.

For Archibald the meetings were inadequate and did not provide a space for genuine two way conversation. Currently, projects in B.C. do not require the consent of U.S. tribes to go forward, Archibald said.

The commission is hoping in the future, transboundary Indigenous communities will have to be consulted. “This is a benefit for the salmon for all our communities,” Archibald said. “We just want that seat at the table so we can tell these mining companies and the B.C. government, what we hold dear and what must be protected throughout this process.”

According to the B.C. Ministry of Mines, this consultation is happening for future projects. “Any new projects in B.C. must undergo a comprehensive Environmental Assessment and are subject to a thorough permit review process that includes cross-border agencies when there are cross-border interests,” the ministry told The Narwhal. “Engagement processes with transboundary Indigenous Nations (for example Alaskan tribes) are occurring.”

'There are solutions'

This is the second time SkeenaWild Conservation Trust and BC Mining Law Reform has released a “dirty dozen” list. The first report, published in 2021, raised similar concerns about ongoing water pollution and the waste left behind by abandoned mines.  

Since 2021, some mining projects have not moved forward due to environmental concerns. 

The B.C. and federal government rejected the proposed Sukunka open-pit coal mine as it threatened a population of at-risk caribou. The province also denied a permit for a proposed open-pit copper, gold and molybdenum mine on the Skeena River on the territory of the Lake Babine Nation. The environmental assessment office found that the project posed too great a risk to the environment and wild sockeye salmon populations. 

“That’s a pretty big deal,” Berchtold said of the two rejected projects. “It hopefully indicates a shift in how decision-makers are considering environmental and social values.”

Following the Mount Polley disaster, in 2016 the Ministry of Mines updated the Health, Safety and Reclamation Code to strengthen tailings management requirements and make sure they are up to date. There’s a committee “responsible for on-going review and to make recommendations for revisions to ensure best practices in health and safety, engineering and environmental protection,” the ministry told The Narwhal. “Currently, the committee has a sub-committee of tailings storage facilities experts reviewing the provisions of the code.”

Improvements have also been made to how the province collects bonds to ensure mining projects have enough set aside for reclamation and cleanup. An interim policy released in 2022 moves the province towards collecting the full cost of cleanup earlier in a mine’s life. 

The dirty dozen report suggests Gibraltar mine explore water management solutions with the consent of affected Indigenous groups. It continues that better data and predictions can also help manage how much water might be on site and how to safely store or release it. This recommendation can help, not just with Gibraltar, but for planning of future mines, Berchtold said.

There is a narrative that “B.C. is a world-class mining jurisdiction that has the best possible mining regulations and oversight,” but there are a lot of ways the province can improve. There are other jurisdictions B.C. could look to for inspiration, Berchtold said. “There are solutions available.”

Updated on June 7, 2023, at 5:10 p.m. PST: This story has been updated to include a statement from Seabridge Gold that was sent after publication.

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Thirteen kilometres west of Imperial Oil’s Kearl oilsands mine, near where her family used to hunt and trap, Jean L’Hommecourt has her own cabin. It’s a place where she remembers being able to drink right from the creek. It’s where she used to go to harvest plants and berries. It’s where, she says, she feels most at home. It’s where she belongs.

L’Hommecourt, now 59, grew up near the northern Alberta community of Fort Chipewyan and continues to harvest from the land — downstream from the oilsands.

In February, she harvested a moose near her cabin, and shared her bounty with family and Elders.

Little did she know that in May of last year, Imperial had found discoloured water in the marshy land outside Kearl’s tailings area and eventually confirmed the discolouration was from tailings leaks that were infiltrating groundwater and bubbling up to contaminate the surface water as well. 

Both the company and the Alberta Energy Regulator failed to notify impacted communities for nine months after first spotting that water — and not until a second incident spilled 5.3 million litres over a retaining wall and into the surrounding land in February 2023, leading to a flurry of concerns about drinking water, wildlife and contamination of land.

Those millions of litres spilled days before L’Hommecourt got her moose. 

Imperial says the spill took place on Jan. 31, but wasn’t detected until Feb. 4, when it was reported to the energy regulator. The regulator says Imperial initially estimated the spill to be 2,000 litres, but on Feb. 5 during a site visit, the company said its estimate had increased to 5.3 million litres. 

The regulator says it will not comment on why there was a delay in reporting or possible repercussions due to its ongoing investigation of the incident. Meanwhile, there is ongoing uncertainty surrounding the cause and effects of the spill. 

“What if something happens to them?” L’Hommecourt says of those who shared her moose. “I kind of feel that responsibility that I might have made them sick by consuming the meat and I feel sad that I have to feel that way.”

This is a region where many still live off the land and where many also work in the oilsands. Where politics — local, provincial, national and global — coalesce and clash.

The spill renewed debate about how much is enough when it comes to the impact of the oilsands on surrounding communities. It has also raised the difficult question of how to work with an industry that so many people in this region depend on without sacrificing the land.

“In order for you to take care of it, to manage it, you have to be part of it,” Chief Allan Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan says in reference to the economic importance of the oilsands to this community. “That’s now your new trapline.”

Hovering over the oilsands mines in a helicopter near Fort McMurray, Alta., more than 400 kilometres north of Edmonton, it’s hard to maintain perspective. The mind shrinks the scale so that you can take it all in, and only snaps back into place when you realize the tiny truck you’re looking down on is the size of a small apartment block. 

Open pits and tailings ponds fill your field of vision, partially obscured by the brown haze kicked up by those enormous trucks. From their edges, the boreal forest stretches in all directions.

There are 160 billion barrels of oil buried under 142,200 square kilometres in northern Alberta, but this is the only region where it can be dug up in large open-pit mines. Just over 1,000 square kilometres has been dug up so far — an area larger than the city of Calgary. Elsewhere, it is removed by injecting steam into the ground to soften the bitumen before it’s pumped to the surface.

The tailings ponds, where the companies store their wastewater and toxic byproducts, have also continued to swell since 1967, when Great Canadian Oil Sands, now Suncor Energy, marked the launch of the world’s first large-scale oilsands mining. 

Since then, the regulator hasn’t signed off on a single cleanup of a tailings pond — known in the industry as a reclamation certificate — as companies struggle to find ways to deal with the messes they leave behind. There are now active discussions with the federal and provincial governments about releasing treated tailings into the river to help reduce the ponds. The combined tailings now cover an area bigger than Vancouver or downtown Toronto. 

L’Hommecourt’s cabin is a mere pixel on the landscape. 

But the scale of the developments isn’t the only factor that comes to bear on the communities in northeast Alberta. 

In 2021, Alberta produced more than three million barrels of oil per day from the oilsands region, and, between 2021 and 2022, contributed $11.6 billion to the government in royalties. 

Imperial Oil, the company behind the recent nine-month-long tailings leak, earned $7.34 billion in net income in 2022. 

The economic fortunes of the entire province rise and fall with the oilsands.

Downstream of the oilsands in Fort Chipewyan, the scale is different. The land is immense, but the community of Fort Chipewyan — the oldest town in Alberta — is small. There are 798 people who call this place home, according to the latest census, the vast majority of whom are Indigenous — Athabasca Chipewyan, Mikisew Cree and Métis. Fort Chipewyan acts as a home base for the nations and many of their members. Others are spread out over reserves and traditional territory throughout the delta. 

For much of the year, the town is only accessible by plane or boat. In winter, it can be reached by road, via a route that — after passing through Suncor’s Fort Hills mine — is without services, developments, towns or cell service along its 177-kilometre length. 

The route passes over muskeg and hills, winding through the scraggly pines of the boreal forest — its surface a combination of puddles, potholes, mud and ice — before it drops into the wide delta where the road smooths out and a dashboard map tells you you’re driving over the water. 

The town, established more than two centuries ago as a hub for the fur trade, has always been a crossroads. It sits on the edge of a wide inland delta where the Peace and Athabasca Rivers converge.

The gas station on the corner of the main street just down from the Northern Store doubles as a restaurant, where morning bannock, lunchtime soup and homemade burgers are staples. Further in from the shore, an arena housing the Syncrude Youth Centre is sandwiched between an aquatic centre and the community hall.

The residential school only closed in 1974, leaving behind lingering trauma that persists across generations. 

Now the community is navigating an uncertain future, torn between tradition and the need for jobs and trying to find a way to work with industry while protecting the land. It’s part of a complicated and complex reality in Fort Chipewyan.

Larry Marten, 73, remembers the land before the hydroelectric dam, named for former B.C. premier W.A.C. Bennett, was built on the Peace River in 1968. The water levels have dropped since BC Hydro built the dam and since the oilsands mines started pulling water from the Athabasca a year earlier. 

For years, contaminants from the enormous tailings ponds have seeped into the water, or spilled. The community has seen “higher than expected” occurrences of some forms of rare cancer. There is fear and mistrust despite assurances the water is safe.

Marten still lives off the land, trapping muskrats and martens, and he can tell you in detail about the years when the land flooded or dried up and the impact it had.

The muskrat population ebbs and flows with the water, he says, but they’ll never be as abundant as they were when he started trapping at 16. He doesn’t think there will be any trappers left in 10 or 15 years. 

“You get rid of all the trappers, you don’t have to worry about it now,” he says. “When they first had the Bennett dam and they were fighting 50 years ago, they had these meetings about the water. Still going on, 50 years. There’s no change, nothing.”

Marten feels the same sort of fatalism when it comes to the oilsands mines, which now divert more of the flow and pose a risk to habitats and drinking water. 

“Well, it’s happening, so there’s nothing you can do about it,” he says. “You gotta fight the government and the government has the say. I say the oil plants are the government, because they pay thousands and thousands of dollars to the government and the government says ‘oh okay, go ahead.’ ”

Throughout the community, there is a sense of inevitability about it all. The oilsands, one of the largest industrial developments on the planet, aren’t going to shut down. The regulator, the government and the companies will continue to expand and operate as long as possible. 

Marten still eats the animals he traps. But there is a constant set of questions buzzing in many residents’ heads: Is it safe? Can industry and government be trusted? Where did my cancer come from?

It’s still not known how much wastewater has seeped from Kearl’s tailings area since May of last year. Eleven months later, the leak continues. Imperial’s latest update, posted online earlier this month, says equipment that was supposed to measure the pond level and activate a pump was not working properly.  

“There was a gradual buildup in sediment materials, which impacted accurate measurement of the pond level,” the company says in the update. 

Routine inspections of the area didn’t detect the rising wastewater, according to the company, due to “winter conditions and low visibility.”

The issue of seepage from the tailings area into groundwater was a source of concern when the Kearl project was moving through a joint provincial-federal environmental assessment and eventually approved in 2007. 

The company itself noted the permeability of the ground in the area and estimated as much as 1,000 litres per second could seep into the nearby watershed without mitigation and monitoring measures, which it promised to implement. 

The regulator eventually issued an environmental protection order against Imperial for both incidents, nine months after the initial leak. That order served as the first public notice of the contamination and noted excess levels of pollutants in the area, including arsenic, hydrocarbons and sulphides. 

Both the company and the regulator insist there have been no indications of impacts to wildlife or fish and, based on Imperial’s monitoring to date, none of the released fluids have entered the river system, but the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation questions the veracity of the company’s monitoring and testing.

The company was ordered to increase its containment measures for seepage from the tailings ponds, as well as to increase monitoring and pumping to reduce the impact of the ongoing leak. It was also ordered to develop a plan to clean up the contaminated area. 

Those plans have not been made public and freedom of information requests submitted by The Narwhal seeking notices of noncompliance from the regulator for both incidents were declined based on exemptions tied to an ongoing investigation.

Requests for emails regarding the incident involving the director of field operations for the area, who signed the regulator’s order, were also denied. 

The regulator says the records, 53 pages in total, may be used for prosecutions. 

“The [regulator] believes there is a significant risk of prejudicing a subsequent prosecution if the information is disclosed,” reads its justification for withholding the records. 

Frustration with the spill and the company’s failure to notify residents downstream came to a head in late March when Imperial hosted a public meeting — its first since the problems were made public on Feb. 6.

The meeting got off to a tense start when Imperial’s representatives forgot to open with a blessing and an offering of tobacco — tobacco they insisted they brought but could not find. Before the company could get to its presentation the crowd began shouting accusations and questions from the floor. 

Calvin Waquan, a member of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, confronted Imperial’s vice president of oilsands mining, Jamie Long, with bottles of water Waquan had topped off with motor oil. 

“When is enough enough?” he asked. 

Most of the anger was directed at the fact the company did not notify residents of the leak for nine months. In doing so, it violated impact-benefit agreements in place with the nations. 

“We fish, we trap, we hunt. That is our inherent right. You are taking our inherent right,” Raymond Cardinal said from the back of the room. “That [impact-benefit agreement] you signed with my nation? To me it’s void.”

The frustration meant there were few, if any, answers given.

It also exposed rifts in the community, with tensions between leaders, the local government and nations and between different ways of holding Imperial accountable. 

“I know that there’s animosity between the [Rural Municipality of Wood Buffalo], nations and whatnot, but I want to reassure you it’s Imperial Oil that needs to be held accountable here, right now, tonight,” said Kendrick Cardinal, the president of the Fort Chipewyan Métis, and the area’s municipal councillor. 

Long, who stood at the lectern and took the brunt of the community’s frustration for over an hour, did not provide interviews and quickly left the building. Imperial declined a later interview request from The Narwhal. 

Sitting outside the band offices the day after the community meeting, Chief Adam of the Athabasca Chipewyan looks tired but determined. He has led his nation since 2007 and has been both an outspoken critic of the oilsands and a proponent of working with industry. 

It’s a fine balance that can be hard to maintain, particularly as he’s called for a shutdown of the Kearl mine until the problems are resolved.

Chief Adam has said from the beginning that his nation would first try to work with Imperial through the agreement it has with the company, but he says the agreement does not close the door on legal action. 

“We don’t sign agreements that give away our rights,” he says. “We sign agreements that are going to benefit the community and to work in a safe environment. And if our rights are going to be breached, then we have that legal option to take back to them.”

Those agreements, he says, protect more than just his people. Non-Indigenous community members don’t have the same agreements in place to force the companies to do better. 

“We hold them accountable for everybody,” he says.

Echoing others in the community, Adam argues the Alberta Energy Regulator is captured by industry and is too busy rubber-stamping projects without proper oversight or consultation.

“We had the [Alberta Energy Regulator] CEO here, Laurie. I basically told him straight out that we will be seeing each other in court,” Adam says. “It may be a month, two months, six months, a year, 10 years down the road, but I said that we’re gonna see each other in court because of what happened here.”

On March 28, the regulator said it will commission what it calls an independent review into “certain aspects of the [regulator’s] response” to the leaks and the spill. It is seeking a third party to oversee the process. 

The request for proposals for overseeing the review closes on April 21. 

Adam says the nation is busy collecting its own evidence, despite setbacks. The nation said its testing team was denied access to the Kearl site for seven weeks. When they were finally allowed access on March 17, they were forced to wait at the gate for seven hours before being allowed into the site. The team had to return the next day because it was not allowed to gather soil samples the first day. 

An Imperial spokesperson did not respond to a question about delays for Athabasca Chipewyan staff at the site, and whether the company has taken samples from fish or wildlife for testing.

But the nation isn’t just focused on collecting data on the Kearl mine and its leaks, it is monitoring the broader delta as well, hoping to understand the cumulative impacts of industry. 

Beyond the economic, political and social complexity of the region, it is also incredibly difficult to trace straight lines between contamination and an individual mine, or between health impacts and contaminants. 

Imperial’s own investigation into where the wastewater was coming from took almost six months to definitively confirm the source. 

Bitumen lines the river banks here, and the water contains traces of it throughout the basin. The first step is always trying to determine what is natural and what is not. What exceeds regulations and what does not. 

That complexity can also act as a shield for companies who run the mines, where seepage into groundwater is a known problem and where tailings ponds would decimate the river basin should they breach.

It’s common to hear locals complain about being presented with endless data and jargon that is impossible to understand. At the community meeting with Imperial, the company pointed to yearly reports when questioned about public information on contamination levels before and after the spill. 

Those yearly reports include almost 1,000 pages of dense technical information and are not available on its website. 

Elders like Marten can tell you about how the land has changed and the animals have disappeared, but say they are easily swamped by companies and their data. 

It’s part of why the nations collect their own.

“We do have the ability to respond technically, if we’re told that things are happening,” Bruce Maclean, an environmental scientist who helps run the community-based monitoring programs for the Athabasca Chipewyan and the Mikisew Cree, says. “We weren’t told [about the leak]. And then we have this rush. Now, we only have two weeks to figure everything out before the water intake has to be turned back on. That’s bullshit. So that makes people frustrated and stressed out.”

Maclean also works with the newly established Nipîy Tu Research and Knowledge Centre, a collaboration between the nations and the Métis that looks at how their rights are being impacted by industry and government — from access to the land, the health of animal populations and the contamination levels in those animals. 

The centre, still in what Maclean calls a “soft start” phase, incorporates Traditional Knowledge, western science and youth education and has partnered with Parks Canada and Environment Canada to help monitor the environmental impacts on nearby Wood Buffalo National Park.

It’s why Marten was in town the day after the meeting to drop off muskrats at what’s called muskrat camp. A survey of muskrat populations has been going on for years, but the camp is a new iteration of the old idea, incorporating contamination monitoring and education. 

The camp, a three-day gathering at a collection of small canvas tents and a cabin on the outskirts of town, allows trappers like Marten to pass on their knowledge to youth or anyone else who cares to learn. Sitting in one of the small canvas tents, Marten showed how to skin the animals and then stretch their inside-out hides over a wood board for drying next to the stove. 

Maclean was helping to oversee the camp and to collect some of the skinned muskrats for inspection. 

He says the monitoring program has 10 years of monitoring data so if the chief and council come to them and ask about samples, they can put the levels in a historical context and say whether the trends are concerning or not in a given year.

But there’s only so much they can do. 

“There’s this huge giant impact around the system,” he says. “It’s hard to just single out one company and say, ‘Well you guys screwed up,’ because they’re part of the screwed-up system.”

Maclean also can’t translate what’s in the environment to its impact on people’s health. Community members, he says, don’t much care whether you tell them there’s four micrograms of arsenic in their water or 16. 

“Does that make anyone feel better? It doesn’t,” he says.

There are immediate concerns the community has to tackle. The water intake for the town reservoir from the Athabasca River recently reopened and the spring melt is coming. 

There is concern the melt could wash contaminants down the river or increase the impacts at the Kearl site. 

Many don’t trust the municipality, the company, the regulator or the province when told the water is safe to drink.

But the real battle will take months or years. 

Chief Adam says he is pushing hard for a real seat at the energy table. First Nations are asked for input on projects and initiatives, but have no say on final decisions. He doesn’t think it’s appropriate for the regulator and the energy companies to bring a project forward and ask Indigenous communities to justify their concerns as part of what he sees as a token process.

“In regards to oversight, in regards to the Alberta Energy Regulator, there has to be an oversight standing committee to sit at the table when industries are applying for licences,” he says. 

His own people will be keeping a close eye on the Kearl site and visiting other oilsands mines to check for problems and conduct monitoring.

Federal Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault has said he wants to see changes to the way environmental monitoring and communications are handled in the region. He wants to bring Indigenous nations, the province and the federal government together to talk about what went wrong at Kearl and how to improve future responses. He also wants that body to examine independent water monitoring, rather than the current industry-led model. 

Adam wants to see the government finally study the health issues in the community, a pressing concern ever since a local doctor identified a spate of rare cancers in Fort Chipewyan. The study was promised over a decade ago.

“Where’s all the concerns? Where’s the studies that we’ve been asking for in relation to all the cancers that continue to happen that nobody wants to talk about?” he says. 

“So why do they continue to issue the licences? Where’s the oversight? We need oversight. Without the oversight, we have nothing and this will continue to happen. And we can’t allow it to happen. It has to stop.”

Chief Billy-Joe Tuccaro of the Mikisew Cree says there can’t be a solution for the next one or two months or one that simply responds to the issues at Kearl. 

But it’s not just local nations, or their leaders, who are pushing for change. 

L’Hommecourt was just in the Northwest Territories for a meeting on water organized by the Dene Nation, Inuvialuit and the Northwest Territory Métis Nation. 

There have long been concerns about the water heading north from the oilsands, and the Kearl contamination led to complaints by the territorial government about violations of a bilateral water management agreement with Alberta. 

L’Hommecourt says she was there to alert them to what’s coming and to stand together as many nations to have their voices heard. 

She wants Imperial to stop operating until the problems with the leaking tailings is solved and doesn’t want to see any future expansions. She wants companies to start reclaiming land before digging up more. 

For L’Hommecourt, there is no balance left. The complex relationship between industry and the people has tipped too far, to the point where she feels only one side benefits. She says she has watched children throw up and cry with burning eyes from an ammonia leak. She has been told not to drink the water, or bathe children in it. She recounts how she has watched as her people’s inherent rights have all but disappeared. 

“The resource extraction is mainly beneficial to the outside world, it seems we don’t see the real benefits. What we’re seeing are the impacts to our lands, to our water, to our people,” she says.

“It stresses a person out, especially a woman, an Indigenous woman, because we rely on everything to feed our children. You mess with that,” she says, trailing off before she finds the word she is looking for. “It’s genocidal, is what it is.”

Back at her camp, hemmed in by aspen trees and frequented by bears, lynx, moose and gray jays, she says she doesn’t use the snow or the creek water anymore, not even for washing. It’s too close to Kearl. 

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At COP15, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, Canada focused on biodiversity protection, meaningful partnership with Indigenous Peoples and science-based policies. 

Yet when the rubber hits the road on each of these priorities with cases like the oilsands tailings ponds, Canada is headed the wrong way. It is time for the government to put a stop to the oil industry’s toxic takeover of lands.

Tailings ponds are industry-made reservoirs the size of lakes that store nearly 1.4 trillion litres of toxic byproduct from oil production. They cover vast swaths of the boreal forest in Northern Alberta, currently taking up over 300 square kilometres — enough to cover the city of Paris three times over. They contain dangerous chemicals such as ammonia, lead, mercury, benzene and naphthenic acids, and are known to leak and evaporate their toxic content into the surrounding environment. 

More than one million migratory birds fly over the oilsands region during their spring and fall migrations, including endangered species such as whooping cranes. Birds mistake tailings “ponds” for safe rest stops along their migratory route and either perish or suffer later on due to the acute toxicity of the mixture.

Fish have been spotted with tumours, while Indigenous communities using the land report a noticeable decline in wildlife in the area, from big caribou to small muskrats. The very existence of the “ponds” destroyed hundreds of square kilometres of carbon-sequestering peatlands, which cannot be restored.

Tailings pollution in the oilsands is a symbol of colonial injustice. Since the creation of the “ponds,” the nations downstream of the oilands, including Mikisew Cree First Nation, have been participating in federal and provincial consultations, monitoring programs and environmental assessments. 

Not once in nearly fifty years, since the oilsands operations began had there been an acknowledgment of the risks posed by the tailings — despite the nations voicing their concerns for ecological and human wellbeing and asking for adequate risk studies to be conducted.

Government considering allowing oilsands companies to release tailings ponds into river

Now, a new plan is being hatched in the oilsands: oil companies want to flush partially treated tailings ponds into the Athabasca River, which the Fisheries Act currently forbids. 

Canada has been considering obliging the industry’s request. But if Canada is sincere about its commitment to science-based policy, it should listen to the scientists calling for an independent risk assessment of the proposed release. Any authorized release should also commit to the highest possible water-quality standards.  

The ecological value of the potentially impacted area can not be overstated. The Athabasca River is one of the headwaters of the Mackenzie River Basin, the largest watershed in Canada and the most intact large-scale ecosystem on the continent. As an integral part of the Arctic drainage basin, it is the Arctic Amazon. The nearby Wood Buffalo National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is already in jeopardy due to industrial activity in the area and the threat of tailings release.

The communities and species of the area already feel the cumulative impacts of oilsands exploitation and other industrial activity. While operators tout the safety of their operations, there are already numerous ways in which oilsands waste is released to the environment, from aerial emissions and deposition of volatile compounds, seepage to groundwater and release of other industrial wastewaters. 

Mikisew Cree First Nation experiences high rates of auto-immune disease and rare cancers, especially bile duct cancer. Despite these alarming cases, there has been no baseline health study to attempt to understand the causes. 

Canada must seek consent from impacted nations to release tailings ponds fluids

Canada must make a public commitment that it will not move forward in authorizing the release without the consent of the impacted nations. Dene lawyer Daniel T’seleie argues Canada has a legal obligation to obtain the consent of all nations impacted by the release due to its passing of Bill C-15, which stipulates “Canada must take all measures necessary to ensure that its laws are consistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples.”

Canada must also bring Indigenous nations, oilsands operators and relevant provincial authorities to the same table and negotiate a plan for fulsome reclamation of the area, paid for by the operators. 

Finally, Canada must ensure that solutions to the tailings issue are supported by thorough and independent risk assessment to align with Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault’s statement during COP15 that “this government’s core value is science underpinning policy.”

We will be watching the government’s actions very closely to see if they align with those values.

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Imperial Oil’s Kearl oilsands facility has been leaking wastewater for almost nine months. It’s seeping into groundwater and bubbling up into the nearby watershed, according to the Alberta Energy Regulator.

The original leak, reported on May 19, continues. 

A second leak, reported by the company on Feb. 4, spilled an estimated 5.3 million litres of industrial waste water — the equivalent of about two Olympic-sized swimming pools — into nearby forest and wetlands from a storage pond. The land is adjacent to tributaries for two rivers — the Muskeg and Firebag.

The Alberta Energy Regulator issued an Environmental Protection Order against Imperial on Feb. 6 to deal with the contamination. 

The company says it will implement additional monitoring and control measures, including catchments and pumping wells. 

But the regulator is concerned the remediation plan fails to address the issue prior to the spring thaw, which could lead to further contamination and impacts. The regulator is now giving the company until Feb. 28 to revise its remediation plan.

The regulator also ordered the company to submit a new wildlife mitigation plan before the end of the day on Feb. 10, which assesses impacts and proposes a “plan for the humane euthanasia of impacted fish and wildlife.”

The order follows two notices of non-compliance issued against Imperial for the initial leak.

“The company has been working with the regulator since first identifying the issue. This order will help facilitate regulatory approvals to implement mitigation measures that have been proposed by Imperial,” Lisa Schmidt, a spokesperson for the company, said by email.

“We regret this incident and are making every effort to learn from it and apply preventative measures.” 

Order says groundwater is contaminating surface water

The issue of seepage from the tailings area into groundwater was a source of concern when the Kearl project was moving through a joint provincial-federal environmental assessment. 

The company itself noted the permeability of the ground in the area and said mitigation and monitoring measures would be implemented. 

Without those measures, it estimated as much as 1,000 litres per second could seep into the nearby watershed.

The regulator’s order does not say how much has leaked since the incident was first reported in May. 

In its report, the joint panel assessing the project said without mitigation, the “seepage will likely impact surface water bodies to the north, specifically the Firebag River and its three tributaries, and that groundwater and surface water quality could degrade.”

Mandy Olsgard, an environmental toxicologist and risk assessment specialist who has studied impacts of oilsands operations, says the order is significant because it says tailings ponds are contaminating groundwater and then reaching surface water — a possibility that has been questioned by industry.

“This is saying it is,” Olsgard says. “This is literally the missing link.”

Olsgard has done work for communities in the area, but is not currently doing so and was speaking independently.

She says the issue of seepage was one of the biggest obstacles to get the mine approved. 

Schmidt says the initial leak is the result of “gaps with the seepage interception system.”

Olsgard also says it’s troubling the leak was ongoing for nine months without notification, and notes there is no posting on the regulator’s compliance dashboard notifying the public of the risk until this week’s order.

“There’s five substances that they say are over surface water quality guidelines, of those substances, three or more toxic to humans,” she says.

Concerns about adverse effects as Imperial Oil wastewater continues to leak

Water quality sampling conducted by Imperial and submitted to the Alberta Energy Regulator showed the contaminated water exceeds Alberta Environment and Protected Areas and Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment guidelines, according to the order.

The contamination includes arsenic, hydrocarbons and sulphides. 

The regulator says it is of the opinion that the leak “is causing, or may cause an adverse effect,” but that no impacts to wildlife have been reported.

Schmidt said monitoring to date has shown no impacts on wildlife and, despite water sampling showing contamination above guidelines, she said there was “no measurable impact to local waterways.”

In addition to work plugging the leak and containing the contamination, Imperial must immediately identify potentially impacted third parties, including Indigenous communities and agricultural users. 

The spill occurred on Treaty 8 land. 

Treaty 8 Grand Chief Arthur Noskey did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication, nor did Chief Mel Grandjamb of the Fort McKay First Nation, on whose territory the facility sits. 

Schmidt said the company has notified local communities.

Gillian Chow-Fraser, the boreal program manager for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, says it’s concerning to find out about the spill through the order and that responses from the regulator are often the only way for the public to know about these incidents. 

She says industry does not have plans to deal with its waste as tailings ponds continue to swell and impact downstream communities. 

“We’re really being promised all these technologies that in the future will be able to address things like the leaks, and the tailings ponds will all be reclaimed,” Chow-Fraser says. 

“But this really exemplifies that while we wait on technology that may or may not come to fruition or exist, there is no way of adequately reducing or minimizing the harms that are happening right now.”

The Alberta Energy Regulator said by email that it is unable to offer additional information as there is an active investigation ongoing. 

If the order conditions are not met, the regulator has the ability to impose fines, start a prosecution and restrict or shut down operations until the company complies with the conditions. 

Fish-bearing waterways are under federal jurisdiction and the potential impact to rivers from the leak could involve violations of the federal Fisheries Act. 

Violations of the Fisheries Act are punishable by fines of up to $500,000 and up to two years imprisonment. 

Environment and Climate Change Canada could also not confirm whether it was involved prior to publication. 

Updated Feb. 8, 2023, at 4:35 p.m. MT: This article was updated to include new comments from toxicologist Mandy Olsgard and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Gillian Chow-Fraser.

Updated Feb. 9, 2023, at 10:57 a.m. MT: This article was updated to clarify the second release involved industrial waste water and to make clear the order revealed contaminated groundwater was impacting surface water.

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Oil and gas producers were in dire straits in the spring of 2020.

Oil prices plummeted as hundreds of millions of people around the world stayed home, reducing demand for fuel, while oil from Saudi Arabia and Russia flooded the market.

In Alberta, oil and gas lobbyists sprung into action, warning government officials the industry could barely cover operating costs. Companies needed financing and government help to keep people employed, they argued, and to provide shelter from the twin crises of COVID-19 and an oil market crash. 

But correspondence and meeting records obtained by The Narwhal have revealed the lobbying went far beyond surviving the pandemic and included what one former government official described as a long-standing oilpatch industry “wish list.”

The records, including dozens of pages the Alberta government initially refused to release, in violation of a provincial information law, reveal details of the long list of changes proposed by the lobby group, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. 

An analysis by The Narwhal has revealed four key areas the oil lobbyists discussed — wetlands, oilsands monitoring, tailings ponds and public involvement — could also be found in earlier lobbying efforts that took place far before the COVID-19 pandemic began. 

Eric Denhoff, who acted as a deputy minister of Alberta’s Environment Ministry under the previous NDP government, reviewed the lobbyists’ list upon The Narwhal’s request. 

“When you look at the enormous volume of requests, what you really have there is a 20-year wish list of requests that they’ve been trying on the [Progressive] Conservatives, then the NDP and then the UCP governments over the last couple of decades,” Denhoff said.

“Many of these go back a long way, and they’ve been pushed back on — both by conservative and NDP governments — because they were inappropriate to try and let industry wriggle out of basic, core responsibilities.”

Jan Gorski, director of the Pembina Institute’s oil and gas program, called the scale and scope of the requests “alarming.” 

Gorski said it appeared that during the pandemic, oil lobbyists “sought the removal of a critical number of environmental protections which were unjustified and would have had long-term negative consequences to Albertans and our environment.”

Industry-led committee pushed to suspend ‘non-essential’ environmental monitoring

Alberta officials discussed the changes behind closed doors, through a committee the oil and gas lobby group dubbed the “COVID-19 Market Crisis Joint Working Group,” the documents obtained by The Narwhal show. The lobby group initiated the committee on March 18, 2020, one day before Alberta saw its first death from COVID-19, under an agreement with then-premier Jason Kenney and then-energy minister Sonya Savage, herself a former Enbridge lobbyist.

Then-president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, Tim McMillan, a former Saskatchewan energy minister, called the first meeting to order two weeks later, and Savage and McMillan ran through the group’s “objectives.” Some senior staff in the minister and premier’s offices were also listed as “required attendees.” 

The lobby group presented a list of 132 separate items to officials during the first meetings of the committee — asking to suspend, defer or scale back industry obligations on everything from Indigenous consultation to greenhouse gas reporting and environmental or wildlife monitoring programs. In their internal emails, some government officials began referring to the lobbyist list by a nickname, using the lobby group’s acronym: “CAPP 132.”

The oil and gas lobbyists outlined their requests to officials, including their desire to postpone the development of any policy or regulation that would “increase costs” for industry and instead “focus on industry priority areas to mitigate potential for increased burden for industry.”

They also were interested in “leveraging” some of their previous lobbying efforts, they said, and in suspending what the lobbyists called “near-term, low-risk regulatory obligations,” like the provincial policy for protecting wetlands, as well as suspending requirements under the province’s emissions reduction and methane restrictions programs.

Although there is nothing unusual about lobbyists for Alberta’s largest industry pressing government officials about policy decisions or asking government to consult companies about matters that could directly affect them, the documents provide a glimpse into how oil and gas companies had an influential — and unparalleled — seat at the table.

Oil and gas committee structure ‘unbelievable’: former Alberta deputy minister

Nearly 50 public servants, political staff and regulators were involved with planning or running the committee or its various sub-committees — which also discussed additional policy changes. The structure of the main committee, including its name, is similar to a federal undertaking with the same lobby group reported on by The Breach.

The committee at the federal level was led by Natural Resources Canada, The Breach reported, and chaired by then-minister Seamus O’Regan, who is now labour minister. It had a similar objective of reducing “regulatory burden,” and included a short list of oil and gas company representatives. 

In addition to lobbyists and government officials, the Alberta committee also involved representatives from five oil and gas companies: Tourmaline Oil, NuVista Energy, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, Imperial Oil and Syncrude. None of these companies responded to The Narwhal’s requests for comment.

Alberta Energy’s top bureaucrat, Grant Sprague, moderated the committee meetings. The Narwhal reached out to Sprague for an interview but did not receive a response from him or Alberta Energy. Alberta’s Environment Ministry, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, the office of former premier Kenney (contacted by The Narwhal before Smith was sworn in) and the office of Savage, who is now environment minister, all did not respond to requests for comment.

The committee’s “core operational team,” according to the documents, was listed as three vice presidents from the oil and gas lobby group, as well as an “industry designate” from one of the other oil and gas companies. It also included a senior official in Savage’s office and one other “government designate.” 

Denhoff, the former deputy minister, had reservations not just about the list of requests, but the structure of the committee.  

“The entire core operations committee is four lobbyists and a political chief of staff,” he said. “It’s just unbelievable.”

CAPP says it ‘helped to create a safer environment’ for workers

In one internal presentation to provincial officials from April 2020, the lobby group noted how the provincial government had estimated the industry was running out of cash and needed between $25 billion to $30 billion to continue operating, more than the entire budget of the Ministry of Health in Alberta at the time (which was just under $21 billion in 2020).

It was in these circumstances that lobbyists circulated their list of 132 requests. Alberta granted approximately half of the requests by June 2020, the documents show, while dozens of others were either partially approved or remained under discussion. Some of those decisions led to the temporary rollback of environmental oversight in the province. 

Those rollbacks included ministerial orders modifying legislation overseeing environmental protections and oil and gas activity and numerous amendments to approvals governing the monitoring of the oilsands. 

In response to written questions from The Narwhal, Jay Averill, a spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, sent a brief statement. “Through the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting global economic shutdown, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, on behalf of the oil and natural gas industry, worked directly with provincial and federal governments to ensure reliability of energy production as an essential service,” he said.

“By working in concert with policymakers across the country we helped to create a safer environment for the people working in the industry while they continued to provide the energy Canadians and our trading partners rely on to survive.”

Alberta wetland protections mean ‘significant costs’ for oil companies: CAPP

One of the key focus areas for lobbyists pressuring provincial officials at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was wetland policy as it relates to industry.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has long pushed back against rules it views as too stringent, or too expensive, when it comes to protecting wetlands, starting with Alberta’s wetland policy introduced in 2013. Such a policy provides “strategic direction” for decisions impacting wetlands in the province, including tools and guidelines for development.

Wetlands cover about half of the oilsands region, according to the Alberta government,  and include bogs, marshes and peatlands, which develop over hundreds of years and are deeply important to First Nations communities.

When Alberta’s wetland policy was introduced in 2013, the association pushed back against a proposed “no-net-loss” clause in the policy that would have forced the industry to replace each hectare of wetland it damaged. The group complained such a policy would cost companies “billions of dollars.” The government backtracked, ultimately announcing a policy that aimed only to “minimize the loss” of wetlands, while emphasizing it would still “allow for continued growth and economic development.”

Nevertheless, the industry continued its resistance into 2019, when it pressured the government over Alberta’s “wetland policy implementation approach,” as part of 52 “energy issues” identified in the documents as being oil and gas lobby group priorities. 

By the time the pandemic struck, the industry was again pointing to the cost of minimizing damage to wetlands, saying “wetland policy implementation incurs significant costs for operators,” and asking for temporary elimination of wetland-related requirements.

Documents show the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers wanted the Alberta Energy Regulator to “defer any required three-year comprehensive reporting requirements for wetlands by one year,” and to “waive the requirement to collect wetland monitoring samples for the duration of, and three months following, [COVID-19] distancing requirements.”

The association also asked the regulator to waive all requirements for field monitoring and reporting under the province’s Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act for all of 2020 — programs that “may include” those related to wetlands, the lobbyists said — as well as surface water, fisheries, soil, wildlife and reclamation.  

The lobbyists said monitoring programs relied on third-party contractors, who were difficult to bring into work sites at the time because operations were limiting staff to essential workers only, and COVID-19 travel restrictions were also in place. 

They also downplayed the risks of temporarily eliminating monitoring. 

“For wetland monitoring, suspending sampling for a season or a period of time is unlikely to result in a potential impact being missed,” they said in their request. “Delay will not impact wetlands, only reporting,” they said in another. 

The province ended up granting all three of those requests.

In response to questions, the provincial energy regulator told The Narwhal by email “only some monitoring and reporting requirements” were temporarily suspended through ministerial orders — those “considered to have a low risk of potential short- and long-term impacts.”

All requirements for monitoring, and activities incidental to monitoring, that had been suspended were reinstated in the summer of 2020, a spokesperson said.

The Narwhal also asked the regulator what happened to approved environmental suspensions with vague end dates, such as “three months post-COVID-19” or other similar references to the end of the pandemic. 

The regulator said oil and gas operators were given 30 days following the regulator’s amendments to various decisions issued June 22, 2020, “to comply with all existing approval requirements as of July 15.”

‘Unfettered access’ for industry: critic 

Like the wetland policy, the joint Oilsands Monitoring Program with the federal government was started about a decade ago, and it received pushback in Alberta almost from the start. Yet the program, which oversees environmental monitoring of the oilsands region except for leases controlled by companies, has released valuable information showing rising mercury levels downstream from oilsands plants. 

According to the program’s most recent annual report, published in 2019, its research had become the basis for hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and other reports and presentations on issues including air quality, mercury, carbon pollution and the impacts of wildfires.

The oil and gas industry, which pays for the program, has been lobbying about it since at least 2019. Government records show that at that point the province was indicating a “limited” desire to engage on the topic. 

But after the pandemic began, the lobbyists argued to Alberta public servants that oilsands companies shouldn’t have to pay for the monitoring program that year, in part because various environmental monitoring activities would be suspended due to COVID-19 restrictions and the program’s expenses would shrink.

They also argued the program had “consistently underspent” its annual budget “over the past several years,” and so a “significant surplus has accumulated.” These surplus funds, it said, should be used to pay for the program for 2020-21, instead of oilsands companies. The lobbyists also asked for the program’s focus that year to be on desk work like program design, data analysis and report writing. 

The government marked this request as “reposition,” meaning they did not immediately grant it, but continued discussing it. 

Denhoff, the former deputy climate minister, said the monitoring program became a “battle.” Every year, he said, industry would try to reduce the amount of money the program spent — ensuring there would be a surplus.

In their request, the lobbyists did not specify how much of a surplus had accumulated. In 2020, The Canadian Press reported the program’s budget in 2019-20 was $58 million, of which approximately 90 per cent was spent. 

Joe Vipond, a physician who is past president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and co-founder of the Calgary Climate Hub, said the documents show how weakened oilsands monitoring was another point against the provincial and federal governments’ claim the initiative is a “world-class monitoring system.” 

“It’s no surprise that as soon as there’s trouble in the industry, the first thing they want to do is make that monitoring even weaker,” he said. 

“Everything that has happened since the UCP has come into power has been about supporting the industry. And so it’s zero surprise to me that industry has this kind of unfettered access, whereas it’s very difficult for other citizens, including environmental organizations, to have influence over this government.”

Cutting oilsands tailings pond management ‘does not impact safety’: CAPP

In addition to the Oilsands Monitoring Program, lobbyists were also fighting obligations to monitor the industry’s own waste.

The gigantic reservoirs of toxic byproducts created by oilsands operations, known as tailings ponds, have ballooned in size by almost 800 per cent over the past half-century and are now collectively bigger than the city of Vancouver. 

The oil and gas industry has been pushing to release treated water from these tailings ponds into the Athabasca River, a move critics say could risk damaging the important waterway. Federal regulations on the issue are expected in 2025. 

Related to tailings ponds are what the industry calls “pit lakes,” which are reclaimed oilsands areas filled with a mix of mine water, fresh water and tailings.

Tailings ponds in Alberta have been found to be leaking and there remains no comprehensive plan to clean them up, nor any clear indication of how this would be paid for. According to the regulator, companies have set aside $1.5 billion for security as of June 2022 to cover what the regulator has said is nearly $34 billion in liabilities related to the clean up of mining sites, including the oilsands. In 2018, a senior official at the Alberta Energy Regulator said in an internal presentation the true figure could be much higher.

The industry was lobbying on policies relating to pit lakes and tailings in 2019, according to the documents. Once the pandemic began, the oil and gas lobby group asked again for a reprieve on collecting samples. 

“There is only one contractor that can do this work,” the lobbyists told the government, “and operators already struggle to get this done as an industry because of capacity.” 

They said that instead of sampling, the data could be “estimated” instead based on the volumes of material being treated. 

Again, the oil lobbyists played down the danger of stopping monitoring. 

“[Tailings] pond measurement in itself does not impact safety nor increase environmental risk,” they wrote in the 132 requests. “While having annual pond investigations done does provide useful data, given the current environment it makes sense to provide a one-year-only waiver from the requirement to collect new data.”

The government granted this request. 

Government documents show that as early as May 2020, the crisis committee was “evaluating” changes to the tailings policy. 

Records show the oil lobbyists also successfully pressured the government to “waive the requirement for water quality monitoring for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis,” which included pit lakes, as well as groundwater, surface water and other water quality analysis.

Industry also received approval to suspend requirements to “advance research programs and demonstration activities for 2020” including those for pit lakes. 

Public involvement the ‘Achilles heel’ of oil and gas development process

The oil and gas lobby group has long been interested in shrinking the process for public consultations on energy projects, one of the few ways Albertans can have their voices heard on industry activities. 

In 2019, The Narwhal reported on government documents showing how oil lobbyists wanted to “expedite” public consultations involving Albertans and landowners that may be directly and adversely affected by new oil and gas developments like wells or pipelines. 

Normally, these individuals can file a “statement of concern” about the development, typically within a 30-day period, but the oil and gas industry has referred to this process as an “Achilles heel” thwarting approvals of energy projects. It has lobbied to either shrink or cut this process in some instances, which could limit the ability of Albertans to object to oil and gas activities that affect them, or limit which projects were required to seek public input. 

The documents obtained by The Narwhal confirm the lobby group continued to pressure the government on the statement of concern process in 2019. 

The issue also became a significant lobbying point during the COVID-19 crisis response committee meetings. 

“Statement of concern process opportunities” appears as a discussion topic five times during meetings between August and October 2020, the documents show.

The oil and gas lobby group initially informed the Alberta government at the start of the crisis response committee that they were interested in “leveraging previous [Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers] submissions,” one of which was managing statements of concern, which it called a “top priority.”

‘Major step backwards’ for province to privately meet with industry about Indigenous consultation

Consultation with Indigenous communities is required as part of the approval process for new oil and gas projects.

However, there were no First Nations representatives listed on any of the committees discussing the rule changes with provincial and industry officials — including proposed changes to project reviews through the regulator.

The government also agreed to another request the lobbyists made regarding the Aboriginal Consultation Office, a government agency that coordinates input from First Nations and Métis communities potentially impacted by oil and gas projects: to ensure Indigenous consultations about oil and gas projects wouldn’t be “paused or delayed due to an inability to meet in person.”

The government granted this request in early April 2020. In mid-April that year, the Aboriginal Consultation Office started sending out messages to about 30 First Nations telling them consultations would resume so oil and gas projects could move forward, according to Global News.

No representative from Alberta Indigenous Relations was listed as attending the crisis committee. The ministry did not respond to questions from The Narwhal.

“The history between the Alberta government and Indigenous nations is one already marked with strife and mistrust due to past and ongoing violations of the Alberta government with Indigenous communities,” said Melina Laboucan-Massimo, co-founder and campaigns director at Indigenous Climate Action and founder of Sacred Earth Solar.

“Alberta publicly pretending to attempt reconciliation with Indigenous nations while secretly meeting with industry is a major step backwards from any meaningful reconciliatory action by once again disrespecting the inherent and treaty rights of Indigenous peoples,” Laboucan-Massimo, who is Lubicon Cree from northern Alberta, said.

‘Troubling’ lack of transparency at Alberta Energy

Government officials and industry lobbyists did not make public the nature of their conversations at the crisis committee. The government only released some of the details in September after it was compelled to do so through freedom of information legislation. 

Alberta’s freedom of information legislation requires government agencies to grant access to records within 30 days upon request, unless they have a valid reason to refuse or delay. In this case, the ministry’s failure to meet deadlines prompted a rebuke from the watchdog, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta, who confirmed earlier this year that Alberta Energy was in breach of the law for refusing access to records. Alberta Energy eventually released those records to The Narwhal in September, more than a year past the deadline.

Alberta Energy has also missed another deadline in response to a separate request for records from meetings of government officials and lobbyists on the committee after the fall of 2020. The ministry told The Narwhal its freedom of information office was “short-staffed.”

Vanessa Sung, interim executive director for Evidence for Democracy, an Ottawa-based nonprofit that promotes evidence in government decision-making, said this raises concerns about transparency.

“A healthy democracy is one where citizens are informed and able to engage in the process of policy development or, at minimum, understand the rationale behind policy decisions. This is how we hold policymakers accountable for their decisions and it requires transparency at all levels of government,” Sung said.

“As a country we’re in need of improvement around policy transparency, and this committee is a very troubling example of that,” she said. 

“In a democracy, it’s not enough that governments say they are making decisions that benefit their citizens. They need to show their work.”

Regulator says it is ‘committed to working with all its stakeholders’

Vipond, the physician, said the government documents appeared to show “unilateral conversations” between oil and gas lobbyists, public servants and regulators, without input from other groups. 

Vipond pointed to the rise of videoconferencing at the onset of the pandemic as yet another way the government could have engaged other Albertans. “There’s no reason why other stakeholders couldn’t have been involved,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Alberta Energy Regulator said it was “committed to working with all its stakeholders and this engagement happens at all levels of the organization.”

“Our leadership is committed to developing these relationships and meets with different groups and individuals over the course of a year on a variety of topics consistent with anyone in a leadership role,” the spokesperson said. 

“Additionally, our leadership continues to connect with a variety of stakeholder groups, including industry, environmental non-government organizations, municipal associations and Indigenous communities to further build these relationships.”

The spokesperson also said the crisis committee was formed to “develop a timely response to ministerial orders related to COVID-19 and protect the safety of workers in the energy industry and Alberta communities.”

Vipond is concerned more Albertans weren’t involved.

“Theoretically, governments work for all people within that jurisdiction. So where’s the Indigenous consultation? Where’s the citizens, where’s the environmental organizations, where’s the counters to one perspective?” Vipond asked.

“If you’re only getting one perspective, you’re probably only making one decision.”

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