Taseko Mines Timeline

A timeline from birth to death of Taseko’s embattled New Prosperity mine in B.C.

The Supreme Court of Canada rejected an appeal by a mining company that has, for decades, been fighting to construct a gold and copper mine in an area considered sacred to the Tsilhqot'in First Nation

The Taseko Mines saga to construct the New Prosperity gold and copper mine has likely, finally, come to an end with a Supreme Court of Canada decision Thursday to reject a company appeal.

The 12-year effort to construct an open-pit mine began with a proposal that involved turning Fish Lake — a place sacred to the Tsilhqot’in Nation — into a tailings pond. That proposal was rejected by a federal review panel, but approved by the province of B.C. The company then made revisions to the project design to avoid draining Fish Lake, dubbing it the ‘New’ Prosperity Mine, in 2011.

The project has been declared dead and then alive again several times over but the Supreme Court decision may signal the final nail in the mine’s coffin.

Here’s a timeline of events leading up to Thursday’s legal ruling.

We’ve got big plans for 2024
Seeking out climate solutions, big and small. Investigating the influence of oil and gas lobbyists. Holding leaders accountable for protecting the natural world.

The Narwhal’s reporting team is busy unearthing important environmental stories you won’t read about anywhere else in Canada. And we’ll publish it all without corporate backers, ads or a paywall.

How? Because of the support of a tiny fraction of readers like you who make our independent, investigative journalism free for all to read.

Will you join more than 6,000 members helping us pull off critical reporting this year?
We’ve got big plans for 2024
Seeking out climate solutions, big and small. Investigating the influence of oil and gas lobbyists. Holding leaders accountable for protecting the natural world.

The Narwhal’s reporting team is busy unearthing important environmental stories you won’t read about anywhere else in Canada. And we’ll publish it all without corporate backers, ads or a paywall.

How? Because of the support of a tiny fraction of readers like you who make our independent, investigative journalism free for all to read.

Will you join more than 6,000 members helping us pull off critical reporting this year?

Yellowknife to Fort McMurray: lessons from the frontlines of Canada’s worst wildfires

With an uncontrollable wildfire burning its way toward Yellowknife in late July 2023, the senior civil servant in charge of the Northwest Territories capital, Sheila...

Continue reading

Recent Posts

Thousands of members make The Narwhal’s independent journalism possible. Will you help power our work in 2024?
Will you help power our journalism in 2024?
That means our newsletter has become the most important way we connect with Narwhal readers like you. Will you join the nearly 90,000 subscribers getting a weekly dose of in-depth climate reporting?
A line chart in green font colour with the title "Our Facebook traffic has cratered." Chart shows about 750,000 users via Facebook in 2019, 1.2M users in 2020, 500,000 users in 2021, 250,000 users in 2022, 100,000 users in 2023.
Readers used to find us on Facebook. Now we’re blocked
That means our newsletter has become the most important way we connect with Narwhal readers like you. Will you join the nearly 90,000 subscribers getting a weekly dose of in-depth climate reporting?
A line chart in green font colour with the title "Our Facebook traffic has cratered." Chart shows about 750,000 users via Facebook in 2019, 1.2M users in 2020, 500,000 users in 2021, 250,000 users in 2022, 100,000 users in 2023.
Readers used to find us on Facebook. Now we’re blocked
Overlay Image