Mining company letter criticized
Government was asked to ignore native spirituality
OTTAWA — A Vancouver company pushing the Harper government to reconsider a controversial gold-copper mining project in the B.C. Interior has privately urged Ottawa to ignore aboriginal requests to consider native “spirituality” as a factor in their determination, according to a letter the company sent to Environment Minister Peter Kent.
A new federal environmental review panel “does not have any right to attribute significance to the spirituality of a place per se,” wrote Taseko Mines Ltd. president Russell Hallbauer in a letter obtained under the Access to Information Act and provided to Postmedia News by B.C. independent provincial representa- tive Bob Simpson.
Taseko, which failed in its 2010 bid to get federal approval after a “scathing” federal review, also asked Ottawa to not permit aboriginal prayer ceremonies at pending hearings on the revised proposal. Children’s plays should also be banned, Hallbauer told Kent in his November letter.
The panel allowed “a group of kindergarten children to present a play, in which the children wore fish cut-outs on their heads, moved around the floor, and then all fell over simultaneously, symbolizing the death of the fish,” Hallbauer wrote.
Allowing opening prayers was not “appropriate,” and a “sensational” anti-project film and the children’s play also should not have been part of a process that is supposed to be “objective and fact-based,” he wrote.
The company also complained that one of the three panel members, metallurgist and former environmental mining supervisor Nalaine Morin, was a member of a First Nations organization in the area that was opposed to the project.
A native leader said Taseko’s letter is an affront to aboriginal spirituality.
“We are tied to the land and that’s a spiritual area,” said Tsilhqot’in National Government (TNG) tribal chairman Chief Joe Alphonse of the proposed openpit mine about 125 kilometres southwest of Williams Lake.
“To not even have that as part of the review, you may as well not have a review at all. Let’s go turn the Vatican into a casino hall.
“This is exactly what we’re talking about when a company is allowed to make those kinds of suggestions. It’s wrong.”
A federal panel appointed under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act ruled in 2010 against allowing the proposed Prosperity Mine to proceed.
The federal government announced in November it would let the company file a new application based on a plan that does not include destroying Fish Lake.