Ottawa to review huge Arctic mine proposal from China

Another massive Chineseowned resource project is before Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet.

Four federal ministers are to decide in 2013 how to conduct an environmental review for the Izok Corridor proposal. It could bring billions of dollars into the Arctic, but would also see development of open-pit mines, roads, ports and other facilities in the centre of calving grounds for the fragile Bathurst caribou herd.

“This is going to be the biggest issue,” said Sally Fox, a spokeswoman for proponent MMG Minerals, a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned Minmetals Resources Ltd., which bought the deposits in 2009.

Centred at Izok Lake, about 260 kilometres southeast of Kugluktuk, the project would stretch throughout a vast swath of western Nunavut. Izok Lake would have five underground and open-pit mines producing lead, zinc and copper. Another site at High Lake, 300 kilometres to the northeast, would have another three mines.

MMG also wants a processing plant that could handle 6,000 tonnes of ore a day, two permanent camps with 1,000 beds, airstrips, and a 350-kilometre, all-weather road with 70 bridges stretching from Izok Lake to Grays Bay on the central Arctic coast. MMG plans a port there for ships of up to 50,000 tonnes that would make 16 round trips a year through the Northwest Passage.

Izok Lake would be drained, the water dammed and diverted to a nearby lake. Three smaller lakes at High Lake would also be drained. Grays Bay would be substantially filled in.

The result would be a project producing 180,000 tonnes of zinc and another 50,000 tonnes of copper a year.

“They’re very much about our future confidence in zinc,” Fox said from Melbourne, Australia, where MMG is headquartered. “We see in the next few years a number of major zinc mines will be coming offline.”

One of those is MMG’s own Century mine, which produces 500,000 tonnes of zinc annually.

“Between the Izok Corridor project in Canada and our other project in Australia, we would be hoping that they would replace the zinc production of our Century mine,” Fox said.

MMG estimates the Izok project would create about 1,100 jobs during construction and 710 permanent jobs. The mine life is estimated at 12 years, but Fox said exploration is likely to expand that.

More than 400 individuals, organizations, aboriginal groups and governments have registered concerns about the project with the Nunavut Impact Review Board. Many pointed out the Bathurst caribou herd has only recently stabilized after a 90-per-cent drop in the 1980s to today’s 32,000 animals. Aboriginal groups had to stop hunting, and many are leery of anything that could impede the herd’s recovery.

The board also expressed concern about the growing industrial footprint in western Nunavut. There are nine mines operating or under review in the Kitikmeot region.

On Dec. 14, the board recommended Northern Development Minister John Duncan call full public hearings. Duncan and the other affected ministries — Transport, Natural Resources. and Fisheries and Oceans — can send the project back to MMG for changes, let the board run hearings, or decide the project’s effects would be broad