A tale of two mines
How proposals by Taseko Mines and Pacifi c Booker Minerals compare.
The apparent contradiction is baffling to both the mining industry and the environmental movement.
On the one hand Premier Christy Clark’s government says it is devoted to expanding the number of mines and is cheerleading one particularly controversial gold- copper mining project in B. C. despite two negative federal environmental reviews.
On the other hand, Victoria is opposing a similar gold- copper project even though it obtained a positive provincial environmental assessment.
Is the different approach to the two Vancouver companies, favoured son Taseko Mines Ltd. and smaller and seemingly out- of- favour Pacific Booker Minerals Inc., about politics? Or perhaps about the company and its backers? Does the size and location of the project, and the implications on fisheries, nearby communities and aboriginal claims, play a role?
“It certainly is a head scratcher,” said Jessica Clogg, executive director and senior counsel at West Coast Environmental Law.
Zoë Younger, the Mining Association of B. C.’ s vice- president of corporate affairs, said her organization isn’t taking a position on either proposal. But she expressed concern with the way the government handled the Pacific Booker decision.
“When you have things that don’t seem to be consistent, one with the other, it creates questions in the investment community — they look at that and say, is British Columbia the best place to invest my dollars? Is it the most stable regulatory environment?”
While both are open- pit proposals on low- grade ore bodies discovered in the 1960s, there are lots of differences in the pedigree and characteristics of Taseko’s New Prosperity gold- copper project, 125 kilometres southwest of Williams Lake, and Pacific Booker’s gold- copper play, 65 kilometres northeast of Smithers.
Taseko’s original Prosperity mine got the go- ahead from the B. C. government in early 2010 after a provincial review said economic benefits trumped a determination that the project would have a “significant” environmental impact due to Taseko’s plan to turn Fish Lake into a tailings dump.
But federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice nixed Taseko’s project later that year, noting that a federal review was “scathing” in its assessment. However, he invited the company to try again and, in October, a federal panel took a second look at a revised plan that proposed to save Fish Lake by locating the tailings dump 2.5 kilometres upstream.
That panel concluded once again that there would be a “significant” environmental impact, despite Taseko’s modifications. The federal cabinet is reviewing the report and is under pressure from the company and the Clark government to approve it.
Pacific Booker, meanwhile, had its application shot down by the Clark government last year even though the province’s own Environmental Assessment Office concluded in a report that the project “would not result in any significant adverse effects with the successful implementation of mitigation measures and conditions.”
Terry Lake and Rich Coleman, then ministers of the environment and mines respectively, denied the mine’s certificate in September 2012 after the EAO’s executive director advised them to focus on the more troubling aspects of the proposal. The company, which would still have to go through a separate federal review before beginning operations, challenged the decision, saying it was unfair to refuse the proposal without giving the company a chance to challenge those findings.
That led to the B. C. Supreme Court ruling last month that Pacific Booker indeed had a valid complaint. The 2012 decision was quashed and the company was told it could submit a new application for reconsideration.
But Mines Minister Bill Bennett said in December there’s no contradiction in how the two companies are being treated. “It is a different circumstance,” he said of the Pacific Booker proposal. “It is very close to a very important salmon- spawning water. Morrison Lake leads into the Babine and is one of the top salmon- spawning waters of northern British Columbia.”
Bennett is correct that below the surface the projects, as well as the companies and their leaders, are different.
The adjacent table compares the projects.