B.C.’s cleaning bill hits $508 mil
Liability for contaminated sites surges on new reporting rules
VICTORIA B.C. taxpayers face a rapidly growing bill to clean contaminated sites across the province.
The government’s liability to identify and clean contaminated sites on public Crown land has jumped by $224 million in the past two years, and now sits at $508 million, according to a new government report this month.
That represents a 210 per cent increase since 2006, when the province estimated costs at $163.7 million.
“It’s definitely an issue people should be concerned about,” said Andrew Gage, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law. “If they are not cleaned up, the cost of cleaning them up will probably get worse over time if the contamination spreads. If they are cleaned up, they are a significant financial cost.”
The increase is in part due to a 2014 change in how the government evaluates contaminated sites, which obligates the province to make an informed estimate. Previously, potential liabilities could go unreported if an assessment was not commissioned because of a lack of funding or staff resources.
“Therefore, this is not an increase over two years of costs of remediation but a statement of existing liabilities that have existed for decades and are being reported based on new accounting standards,” the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations said in a statement.
Minister Steve Thomson was unavailable for an interview despite repeated requests.
The government is on the hook for cleaning old and abandoned properties if the companies go bankrupt, no longer exist or if the sites have defaulted back to the province.
Many of the high-risk contaminated sites involve old and abandoned mines, as well as pulp mills and industrial sites, which are leaching pollutants into the ground and water supply. But some are also in urban areas, like the ongoing remediation of the Pacific Place lands at the former Expo 86 location in Vancouver’s False Creek, where B.C. agreed to remediate the soil and clean groundwater as part of a development deal with Concord Pacific. So far, the province has spent $68 million.
There are also major projects, like the Britannia Mine, 45 kilometres north of Vancouver, which was the largest copper-producing mine in the Commonwealth in the early 1930s before it closed in 1974 and left taxpayers on the hook for $63.5 million in cleanup costs to date.
The ministry said it prioritizes which sites to clean based on risks to human health and the environment. Of 84 sites investigated since 2003, 48 were deemed low priority, 18 were remediated and 16 were under investigation or remediation, according to the ministry report. The government has spent about $22.5 million on actual cleaning in the past two years.
“This is a huge financial as well as an environmental liability for British Columbians,” NDP critic George Heyman said.
B.C. auditor general Carol Bellringer blasted the government in a May report on mining, warning taxpayers could be on the hook for even more costs in the future because of a $1.2-billion shortfall in the amount of securities mining companies have posted with the province compared to the estimated cleanup costs if they abandoned their projects. In response, Energy Minister Bill Bennett pledged to develop reforms to the system.
“If they then go bankrupt, we either leave the mess, which is unacceptable to British Columbians, or British Columbians are forced to pay the costs, which is equally unacceptable,” Heyman said.
The biggest shortfall was $500 million from Teck Resources for its coal mines and its large Highland Valley Copper mine against estimated reclamation costs of $1.187 billion.
The B.C. government has, in the past, estimated there could be up to 2,000 contaminated sites on private and provincial land across the province, a figure that doubles when you include contaminated properties in which the federal government has liability.
This is a huge financial as well as an environmental liability for British Columbians.