B.C. puts finishing touches on mining safety regulations
Actions include higher fines, beefed up enforcement and training for inspectors
The B.C. government announced Tuesday the last touches meant to increase safety in mining in response to the 2014 Mount Polley mine dam failure.
The changes are also a response to B.C. auditor general Carol Bellringer’s report in March 2016, which concluded that compliance and enforcement was lacking in the province’s mining sector.
The final changes include setting new administrative penalties — which don’t require the more onerous process of applying for penalties in court — at a maximum of $500,000 for not complying with the Mines Act and mining rules. The province introduced the new penalties in 2016, but hadn’t set levels.
A 2015 Vancouver Sun probe found specialized mining dam inspections had been cut after the B.C. Liberals came to power in 2001 and that no fines for regulatory contraventions had been levied in court under the act since 1989. B.C. also unveiled an eight- page compliance and enforcement plan that calls for better co-ordination among regulatory agencies, exploring the use of a dedicated investigation team and strengthening training for mine inspectors.
The strategy is to be overseen by a compliance and enforcement board, created in spring 2016, which includes senior officials from the Mines Ministry, Environment Ministry and B.C. Environmental Assessment Office.
The Mines Ministry also launched an expanded, more user-friendly information portal (mines.nrs.gov.bc.ca), first rolled out in 2016, that will include mines’ dam-safety inspection reports, permits and other regulatory reports, including from the Environment Ministry and the Environmental Assessment Office.
The changes — which include beefed-up rules for earth-and-rock mine dams introduced last year — will be backed by $18 million in additional funding over the next three years, said B.C. Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett.
“All things converge today to a place, where ... the public can have confidence in how we are doing things and also still have confidence that we are a good place to invest,” said Bennett.
Following the completion of an Ernst & Young report that examined how other provinces and international jurisdictions in the U.S. and Australia handle financial security for the cleanup and reclamation of mines, Bennett said the province will also be laying out more clearly how the need for financial security is set, and making that clear to the public.
Funding for the cleanup of mines inched up to $1.273 billion in 2015, raising the level of financial risk to taxpayers above what it was the year before, The Sun reported in January.
Nikki Skuce of the environmental group Northern Confluence said while the pendulum has moved from self-regulation by the mining industry to some government oversight, the changes haven’t gone far enough.
“There is little that has been changed to ensure that we don’t have water-treatment systems or wet-tailings storage facilities that require care and maintenance in perpetuity,” said Skuce.
A B.C. government-appointed engineering panel that examined the Mount Polley failure had called for a move away from storing mine waste, called tailings, underwater and behind earth-and-rock dams. The panel had suggested the use of dry-stacking tailings as an example of an alternative storage method.