Documents show federal departments concerned about Ontario mining project
CBC News has learned bureaucrats in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans felt pressured to weigh in on the environmental impacts of a major mining project before they were ready.
Documents obtained under Access to Information show ongoing concerns about requests for feedback from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA).
“There is concern about these requests since it’s rare for us to have the information necessary to respond …,” a senior policy analyst with Fisheries and Oceans wrote in an email dated Aug. 17, 2011.
At the time, CEAA was trying to determine whether the Cliffs Natural Resources chromite mine project should be subjected to public hearings as part of its environmental assessment.
Cliffs plans to remove up to 12,000 tonnes of ore out of the muskeg every day for 30 years. It also plans to move the ore over a road to be built on the only high land in that part of the Boreal forest, stretching 540 kilometers north of Thunder Bay.
‘Interesting dilemma’
A project manager with the CEAA addressed the DFO’s concerns in another email.
“To clarify, the Agency is not asking your views on a referral to Panel. The question is at this early stage, the Agency would like to ask expert federal departments your views on the following …,” Jim Chan wrote. One of the questions that followed was “Does your department feel that the Cliffs Chromite Project may cause significant adverse environmental effects that are unmitigable?”
On August 29, a regional manager for habitat management at the DFO wrote:
“This creates an interesting dilemma …. The problem is that in the early stages, what we consider appropriate mitigation/compensation may not be economically/technically feasible from the proponents’ perspective and the impacts may end up being more signification (sic) than originally thought.”
Another email in the discussion thread between senior bureaucrats on the topic began: “Yowza!” The rest was blacked out under provisions in the Access to Information Act dealing with personal information.
In the end, the DFO told the CEAA that, based on the information to date, it didn’t have enough details to answer the question about whether the potential environmental impacts of the mine could be mitigated.
‘Cumulative effects….could be substantial’
Other departments also had advice for CEAA.
On Sept. 12, 2011 the manager of Environment Canada’s environmental assessment section wrote:
“The cumulative effects of known and anticipated mining and other developments on Ontario’s Far North could be substantial if not sufficiently understood and managed at the regional scale.
For the rest of this article, please go to the CBC Radio Thunder Bay website: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/story/2012/06/18/tby-dfo-pressured-review.html