MiningWatch Canada was created in 1999 to push back against the mining industry’s ability to rewrite laws, mislead the public, and bulldoze communities, workers, and ecosystems – literally – in its quest for profit. We’ve done that. We’ve changed the debate and helped put power back into the hands of the affected communities. But global demand for metals continues to grow, and the industry continues to push into remote areas, finding new ways to advance its interests. There is still an awful lot left to do.
1. Growing Up
MiningWatch has not only survived, but grown by leaps and bounds in terms of the number of groups and key individuals we work with in Canada and internationally, as well as the strength and depth of those networks and relationships. We’ve also made huge strides in our recognition by the public, media, and decision-makers, and our presence in important civil society planning spaces and multistakeholder dialogues. We’ve grown in size, too, from the equivalent of two full-time staff in 1999 to five in 2014, and from eight member organisations to twenty-seven. Requests for assistance have grown even faster. It would be wonderful to have more staff – and more money – but we’re moving in a great direction.
2. Expanding media reach – both social media and traditional media
People continue to come to our website in the thousands weekly for information and analysis, while our email ists provide daily news, newsletters, alerts, and updates for over three thousand people. Our social media presence – something we couldn’t have even imagined in 1999 – is substantial. We now have over 4,000 Facebook friends, up over a third just in the last year. Even more impressive, our Twitter followers rose by 58% last year – now well over 8,000 – including activists, academics, media, and elected representatives, but also a lot of industry types. Whether they are actually learning something or just monitoring our work, clearly they are taking us seriously! At the same time, in the “traditional” media, we get calls from print, radio and TV media virtually every day for interviews or background information and analysis. These range from community or academic publications to mainstream national and international outlets like the Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV, the Guardian, or Spain’s El País.
3. Setting a common agenda with Indigenous peoples and communities affected by mining around the world
The very first conference we organised was “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Aboriginal Communities and Mining.” It offered Indigenous community representatives from across the country a chance to connect and have an honest exchange about the effects of mining on their lands and people, and discuss strategies for working together. It also established MiningWatch as a trusted partner in those struggles, and set a course for our work to follow ever since. The following year, we convened a similar workshop with a global reach, entitled “On the Ground Research: A Workshop to Identify the Research Needs of Communities Affected by Large-Scale Mining.” It, too, set an agenda for research, but also set in motion relationships, networks, and collaborations that are going strong today.
4. Making mining companies responsible for the mess they leave behind
Mines create massive environmental liabilities, and as a result of poor planning and regulation, in too many cases the operators cannot properly rehabilitate the mine sites, waste piles, and tailings dumps – or they conveniently leave or go broke before being forced to spend huge amounts of money on clean-up. MiningWatch persuaded mining industry associations to help push the federal government to set up the National Orphaned/Abandoned Mines Initiative (NOAMI) in 2001 to raise the profile of abandoned mines and find solutions for this costly and dangerous problem. Sizeable “closure bonds” are now standard practice in Canada, and increasingly, worldwide. Since the initiative started the provinces and federal government have established clean up programs for abandoned sites. We also successfully pressed the federal government to take responsibility for the abandoned Giant mine in Yellowknife with 237,000 tonnes of deadly arsenic trioxide stored underground, threatening not only the city of Yellowknife but also Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River.
5. Exposing public subsidies to the mining sector in Canada
The mining industry in Canada enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from both provincial and federal government. Public money goes into everything from infrastructure (roads, ports, and power supplies) to mine training programs and cleaning up abandoned mines, but the biggest contribution is through the tax system and the many tax breaks and credits specific to mining and mineral exploration. Our 2002 study with the Pembina Institute, “Beneath the Surface,” exposed the myths surrounding mining’s contribution to the economy, and showed that the mining sector is a poor investment for governments, creating ever fewer jobs at ever greater expense.
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