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MONTREAL — Quebec mining junior Strateco Resources Inc. is suing the provincial government for $190-million in investment losses following its decision to block the company’s uranium project after years of preliminary work.
“This whole thing has left us extremely frustrated,” Strateco chief executive Guy Hébert said Thursday, noting that he put two mines into production in Quebec within a nine-year period while this project has taken a decade and still isn’t producing.
Strateco’s Matoush uranium project in Northern Quebec was once hailed as a key part of former premier Jean Charest’s Plan Nord, a multibillion-dollar effort to develop Quebec’s north, pinned on natural resource extraction. Today, it sits undeveloped, highlighting the confusion that’s come from Quebec City in recent years on mining activity.
Boucherville, Que.-based Strateco, once a $4 stock that now trades for pennies, said it invested an average of $20-million a year on the Matoush project from 2006 to 2012 on the basis that uranium exploration and mining are allowed in Quebec. The government granted the company some 30 permits to start work at the site, including permission to build an airstrip.
In March, 2013, the newly-elected Parti Québécois government imposed a moratorium on uranium exploration and mining in Quebec, pending an environmental review. Eight months later, Quebec’s environment minister refused to grant Strateco the certificate of authorization it needed to begin the advanced exploration phase of the project. The minister cited a “lack of sufficient social acceptability” on the part of the local Cree community toward the planned uranium mine, located some 275 kilometres north of Chibougamau.
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