B.C. report on Mount Polley results will decide Morrison mine’s fate – by Justine Hunter (Globe and Mail – January 29, 2015)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

VICTORIA — One of the little-known casualties of the Mount Polley mining disaster was a proposed new mine hundreds of kilometres away, its fate left in limbo since the tailings pond dam collapsed.

When the provincial government releases a report Friday on the cause of the massive breach at Mount Polley, it will be forced to reconsider its decision on the Morrison mine project.

In the fall of 2012, British Columbia refused to issue a certificate for the Morrison copper-gold mine, despite the fact a government report had concluded it would not result in significant adverse effects if mitigation measures were followed. It was a surprising decision from a pro-resource government that had systematically streamlined regulation and reduced oversight to encourage investment. Suddenly, the industry was questioning whether the ground rules for mining in British Columbia had changed.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge overturned the government’s decision in December, 2013, saying the province had failed to meet the requirements of procedural fairness. At the time of the original decision to reject the Morrison mine, then-environment minister Terry Lake explained that his government had applied new “risk versus benefit” criteria that the proponent, Pacific Booker Minerals Inc., failed to meet.

The government was required to reconsider the Morrison mine application and had just about reached the deadline for a decision when the massive dam holding the toxic waste water from the Mount Polley copper-gold mine collapsed, spilling eight million cubic metres of tailings into Polley Lake and Quesnel Lake.

In the wake of that environmentally devastating failure, the province launched three investigations and on Friday will release the results of one of them – an expert panel review of the technical reasons for the breach. As that report is tabled, the clock starts ticking once again on the Morrison mine decision.

“Any decision on the proposed project should be informed by the outcome of the review panel’s work,” Environment Minister Mary Polak told Pacific Booker’s management in a letter two weeks after the Mount Polley incident. “I plan to make a decision on the proposed project within 30 days of the outcome of the review panel’s work.”

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