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VICTORIA — When Enbridge Inc. sought approval to build the Northern Gateway oil pipeline, Premier Christy Clark said she would oppose the project so long as the environmental safety regime on land and on the water was in doubt. In its formal rejection letter, her government stated: “‘Trust me’ is not good enough in this case.”
The same could be said in the case of the Mount Polley mine. And the Clark government should be worried that this lack of faith could spill across the resource sector.
It is still not clear why the mine’s tailings dam burst last month. Environment Minister Mary Polak says there is no evidence that her government’s cutbacks to enforcement and inspections were to blame.
The breach in the dam flushed 24 million cubic metres of water and mine tailings into Quesnel Lake. Mining industry and government officials alike tugged their forelocks and promised to review dam design and maintenance. If the public focuses only on the question of dam safety, they will be getting off lightly.
Experts have warned, time and again, that provincial budget cuts to environmental regulation could result in a catastrophe. Here are just two examples:
The Professional Employees Association, in a report last March, noted that the province has reduced its complement of scientific and technical experts – engineers, agrologists, foresters and geoscientists – by 15 per cent since 2009. Five months before the Mount Polley breach, the association warned those reductions could threaten both public safety and the environment because of inadequate monitoring and inspections.
The Forest Practices Board has also expressed alarm. In a special report in May, the board stated that forestry compliance inspections and management have dropped by a third. They examined 216 resource bridges and discovered that more than a third lack an engineer’s seal of approval and 19 of them were “obviously unsafe.”
New Democratic Party Leader John Horgan will be back in the community of Likely on Monday to speak with residents who are worried about their water supply and salmon habitat because of the Mount Polley disaster. It will be his second visit to the mine site since the breach, and Mr. Horgan will use this visit as a backdrop to raise his concerns about government’s diminished role in ensuring that resource development is conducted safely.
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