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.
MONTREAL — Quebec is moving steadfastly ahead on its Plan Nord project to open up the vast resource-rich northern reaches of the province. But there is one activity notably absent from the to-do list in the 20-year mining-forestry-energy action plan: uranium mining.
Despite progress made in recent years polishing Quebec’s image as an unwelcoming place for investment in mining ventures, uranium exploration and development continue to be blocked by the government over environmental, health and social concerns.
Quebec uranium mining company Strateco Resources Inc. – once promoted as a high-profile player in a previous, more ambitious incarnation of the Plan Nord – is caught in the middle of a seemingly endless conflict over the right to mine the yellow mineral.
The latest blow to Strateco’s nearly decade-long effort to launch the province’s first uranium mine – in Northern Quebec – is a recommendation from the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement (BAPE) agency that it would be premature at this time to authorize development of a uranium industry.