Ontario Liberals quietly loosened environmental rules, watchdog warns

The Ring of Fire. The next frontier of mining in Ontario. And yet some silly buggers want to wrap it all up in so much red tape my kids will have kids by the time the first mine is producing.

Best thing this government could do is crack that nugget wide open. Provincial coffers need money.

Hey..it's okay as long as you aren't a conservative or an Albertan.

This one will just slip away un-noticed throughout the land.

It's all Harper's fault.

I'd laugh if someone tried to stick this on him, I don't think he'd mind taking credit for generating the jobs and tax revenue/royalties.

Well, the feds could use an extra 2 billion right now. That's almost what it has cost so far to contain the damage at just two abandoned mines in the north. Mines are necessary and a great economic driver. But since the change the landscape on a geological time scale (there are Roman mines that are still polluting), you want to make sure up front you aren't going to be left with mess.

I'd lessen the restrictions on them too but only if they found a way to do business without leaving tailings ponds full of arsenic and cyanide behind them. Or piles of asbestos dust turning a hundred mile radius around the area into a no-trespass death zone, like has happened in parts of western Australia. Oil & gas can be bad enough, but nothing comes close to mining activities to creating toxic destruction that the taxpayer usually ends up having to pay to clean up.

Cyanide rapidly decomposes when exposed to the elements. How much Arsenic, Mercury, etc. is left over in the tailings depends on how prolific those elements are in the rock being mined. Legacy mining methods spread this stuff out in the air and dusted the ground, but that isn't necessary today.

What do you mean "isn't necessary"? The primary reason for acid rock drainage and metal leaching is due to an increase of several orders of magnitude of the surface area of the rock (due to being crushed). The rate of reaction is determined primarily by the available surface area, which is what leads to the large increase of acid and dissolved metals much higher than background levels, even if the area is already highly minieralized.

Mining technology is still essentially the same (crushing) so that aspect hasn't changed. That means water control has to be assured for several centuries. Mining companies are publicly traded--they have an obligation ot their shareholders to make money. You need the government to act as a trustee for natural and other public resources, in my opinion.

What do you mean "isn't necessary"? The primary reason for acid rock drainage and metal leaching is due to an increase of several orders of magnitude of the surface area of the rock (due to being crushed). The rate of reaction is determined primarily by the available surface area, which is what leads to the large increase of acid and dissolved metals much higher than background levels, even if the area is already highly minieralized.

Mining technology is still essentially the same (crushing) so that aspect hasn't changed. That means water control has to be assured for several centuries. Mining companies are publicly traded--they have an obligation ot their shareholders to make money. You need the government to act as a trustee for natural and other public resources, in my opinion.

I'm thinking beyond crushing into milling (where the bulk of the "nasty stuff" comes into play), you're not going to get around having to crush the rock and all the issues that comes with that. With the old roasters Mercury and Arsenic contamination were facts of life.

True enough.

Teck has a problem with selenium right now--a metalloid similar to arsenic. They operate, I think, five coal mines near the Elk River in southeast BC. Run-off from the mines has raised selenium levels in the Elk River. The Elk River flows into Montana, so Montana is quite alarmed right now. The problem is that selenium is a bugger to treat and there is basically no proven technology in place that can be shown to be abe to deal with the levels in the Elk River right now.

Teck plans to expand all five mines. Theya re undertaking what they call one o the alrgest water management plans in the world in order to try to deal with the selenium issue.

CBC: Mines blamed for high selenium levels in B.C.'s Elk River

Poor Teck, of course, is still smarting from having being found liable in the US for slag deposited in Roosevelt Lake, Washington State from their smelter in Trail (unfrom 1930 to 1995).

Anyways, all that to say that mines can still present profound local and regional environmental challenges. Miners, in my experience, are not evil and are not out to screw the environment. But once the cat's out of the bag and the problems are evident, they tend to be very difficult to fix. Sometimes, to my mind, you you need some strong regulation to get the company to spend a few more million up front to reduce risk down the road. (not that it would have helped with selenium--nobody saw that coming).

What I find interesting is the people on here(and the media) who grumbled on about Harper's secret agenda and being anti-environment because of some minor changes to the Environment Act, are strangely silent when it comes to the left doing pretty much the same thing in Ontario.

Where's the liberal outrage over this?

If I lived in Ontario, I suppose I might care more. There is no such thing as a federal Environment Act.

You know what I meant.

Sure there is. Canada's key environmental laws at the Federal level are:

Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 (CEPA)
Fisheries Act
Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA)
Species at Risk Act (SARA)
Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992
Canada Shipping Act
Hazardous Products Act
Pest Control Products Act

The sum of these laws creates a lattice of legal construction that is more powerful than the US environmental laws whose verbiage is often vague and whose enforcement is often arbitrary and frequently reversed and modified at the judicial level.