The Canadian Federal Court decision requires Environment Canada to make the mining industry annually report the toxic waste accumulating in tailings ponds and waste rock piles.
John Jackson
Great Lakes United
Great Lakes United and Mining Watch Canada, with the legal assistance of Ecojustice, have won a court case, forcing Environment Canada to require the mining industry to annually report the toxic substances put into tailings ponds and waste rock piles to a public inventory. This means that approximately 20 metal mining facilities located on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes basin will have to report their waste. This court decision will allow us to more completely understand threats to the Great Lakes basin as a result of mining activities.
Ecojustice launched the suit in November, 2007 on behalf of Great Lakes United and Mining Watch Canada. On April 23 2009 the Canadian Federal Court issued an order requiring the federal government to immediately begin publicly reporting mining pollution data from 2006 onward to the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI).
The strongly worded decision described the government’s decision-making pace as “glacial” and chastised the government for turning a “blind eye” to the issue and dragging its feet for “more than 16 years”.
In response to the Canadian Minister of the Environment’s failure to require reporting, the Honourable Mr. Justice Russell concluded, “the result is that the people of Canada do not have a national inventory of releases of pollutants that will allow them to assess the state of the Canadian environment and take whatever measures they feel are appropriate to protect the environment and facilitate the protection of human health.”
In contrast, since 1998, the U.S. government has required mining companies to report all pollutants under the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), the U.S. equivalent of the NPRI. In 2005, the 72 mines in the U.S. reporting to the TRI released more than 500 million kilograms of toxic substances to mine tailings and waste rock. This accounted for 27% of all U.S. pollutants reported. The addition of the Canadian data will give us a more complete picture of the mining threat in the Great Lakes.
Toxics leak through tailings ponds walls and evaporate into the air on an ongoing basis. As climate change threatens to bring more frequent and increasingly intense storms, the potential for tailings ponds’ walls to collapse increases. This means toxic tailings rushing out into the environment and into the lakes. Such devastating collapses of tailings ponds have already occurred in Europe and in the coal mining area of the U.S.
The decision also means that the public will have to be told about the devastating toxic discharges to the massive tailings ponds created by mining the tar sands in Alberta. The product of tar sands development—one of the largest industrial undertakings in the world—is being touted as the source of oil for proposed expansions of oil refineries throughout the Great Lakes in locations such as Superior, Wisconsin, Gary, Indiana, Detroit, and Sarnia.
Now that we will have knowledge on the toxic contents of these tailings ponds and rock piles on both sides of the Great Lakes basin, we will be more capable of pressuring for action to protect the Great Lakes from these threats.
Environment Canada has stated that they will move quickly to implement the judge’s decision.
jjackson@glu.org
To read the entire legal judgement, click on http://www.glu.org/en/node/293.