John Jackson
Great Lakes United
jjackson@glu.org

Great Lakes United and MiningWatch Canada have launched a lawsuit against the Canadian government for being complicit with the mining industry in hiding from the public vital information about contaminants.

On November 7, Ecojustice (formerly Sierra Legal Defense Fund) filed an application for judicial review in federal court on behalf of Great Lakes United and MiningWatch Canada. It alleges that Canada’s Environment Minister broke the law when he directed mining companies to ignore their legal responsibility to report to the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) the millions of kilograms of pollution that they put into their tailings ponds and waste rock piles.

Mine tailings and waste rock piles contain huge amounts of toxic contaminants, including mercury, lead, arsenic, copper, nickel, and cyanide. These are leaving a toxic legacy with the potential for destruction of water ecosystems in the Great Lakes and other parts of Canada.

The U.S. government has required their mining industry to report the toxic substances disposed of into mine tailings ponds and waste rock piles to their equivalent of the NPRI – the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) – since 1998. For example, in 2005, the mining industry put over 1,600 tonnes of mercury and mercury compounds into their tailings ponds and waste rock piles. This made up 27 per cent of all pollutants reported to the TRI in 2005.

In Canada, until 2006 the government exempted the mining industry from reporting the contaminants put into tailings ponds and waste rock piles under NPRI. Environmental groups, including Great Lakes United, fought this exemption and succeeded in getting the government to agree to remove it, effective the 2006 reporting year. Even though the exemption was removed from the official notice requiring reporting, in its official guidance, Environment Canada officials continued to tell the mining industry that they did not have to report these disposed of toxic materials. Consequently, the industry did not report them in their submissions to NPRI for 2006.

Since the launch of Great Lakes United’s and MiningWatch Canada’s lawsuit, a spokesperson for Canada’s Minister of the Environment said that the Minister “believed in openness and transparency and thinks that there should be reporting standards for this mine tailing and waste rock.” He did not, however, specify that he wished to have it under the NPRI.
The Mining Association of Canada responded by saying that they support the development of an “inventory-portal mechanism” related to mine tailings and waste rock.

Great Lakes United and MiningWatch Canada assert that there is no need to look for a new mechanism to report under. It is already required under the NPRI. In their lawsuit they call upon Environment Canada to obtain from the mining industry the data for 2006 for mine tailings and waste rock and publish it in the NPRI, and to make it clear that the mining industry is required to continue reporting these substances to the NPRI in future years.