Giant remediation moves toward milestone while missing job targets

The Giant Mine remediation team is yet to hit its northern employment targets but is expected to reach a “significant milestone” in its decades-long project this year.

Staff from the federally led project addressed the public at a meeting last week, setting out how work at the toxic former gold mine on Yellowknife’s doorstep is progressing.

Giant Mine will never be fully cleaned up. Instead, the aim of the $4-billion project is to ensure the deadly arsenic trioxide buried underground is as safely contained as it can be using current science, while remediating whatever else can be addressed at the site.

At the moment, that work is expected to last until the late 2030s before becoming “perpetual care” – a matter of maintaining the site for the rest of time or until better science comes along.

The milestone coming up in 2024 is the completion of underground stabilization work, where workers have added a backfill to make sure the old mine’s underground workings are stable.

That opens the way for more advanced phases of the remediation to begin.

A more visible milestone has already been reached: the buildings at the former townsite on the mine’s southern waterfront have been torn down.

Work is also continuing to realign Baker Creek, a stream running through the site that must be carefully managed to ensure no contamination reaches it, and to build an on-site water treatment plant.

Natalie Plato, the remediation project’s deputy director, said the water treatment plant should be built by 2025 and in operation a year later.

Recruitment figures

The Giant Mine remediation has been compared to the opening of a small mine because of the hundreds of jobs it is generating.

However, a key concern for organizations like the Giant Mine Oversight Board – which is the remediation’s independent watchdog – is where those jobs go. How many local and Indigenous employees and contractors are getting the work?

Since 2017, Parsons – the contractor managing most remediation work – has awarded some $570 million in contracts, the remediation team says. Of that work, 52 percent went to northern and Indigenous businesses.

Since 2005, the start of the project just after the mine ceased operating, work worth $1.3 billion awarded by the federal government, of which 36 percent went to Indigenous businesses.

Against a target of 65 to 75 percent of procurement coming from northern suppliers in 2022-23, the Giant team said 61 percent of contracts met that criterion that year.

In 2022-23, the project said 18 percent of employment involved Indigenous people against a target of 25 to 35 percent. Thirty-six percent of employment involved northerners against a target of 55 to 70 percent.

“There’s definitely room for improvement there,” acknowledged Andrei Torianski, the project’s economic development manager.

Torianski said the figures are affected by the awarding of engineering and consultancy contracts to southerners when appropriate skills and backgrounds can’t be found locally.

“A lot of the boots-on-the-ground can be done here by local contractors, whereas there is a lack of expertise to come up with designs and engineering, heavy lifting in the background,” he told meeting attendees at Yellowknife’s Northern United Place last week.

“It is obvious that we need to do better,” said Plato, “and we are looking at ways to try to remedy that.”

Asked if the Giant remediation team had spoken with Diavik Diamond Mine – an employer of hundreds of people that will cease operations in 2026 – about opportunities to bring on Diavik staff, Torianski said Giant was in regular contact and “keeping a close eye in terms of what the reality is with the mines.”

“We are informing everybody what it is we’re needing in terms of employment, what our labour estimates are until 2038,” he said.

“One caveat that kind-of complicates it is the employees on-site? We don’t employ them. They are employed by the subcontractors of the main construction manager. [But] we can encourage employing local.”

Reports published by the remediation project show that contractors were issued around $50,000 in penalties for not employing enough local people over the last financial year for which data available. Bonuses of around $40,000 were issued to contractors who exceeded targets.

Perpetual care plan delayed

Among other developments noted at the meeting, the Giant team said it is “in negotiations” with the Tłı̨chǫ Government. Currently, Giant has community benefit agreements worth $2 million annually with the Yellowknives Dene First Nation and roughly $400,000 a year with the North Slave Métis Alliance.

A separate agreement already provides $340,000 annually to the Tłı̨chǫ Government for training, a Giant representative said.

Residents were also walked through how work in the vicinity of the boat launch will evolve over time.

The project has committed to building a new boat launch at the nearby sailing club during the years in which the existing boat launch is off-limits.

Plato, meanwhile, acknowledged that Giant’s “perpetual care plan” – which sets out what happens each year once the main remediation work wraps up – is behind schedule.

The perpetual care plan was supposed to be completed by 2020, but remediation didn’t start till 2021 and that has pushed back work on the plan, she said.

A contractor to develop the plan is set to be hired in April or May this year, Plato said.