Nahanni Butte says Cantung environmental assessment will delay cleanup

The Nahanni Butte Dene Band has criticized a regulator’s decision to trigger an environmental assessment of plans to clean up the former Cantung mine near the NWT-Yukon border.

The Mackenzie Valley Land and Water Board said last week the proposed approach to cleaning up the mine might have a significant adverse impact on the environment and be a cause of public concern.

Environmental assessments provide the most thorough analysis available but can take years.

Nahanni Butte, which described itself as having worked collaboratively on the project for a decade, said it is expecting an assessment to add at least two years to the process.

“A decade after mining ended at Cantung, we still have no timeline for when the site will be cleaned up,” Chief Steve Vital of Nahanni Butte Dene Band was quoted as saying in a statement.

“Instead of making progress, the Water Board is kicking the can down the road and adding more red tape.”

Nahanni Butte says it is especially affected as it is the first community “directly downstream” of Cantung.

The community had asked the regulator to skip an environmental assessment so work could begin sooner, saying the issues were well understood, the proposal was technically sound and any further delay was unacceptable.

Other First Nations saw the cleanup proposal differently.

The Liard First Nation, in Yukon, said the proposal should go to an environmental assessment because Indigenous community members still had concerns after years of talking about what should happen.

The Fort Simpson-based Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation said “severe technical deficiencies” remained, though the land and water board said LKFN had not expressly asked for an environmental assessment.

What’s the plan at Cantung?

Cantung is a complicated site.

A tungsten mine in the heart of the mostly pristine Nahanni range, Cantung entered operation in the early 1960s and went through various owners – and fits and starts of production – until it closed in 2015.

The arrangement of who’s in charge is unusual.

North American Tungsten Corporation Ltd, or NATCL, is Cantung’s owner and the company tasked with cleaning it up – but NATCL entered creditor protection in 2015.

NATCL still exists today, but its actions are usually carried out through a court-appointed monitor for the creditor protection process, Alvarez & Marsal. The Cantung cleanup plan submitted on NATCL’s behalf carries the signature of a senior manager at Alvarez & Marsal.

Work at the site is paid for by a third entity: the federal government. A 2015 court order obliges Canada to cover the cost of care and maintenance at Cantung.

At Cantung, you will find old buildings, mine openings, landfills and tailings that are making the area “increasingly unsafe” over time, according to NATCL documents setting out the company’s cleanup plan.

A big worry is the health of the Flat River, which runs through the site.

Tailings at Cantung are “actively leaching metals” into that river, the land and water board stated in its decision to trigger an environmental assessment. Federal inspectors found water pooled in those tailings was “acutely lethal” to aquatic life.

Wind can carry tailings dust into the surrounding environment, the land and water board continued, and water from the flooded underground mine workings has been flowing into the Flat River since 2015, carrying “elevated concentrations of major ions and metals.”

NATCL’s plan to stabilize some tailings “in place,” rather than removing the tailings, has caused significant concern, the land and water board stated. The Nahanni Butte Dene Band, by contrast, said some tailings are now “more harmful to dig up than to leave in place,” while other tailings piles can be safely moved.

What happens next?

On Monday, the Mackenzie Valley Review Board – a separate regulator that handles environmental assessments – formally began preparing an assessment for Cantung.

A public registry has been created for assessment documents.

At this stage, there is no timeline for the assessment to conclude.

The Mackenzie Valley Land and Water Board suggested it is possible that an environmental assessment “could potentially result in earlier consensus” about how to clean up Cantung, compared to following the land and water board’s own processes to their conclusion. That’s because the review board has broader jurisdiction and could move some things along more quickly, the land and water board wrote.

The Nahanni Butte Dene Band rejected that argument.

“Imposing an additional multi-year regulatory process and arguing that it will accelerate a clean-up makes no sense,” the First Nation stated.

“While the federal government has a ‘One Project – One Review – One Year’ goal, what we see on the ground in the NWT is that, even when the directly affected Indigenous government and the federal government agree on how to clean up our land and our water, one project gets multiple reviews, and decisions stretch over a decade instead of a year.”