First of all, I don't think it's a rural-urban divide. I think you'll find that, in urban communities, quite often racialized and lower-income people are quite exposed to risks that don't occur in rural communities. For instance, when you look at the research on contamination with lead and the epidemiological work that was done to ban lead in gas, many of the populations that were experiencing a statistically higher level.... I shouldn't say “higher”. Those experiencing low IQ rates that correlated to exposure to lead were overwhelmingly in urban environments.
Yes, you're right anecdotally. Certainly the Trail smelter is an international case that created the good-neighbour principle. Also, if you look at Délı̨nę in the Far North, that Inuit community is a village of widows because their husbands carried bags of yellowcake from uranium mines on their shoulders without protections.
The bottom line here is that no Canadian—urban or rural, white, Black or indigenous—should be exposed to unsafe levels of chemicals and toxins just because they're developing a mine.