Thank you, Mr. Chair and members.
I'm very pleased to be with you this afternoon. My name is Brennain Lloyd, and I am here on behalf of Northwatch.
Northwatch is a public interest organization in northeastern Ontario. We were founded in 1988 to provide a regionally representative voice in environmental decision-making and to address concerns primarily with respect to regional activities and initiatives related to energy, waste, mining, and forestry.
Northwatch has done extensive work in forestry and mining, including at a project and a policy level. Our work is primarily in northern Ontario—we are a coalition of groups based there—but we've also worked at a provincial and a national level primarily on policy legislation and regulation.
We have a long-term and consistent interest in the mining sequence and its social and environmental costs and benefits, including mineral exploration, mine development, operation and closure, post-closure, perpetual care, and metals processing. Personally, my work goes back to the early 1990s and the mining concerns. I have been a member of the Whitehorse Mining Initiative Leadership Council and the Mineral Sector Sustainability Roundtable, and I am currently a member of the national steering committee for the National Abandoned/Orphaned Mines Initiative, which is at the national level. Provincially, I'm on the Ontario minister's Mining Act advisory committee and have been for some years.
I have also participated in numerous project reviews and consultations at a provincial and national level. I am co-author of a number of reports, including “underMining Superior” in 2001 and the “Boreal Below” report on mining activities in Canada's boreal forest region, which was initially published in 2001 and then republished with updates in 2008.
We really welcome the opportunity to come and speak with the standing committee this afternoon. I'll note that our initial expectation, given your study title of “Resource Development in Northern Canada”, was that the discussions would be more broadly scoped and more generally about development in northern regions. In reviewing the evidence from your several meetings to date, it appears to be largely a conversation, so far, about mineral extraction, processing, and the mining sequence and much less one about other forms of development and other resource-based areas of activity and interest.
I understand there is more to come on those other topics, but for today, I'll focus my remarks primarily on the area of discussion to date.
Within that context, I'd like to take a few minutes of our time to speak and add to some of those themes that the standing committee has been exploring during the study review process. I've gone through the evidence and I have identified a couple of what I consider to be overarching themes that are recurring through your discussions: sustainable development, environmental assessment, infrastructure, and revenue.
I think sustainable development is the starting point for these discussions. The references in your study discussion to date on sustainable development are helpful, but I think it's important to avoid the shorthand that's often applied when referencing the concept of sustainable development and its genesis. I think we're all familiar with the genesis of that conversation as the 1987 landmark report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, and we've largely adopted the definition from the Brundtland commission of sustainable development as that which “meets the needs of the present [generation] without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
But the definition in the Brundtland commission report did not end there. There is an equally important second sentence to that definition, and it reads:
The concept of sustainable does imply limits—not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities.
The limits referred to in that very important second half of the Brundtland commission's definition of sustainable development are ecological limits or include ecological limits. Like the missing half of that definition, the discussion of ecological limits and the ecological impacts of the mining sequence have been largely missing from this study process to date.
In summary, I'd like to sketch some of those impacts now and give them a more central place in your conversation.
As you're familiar, mining activities move in a mining sequence, a continuum of activities and a continuum of impact, beginning with initial exploration; initial exploration prospecting; and more advanced exploration, where, while not the most extreme set of impacts in the entire sequence, certainly at a site level the disturbance from mineral exploration can be quite extreme, with a complete removal of vegetation and a total loss of ecological function at the site level.
Prospecting and exploration on the ground often also include infrastructure-related impacts related to access, water use, removal of ground cover, excavation, and disruptive noise. The beginning of acid mine generation can occur as early as mineral exploration.
Then the mining process itself requires massive remove of soil and rock to retrieve the valued ore. Their processing reduces large volumes of mine tailings, which are frequently acid generating, so that introduces the phenomenon of acid mine drainage, generally accompanied by metal leaching, which is highly contaminating at a local level.
And then we move on to processing, which has its own attendant set of impacts, largely discharged to air but also to water.
An estimated 40 million hectares of Canada's boreal forests have been used for mining purposes to date. On average, 20 million hectares are staked each year for new mineral claims. Not all of those will go to exploration, and certainly not all of those will go to a developing mine.
Waste rock is created at a rate of one million tonnes per day in Canada. Generally speaking, about 20% of that can be expected to be acid generating, meaning it will produce acid mine drainage and it will leach metals, which will be contaminating to local water bodies and local environments.
Surface water has been shown, in reports, to become contaminated in 70% of case studies, and the groundwater has been shown to become contaminated in 65% of case studies of operating mines. That's from a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study, but I think we can expect a Canadian corollary to those numbers.
In contemporary terms the discussion of sustainable development includes not just impacts on the environment but is often cast in the context of community sustainability. There are several elements to those discussions, which I think also need to be central to your deliberations. Those are those very real community sustainability measures around food, energy, self-sufficiency, stability. Stability of the community includes demographic, economic, and population stability, and so on.
Those elements I've just listed as elements of a sustainability framework have direct links to the other themes you've been exploring, namely those themes of infrastructure and economic benefits. While inarguably the economic benefits or perceived economic benefits are key motivations for both larger and local community governments to support or even encourage mining, it's important that we have realistic expectations about what those benefits will be and what the implications of a modernized mining sector are for such community interests as employment.
In 2008, we identified a number of trends in “The Boreal Below” report, which are still largely.... We did have a dip in 2008-09. The mining sector generally is back up to about a 2006-07 level of activity, so I think the trends are still generally at play.
We saw a 22% increase in the value of mined commodities from 2005 to 2006, just a two-year span, a 45% increase in value of mineral potential, but only a 7% increase in the number of jobs. So for a community looking at employment benefits, we have to look very carefully at this trend of modernizing mining, and that volume ratio of mine to jobs is shrinking, is shifting.
The number of person-hours paid per tonne mined dropped by one-third between 1995 and 2004. Of the ten largest employer sectors who reported to the National Pollutant Release Inventory in 2002, the primary metals sector ranked number one for total releases per job. These are all factors we need to have very clearly in front of us as we consider those economic benefits. They are real but they have to be practically and pragmatically assessed.
Finally, I'd like to share a couple of thoughts about environmental assessment, because it has been a recurring thread through your conversations. There is a discussion that needs to be had about single project versus regional environmental assessments, given the number of development projects being contemplated. An example is the Ring of Fire area, which is a development area in northern Ontario. It is attracting large attention but has large challenges associated with it. To date, the signals are that the environmental assessments for the Ring of Fire projects will be done as comprehensive studies for each project and its associated activities, including transportation and processing.
There are a number of problems with that in terms of the narrowness of the environmental assessments being proposed and the lack of cumulative and integrated assessments of the cumulative and synergistic effects.
In addition, there is no land use plan in place for that area. To date, there has only been very minimal attention given to climate change and energy use. The effective addressing of cumulative effects is being compromised by the environmental assessment process decisions being made. I expect that you're aware that first nations are very frustrated with the process decisions being made, to say the least.
The popular wisdom is that the chromite and other deposits in the McFaulds Lake area, dubbed the Ring of Fire, is, as Ontario's premier describes it, the most promising mining opportunity in Canada in a century. If we are going to do it, and if we're going to do it big, we had best also do it well. That means improving land use planning, improving environmental assessment, and looking very closely at the relationships between economic benefits, environmental impacts, and long-term sustainability for the communities.
Thank you.