I'm familiar with the regime north of 60. Before a mine gets permitted at the front end, the mining proponent has to prepare and submit a mine remediation and closure plan to the environmental review board. That is done by the proponents, and usually involves third-party engineers who have to sign it off. So their accreditation as professional engineers is at risk if the material isn't up to a satisfactory level.
That is usually tabled in the public consultation process, where it can be peer-reviewed by others in the community or detractors of the development on the opposing side. Those mine-site remediation and closure plans use prevailing third-party costs associated with certain projects and certain aspects of the project, so they come up with a very market-linked price tag to return the project to a pre-mine state.
Once that remediation and closure plan is accepted, you usually post financial bonds for reclamation security. In the case of north of 60, they are held by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada. They are supposed to cover the full cost of reclamation of the site.
We're trying to avoid the experiences we had with previously contaminated sites. There are some in the north that are quite famous now. There's a Treasury Board policy that the taxpayer is not to pay the freight costs associated with cleaning up closed mines, abandoned mines, and those sorts of thing. That's all done at the front end.
In the case of the diamond mines, they are ISO-certified companies, so they're probably among the best operators in the world. Even in those cases they have posted hundreds of millions of dollars in reclamation security.