Prime Minister Mark Carney is expected to make at least four additions to his government’s fast-track list on Thursday.Stephen MacGillivray/The Canadian Press
John Sandlos and Arn Keeling are professors at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Their new book, The Price of Gold: Mining, Pollution, and Resistance in Yellowknife, is out now with McGill-Queen’s University Press.
With tariff headwinds from the Trump administration blowing full tilt, the Carney Liberals have fallen back on a very old Canadian idea: building the national economy through natural resource development. Bill C-5 and the newly created Major Projects Office allow the government to leapfrog resource developments over red tape (environmental assessments, licensing, community consultations and the like), so long as they serve the national interest.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Mark Carney is expected to add at least four new items to what he calls a continuously growing “living list” of prioritized major projects. The Globe and Mail has reported that the new projects include the Ksi Lisims liquefied natural gas project in British Columbia, the Crawford nickel project in Ontario, the Sisson mine in New Brunswick and a hydroelectric project in Iqaluit.
No doubt the rush to shore up the domestic economy in the face of trade threats makes sense, and the frustrations of the business community with project delays is understandable. But our research on the history of resource extraction in Canada provides many cautionary tales about rushing headlong into lightly regulated development.
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Prior to the 1970s, few regulatory controls stood in the way of resource extraction projects in Canada. Companies staked, drilled and excavated wherever they wanted, with no legal requirements to consult with affected communities or consider environmental consequences. Governments of all stripes often supported these developments with direct subsidies or lavish infrastructure expenditures on roads to resources.
Much of this development rush targeted rural and remote northern territories and was often accompanied by severe air and water pollution, compromising agriculture or Indigenous lands used for hunting, gathering and fishing.
Arguably the worst example of resource development gone wrong in Canadian history is Giant Mine, adjacent to Yellowknife, which operated from 1948 to 2004.
To process the gold ore at Giant, the mine’s operator had to roast most of it at high temperatures. One byproduct of this process was the highly toxic compound, arsenic trioxide, which spread far and wide over the surrounding area. The Yellowknives Dene First Nation on nearby Latham Island was dependent on highly contaminated snow and ice for their drinking water. Tragedy struck in April, 1951, when the community experienced widespread illness and at least one child died of arsenic poisoning.
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Over the next decade, the federal government forced the company to install increasingly sophisticated pollution controls. Faced with the problem of what to do with large amounts of captured arsenic trioxide dust, the company began to store it in mined-out chambers.
Over the next 50 years, 237,000 tonnes of this highly toxic material accumulated underground.
When the company went into receivership in 1999, Giant Mine became a public liability. It is now the site of a complex remediation project that will cost the federal treasury more than $4.38-billion, almost equal to the $4.47-billion value (in 2025 dollars) of gold extracted from the mine.
While it may be tempting to dismiss Giant Mine as an extreme case from the “bad old days,” it is hardly unique. Since 2019, the federal government has funnelled $9.1-billion into the eight projects (including Giant) that comprise the Northern Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program, and provincial governments grapple with the costs of their own legacy mines, including some of more recent vintage.
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These abandoned sites inform the skepticism of Indigenous communities facing large-scale resource extraction on their territories. As one Yellowknives Dene First Nation member commented about gold mining in Yellowknife, “they got the mine, we got the shaft.”
Newer mines have been subject to stricter requirements for cleanup and closure planning (with some variation among provinces and territories), including the upfront payment of security funds to cover future costs of remediation.
But there are still risks of a large public cleanup bill if a mining company suddenly goes bankrupt, or if the advanced collection of cleanup funds fails to meet the actual costs of remediation. One recent example is the massive landslide and cyanide spill at the Eagle gold mine in central Yukon in June, 2024, which left the taxpayer with a $150-million cleanup bill after the operator, Victoria Gold, went into receivership.
And, as Emma Graney reported in the ROB Magazine, in 2024, the Alberta Energy Regulator had only collected $1.71-billion from oil sands operators to cover $57.3-billion in environmental liabilities. In fact, oil sands companies have only contributed $1 toward the fund since 2010, exempt from contributions until there are 15 years of oil reserves remaining at a mine. The billions in unfunded liabilities associated with decommissioning oil and gas wells in Alberta tell a similar tale.
No doubt there is room to streamline major development approval processes for improved timeliness and efficiency, but there still must be enough rigour so that future developments, especially those undertaken in partnership with Indigenous nations, do not leave behind damaging and expensive environmental liabilities.