Mining Mount Royal

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Imagine a huge open-pit mine in the heart of Montreal. It’s not that far-fetched – Mount Royal, the ancient volcanic mountain that rises above the city’s downtown and the St. Lawrence River, is a storehouse of valuable minerals.

Judging by the laws and regulations that govern Quebec’s mining industry, a company with thick public-relations skin could conceivably get away with staking a claim to Mount Royal Park. According to the Fraser Institute – Canada’s anti-environment, anti-government, anti-everything-but-corporate-greed think tank – Quebec is the friendliest jurisdiction to the mining industry in the world.

The Fraser Institute’s annual survey of metal mining and exploration companies assesses the impact of public policy such as taxation and regulation on exploration investment. Survey results represent the opinions of executives and exploration managers in mining and mining-consulting companies operating around the world.

To no one’s great astonishment, Quebec has topped the Fraser Institute’s list for three years in a row. One of the main criteria, according to the Survey of Mining Companies: 2008/2009, is “Mineral potential assuming no regulation or land restrictions.”

That’s the point a group of environmentalists posing as the fictional mining company, “RoyalOr” (royalor.com), was trying to make when they recently made a claim to all of Mount Royal Park during a colourful media event on the mountain’s grassy lower slopes. Activists dressed in overalls and hard hats pounded stakes and hammered home the agitprop to prove a bigger point: Canadian mining companies are destroying communities around the world with operations that deform landscapes, destroy habitats and poison waterways. Even worse, many companies are suspected of sponsoring violent campaigns of murder and rape against community activists who try to oppose the onslaught on their lands.

And, they emphasized, it’s not just a Third World phenomenon. Northern Quebec faces untrammelled corporate assaults more normally seen in underdeveloped nations. The event featured testimony from people dealing with mining assaults against communities in Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Papua New Guinea … and Malarctic, Quebec.

Nicole Kirouac, a resident of the community of 3,800 near Val-d’Or, spoke of the expropriation and removal of a complete neighbourhood – including an elementary school – for an open-pit mine. “More than 80 houses have already been moved,” she said. “As individuals, we have no rights when it comes to the mining companies.”

If it sounds familiar to the Crees of Eeyou Istchee, it’s because mining operations have poisoned the environment in Cree territory for more than half a century with impunity. As the Nation has detailed over the last several years, the wealth of the land has been plundered, leaving behind only toxic contamination of heavy metals and a degraded environment.

In fact, according to Ugo Lapointe, a geologist and spokesperson for the Coalition pour que le Québec ait une meilleur mine, there are over 140 abandoned mine sites in Quebec needing environment remediation. The estimated cost of this work is about $264 million, said Lapointe; money that will eventually be supplied by taxpayers to clean up after corporations that grew rich off a public resource and then skipped town, leaving their messes behind.

But public awareness of these environmental crimes is growing, as is the opposition to unchecked resource robbery. The coalition Lapointe represents is calling for comprehensive legislation to ensure that mining operations do not take precedence over local communities, and respond to stringent environmental imperatives.

It’s the kind of progress that’s likely to bump Quebec from its dubious distinction as the easiest territory to establish a mining operation in the world. The Fraser Institute would not approve. But it’s a step Quebec needs to take.

Indeed, there is a ray of hope. On May 8, only three days before the well-publicized action took place in Mount Royal Park, the Quebec government took a step to protect the precious urban park from mining operations.

There’s no real fear Mount Royal could actually become an open-pit mine. But the fact that Quebec was compelled to act in order to forestall the right that exists under Quebec law to exploit the resource wherever it exists is revealing of the lawless frontier we live in when it comes to mining.

Now, if places like Oujé-Bougoumou and Malarctic could benefit from the same governmental concern, we may actually make progress.

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