The Thompson Nicola Regional District boasts temperate rainforests, vast plateaus and expansive deserts. It’s also home to a wealth of copper deposits sitting just outside of Dunn Peak Park.
Copper mining company Taseko Mines Ltd. is in the early stages of B.C.’s environmental assessment process, with the hopes of establishing an open-pit copper mine near Vavenby. The mine, known as the Yellowhead Project, would operate for 25 years and produce an estimated 180 million pounds of copper annually, the company predicts – an amount that may outpace the Gibraltar mine, a Williams Lake-based mine that has the second-largest copper output in the country and is also owned by Taseko.
Copper is among the 34 substances the federal government classifies as a critical mineral. According to Natural Resources Canada, it’s used in electrical wires, solar cells and industrial machinery, among other products.
Copper from the Yellowhead mine would be shipped to the Port of Vancouver, where it would be sent overseas to be processed and marketed in China and Japan.
This isn’t the first time the area has caught the attention of mining companies. Yellowhead Mining Inc., which Taseko took ownership of in 2019, previously proposed a similar project. In 2015, B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Office began to review the proposed Harper Creek Project – just months after the Mount Polley tailings dam breach, an incident that spilled eight million cubic meters of waste byproduct into water sources for nearby First Nations and is considered the worst mining disaster in B.C.’s history.
While neither Yellowhead Mining nor Taseko owns or operates the Mount Polley Mine, participants in the environmental assessment process decided to put the Harper Creek project on hold to consult further with Indigenous groups and revisit its tailings and water management approach in light of the incident. When Taseko acquired Yellowhead Mining in 2019, they officially withdrew from the environmental assessment process and went back to the drawing board.
Six years later, Taseko executives say the provincial government and mining companies alike have made changes to prevent a similar incident from happening.
“The tailings storage facility would be constructed in a manner very similar to our Gibraltar tailings storage facility, which has operated safely for over 50 years and under our ownership for 20 years,” said Taseko Vice-President of Operations Richard Tremblay during a September 4th public information session.
The Ministry of Environment sent the Gibraltar Mine operators a warning letter in August for issues with Gibraltar’s leach operations – the process of extracting copper from ore by applying an acidic solution to it – because the company did not show it is capturing all the waste from the leaching process.
“Ministry inspections are a normal part of the regulatory oversight that exists in British Columbia and findings are typically minor in nature but helpful in ensuring regulatory compliance,” Magee’s statement reads.
“Gibraltar’s record of tailings storage facility management over the past 20 years is exemplary,” he added, citing favorable reviews from the Independent Tailings Review Board.
The Ministry of Environment does not consider a company’s other projects during the review process, it said in a statement to The Goat.
Economic impacts
According to the initial project description filed with the B.C. Environmental Assessment Office, the Yellowhead Project would directly create about 2,000 jobs during the construction phase, and create 590 jobs for the 25 years of the mine’s operation. These employment predictions are based on predictions from BC Stats, the Province’s statistical office, according to the report.
In a statement to The Goat, Magee said Taseko has a track record of providing local employment..
“Approximately 96 per cent of Gibraltar’s workforce of more than 800 people reside in nearby communities,” the statement reads. “At Florence Copper [in the U.S. state of Arizona], 70 per cent of our team currently lives in the surrounding area.”
However, mining reform advocates and researchers say mines tend to over-promise and under-deliver on job creation. Mining impacts and policy researcher with the advocacy group Wildsight, Simon Wiebe, said studies show mines typically fall short of their estimated economic output.
Wiebe pointed to a 2023 study led by Simon Fraser University professor Rosemary Collard which audited three B.C. coal mines and found their economic benefits were overstated during the environmental assessment process. A subsequent study from Collard, “A timeline and economic benefit audit of British Columbia mines,” found that mines only produce about 53 per cent of their expected employment rates if they become operational. Many mines never open due to economic lulls that hurt the critical minerals industry, the study found.
“They’re not nearly as economically stimulative as they claim,” Wiebe said. “Then you go into the post-mine cleanup phase. We commissioned an environmental engineer to look into some of the costs that would go into water cleanup [for coal mines]... they came out to a number of 6.4 billion dollars over the next 100 years to operate the water treatment facilities they’ve planned to build.”
Director of mining reform advocacy group Northern Confluence, Nikki Skuce, said job creation is often weighed against adverse environmental impacts during the assessment process.
“They’re willing to accept the environmental impacts and social impacts for the local jobs and tax benefits to the Province,” Skuce said in an interview with The Goat. “But there’s no following that. There’s no holding companies to account.”
“One of the recommendations we’re going to keep making is that we need the Province to actually track [economic benefits] or have it as a condition in the environmental assessment certificate.”
In a statement to The Goat, the Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals said that while B.C. does not have formal requirements for mines to report on employment metrics, most mining companies in the province are publicly-traded, meaning they are required to formally report their financial performance to the BC Securities Commission.
“Many publicly traded mining companies also release annual sustainability reports highlighting metrics such as direct employment numbers, local procurement and supplier spending, and other economic [impacts].”
Environmental Impacts
The proposed Yellowhead Mine would operate for 25 years, but the impacts can last for several generations, experts say. Wiebe voiced concerns about the leaching process, which can result in heavy metals and acidic chemicals being released into the environment.
“Once they get the ore out of the ground, they sprinkle chemicals on it to leach the copper out, and then they can extract the copper out of those liquids,” Wiebe said. “The trouble is that those chemicals are often not very healthy for anything. They end up sitting in the tailings dams and at best leaching away, and at worst, collapsing and poisoning entire downstream communities.”
And when chemicals like selenium, a common byproduct of mining, find their way into bodies of water, it can have huge upstream impacts, Wiebe said.
“When you put a heavy metal in large quantities in a waterway, a lot of the time certain ones end up getting bioaccumulated. It will get slowly absorbed into aquatic plants,” he said. “When you go up the food chain, all of a sudden you’re starting to get relatively high concentrations that could be damaging to aquatic life.”
That could mean chronic issues for fish like reproductive failures, leading to population collapse in extreme cases, he said. It also means humans may not be able to safely eat affected fish.
The Ministry of Environment said the Yellowhead Project has received significant public interest throughout the early environmental assessment stages. There will be at least three more public comment periods before a verdict is issued, though there is not yet a set timeline for the next public comment opportunities.
Wiebe said public comments are a valuable way for residents to share any feedback they have.
“I’ve participated in a few environmental assessments, and they’re the most robust and transparent mining review that we have here in B.C.,” Wiebe said. “It’s by no means a perfect process, but it’s the best and most transparent thing that we have.”
