(Ottawa/Cuenca, Ecuador) An independent analysis of Dundee Precious Metals’ Loma Larga project has revealed serious errors and omissions in the company’s plan for its gold-copper project that could put downstream communities in southern Ecuador at significant risk, including potential for arsenic contamination.
A new documentary Blue Peril is a visual investigation that presents a scientifically robust and disturbing picture of far-reaching impacts of deep sea mining for Pacific Island communities. It highlights the serious implications for Pacific Island economies and way of life – with Hawaii and Kiribati predicted to be in the firing line. Focusing on the Tonga and Nauru sponsored licence areas of The Metals Company (TMC) in the Pacific Ocean, Blue Peril incorporates the best publicly available data into internationally accredited oceanographic and spatial imagery programs. Blue Peril is accompanied by technical notes. Catherine Coumans and other experts are available for comment.
In a recently published decision, the OECD Investment Committee faults the Canadian government for its handling of a complaint brought by Swiss NGO Bruno Manser Fonds before Canada’s National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises. The complaint concerned Canadian-based Sakto, a real estate group of the daughter of Sarawak Governor Abdul Taib Mahmud.
(Basel/Amsterdam/ Paris/Ottawa) In an important recent decision, the OECD Investment Committee finds that the Canadian government’s handling of the Sakto complaint:
We are mourning the loss of Sue Moodie of Whitehorse, Yukon. She was a kind, principled, and determined community activist, who loved music, being with friends, and living in the bush.
This week, Eleanor Goldfield digs into mining – past and present. First, author and organizer Mitch Troutman discusses his latest book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners who Seized an Industry. Mitch shares the importance of remembering and sharing a radical past, as he puts it: nothing was ever inevitable and that history is taught best when it gives us agency in the present.
(Montreal) As the fourth week of the provincial election campaign begins, a coalition of local and national organizations announce that the movement against the current mining boom in southern Quebec has expanded to include a dozen Regional County Municipalities (RCMs) representing 142 municipalities in 5 administrative regions of Quebec (see list below). All of them are calling on the government of Quebec to review its Mining Act and its approach to “territories incompatible with mining activity.”
Canada has all the right components to cash in on an electric vehicle battery industry worth C$48 billion per year, but only if governments take ambitious action now to help the sector meet its potential, concludes a new report issued this week. But some parts of that vision are raising flags about the risks and impacts of a rush into battery supply chains. “A strong and coherent push to electrification, including EVs, is absolutely necessary and requires massive public investment, but it cannot be allowed to happen without integrating energy justice, economic justice, and environmental justice,” said Mining Watch Canada Co-Manager Jamie Kneen.
A Canadian-owned mining company and two executives at its zinc mine in Burkina Faso have been convicted of involuntary homicide in connection with a flooding disaster that killed eight mine workers. “It is extremely unusual for mining companies and executives to be charged, much less found guilty,” said Jamie Kneen, a researcher at Ottawa-based organization MiningWatch Canada. Geoffrey York and Niall McGee report for the Globe and Mail.
On the morning of Sunday, September 11, a tailings dam collapsed at the closed Jagersfontein diamond mine in Free State, South Africa. Local news reports the flood of mine waste killed at least three people and injured 40.
Neskantaga First Nation has long been among the most vocal critics of plans to build a proposed road that would connect the Ring of Fire mineral deposit to the highway networks and manufacturing might of Ontario’s south. Now, they’re working to start a sturgeon stewardship program in an effort to protect the fish from proposed development. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has made his intentions clear about opening up the Ring of Fire for development, and big players in the mining and electric vehicle (EV) industries are circling. But that idea is just a new public relations campaign for an old industry, says Jamie Kneen, the Canada program co-lead for MiningWatch Canada, a non-governmental organization based in Ottawa that acts as an industry watchdog.
