Mike W. Bryant
Staff columnist
Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Previous columns 

An environmental assessment of the federal government's plan to clean up Giant Mine? Well, why not?

What's a couple more years of browbeating bureaucrats compared to eternity? It's not like the arsenic dust buried beneath the mine is going anywhere any time soon. Unless, of course, our citizens ever get the urge to build a 30-storey glass statue of Mayor Gord Van Tighem and need 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide to harden the glass and make it clear and shiny. Or, as the good mayor once suggested himself, the planet suddenly finds itself in a worldwide shortage of arsenic-based cosmetics.

"It makes your skin nice and soft apparently," he once told me as a member the Giant Mine Community Alliance, a body created by Indian and Northern Affairs to calm the town folk.

It seems to me a measly environmental assessment is not enough. We need an end game. I still can't help but feel that the lets-freeze-it and see what happens in a million years plan is nothing short of preposterous no matter how many assurances the government provides. There will never be enough rats to kill to usher in a need to mine the stuff out and sell it, and I'm pretty sure the good mayor was joking when he suggested we can pawn it off to make beauty products.

In essence, there is no real plan. DIAND hopes that someday science will provide the answer - that when mankind is bobbing around in jet cars and curing cancer with Star Trek tri-corders, technology will be so advanced that doing something about all that nasty arsenic will be simply a matter of teleporting it to Mars. In the meantime, we and our future descendants will just have to be extra vigilant in case some disaster befalls us and the creaky, old mine ruptures to spill its arsenic guts into Yellowknife Bay when we least expect it.

This the-future-is-coming approach to environmental management makes me think of the film version of Logan's Run, the story of a futuristic city locked inside of a bubble where so much time has passed that no one knows how the bubble city came to be or what exists outside of it. A giant computer controls everything in the city from food production to climate control to making babies and then killing them when their life clocks turn black.

DIAND's Giant Mine plan calls for the arsenic to be frozen and then "monitored" for, well, the end of time for all we know, and let's be honest, no one at DIAND or anywhere else carries a crystal ball shiny enough to tells us what the future holds.

I've talked many times with Bill Mitchell, the man in charge of the Giant Mine cleanup, and deem him to be very capable but he's not going to live for a million years. In fact, I doubt he'll still be involved with the project five years from now.

Who's going to make sure the arsenic stays frozen and intact for all time? Is DIAND going to build a super computer like in Logan's Run to simply carry on in perpetuity, operating the pumps to keep the mine from flooding, periodically re-freezing the arsenic chambers if need be? Will anybody other than a super computer remember or care a hundred years from now? A thousand?

It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that people here, especially those who plan to stay a while and raise families, are weirded out by the arsenic-forever plan.

Some may say we're being a little hypersensitive, but for anyone who disagrees that freezing the arsenic is a bad idea, why don't you try this:

Most people in Canada don't know about Giant Mine. How about calling up some relatives in Calgary or Fredericton or wherever and tell them you live next to an abandoned mine with enough arsenic buried under it to theoretically poison the planet, and all that's keeping it there are underground pumps and some crumbly rock. Then tell them, don't worry. We're going to freeze it there right as rain.

I wonder what they would say back.