The Gibraltar mine was only expected to operate for 12 years when it opened more than five decades ago in south-central British Columbia. Today, it’s the second-largest open-pit copper mine in Canada — and Taseko, the company that owns it, is aiming to expand it yet again.

Taseko now plans to continue mining for up to 20 more years, but the provincial government won’t require an environmental assessment.

Xatśūll First Nation asked for an assessment last summer, noting the mine expansion would add to the toll resource extraction has already taken in the nation’s territory in the Cariboo region.

The proposed expansion doesn’t automatically trigger the review under existing laws, but Environment Minister Tamara Davidson could have required an assessment anyway. 

Xatśūll Kukpi7 (Chief) Rhonda Phillips said she was disappointed but not surprised by the BC Environmental Assessment Office’s decision, announced last week.

“It’s not the first time the province has chosen not to designate an expansion at the Gibraltar mine as a reviewable project,” she told The Narwhal.

Phillips is worried about the risks the project poses to the Fraser River and the added impacts in a region already under pressure from mining, forestry and other resource development. 

“The environmental assessment is essential to ensure there’s transparency and accountability and a thorough evaluation of those risks,” she said. “Bypassing that is just undermining the government’s responsibility in ensuring that their environment is taken care of and that there’s true reconciliation happening at the table.”

Xatśūll isn’t alone in its concerns about incremental mine expansions proceeding without environmental reviews. Two years ago, Ktunaxa Nation Council raised similar concerns about the Greenhills metallurgical coal mine in southeast B.C., owned by Swiss mining giant Glencore. 

Under its previous owner, Teck Resources, the Greenhills mine expanded several times over the past 20 years without an environmental assessment. And now it’s poised to expand yet again, adding to longstanding concerns about contamination of downstream rivers. 

Gavin Smith, a staff lawyer with non-profit group West Coast Environmental Law, said projects with significant impacts are “slipping through the cracks” of B.C.’s environmental assessment process by proceeding in phases.

Smith said companies may opt to pursue projects in phases for economic reasons or as an intentional strategy to avoid a robust and transparent environmental assessment.

The common refrain from the B.C. government is that permitting processes can address concerns about potential environmental impacts, Smith said. 

In a recent report about the Gibraltar mine expansion decision, Alex MacLennan, the head of the BC Environmental Assessment Office, said the decision aligns with a goal of “fostering economic sustainability and communities through continued employment,” adding the project’s environmental impacts could be considered through the Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals’ permitting processes.

But there are important differences between the two types of reviews.

When a proposed project goes through an environmental assessment, information about the project and its potential impacts are available in a publicly accessible, searchable database, Smith pointed out. Accessing information about projects reviewed through the permitting process is more cumbersome, he said.

Environmental assessments are also more in-depth than permitting processes, with more robust review requirements for projects that could have significant impacts on the environment, communities and the rights of Indigenous Peoples, Smith explained.

“We have an Environmental Assessment Act for a reason,” he said.

Sean Magee, Taseko’s vice president of corporate affairs, said the company is seeking standard permit amendments that typically do not require reviews under B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Act. 

In an emailed statement to The Narwhal, Magee said the company supports and accepts the B.C. government’s decision that an environmental assessment is neither justified nor required,  noting the environmental assessment office has released a comprehensive summary of its decision.

“Gibraltar is a significant contributor to the economy and communities of the Cariboo-Chilcotin British Columbia and Canada,” Magee said. Citing figures from a recent economic impact study, he said the mine employs more than 700 workers and supports some 2,860 full-time jobs across the country by creating demand for products and services and through personal spending by employees.

Tim McEwan, the senior vice-president of corporate affairs for the Mining Association of BC, said in a statement to The Narwhal that B.C. has made significant changes to strengthen mining laws and regulations in recent years.

He said the industry is “committed to responsible resource development” and “meets some of the most rigorous global standards governing environmental assessment, operational permitting, enforcement and post-closure reclamation and monitoring.”

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals said officials consult First Nations and assess the potential impacts of projects on Indigenous Rights and their cumulative effects through the permitting process.

In an emailed response to questions, the spokesperson said there are opportunities for the public to comment through the permitting process and companies are typically required to post a public notification in the local newspaper and company website. Limited information is also available about proposed work on the ministry’s new regional mines engagement website, launched last summer.

In addition to copper, the Gibraltar mine also produces molybdenum, a metal added to steel to make it stronger. It sits between Quesnel, B.C., and Williams Lake, B.C., in the territory of Xatśūll First Nation and Esdilagh First Nation, which is part of Tŝilhqot’in Nation. The mine is about 45 kilometres west of the infamous Mount Polley mine, where a tailings dam failed in 2014, sending 25 million cubic metres of tainted water and debris into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake.

In a letter last summer to the B.C. ministers responsible for mining and the environment Phillips warned it would be many decades before the ecosystems in Xatśūll territory recover from the damage caused by the Mount Polley dam failure, if they’re able to recover at all.

She said the First Nation is “highly concerned with allowing further mining activity to proceed in its territory without appropriately stringent levels of scrutiny to assess and address impacts.”

The Gibraltar mine, which opened years before B.C. enacted its first environmental assessment laws — and without Xatśūll First Nation’s consent —  has never undergone a comprehensive environmental review. But for more than 50 years, it has impacted Xatśūll’s rights to hunt, fish and trap, Phillips said in the letter.

Taseko has not yet submitted applications to amend its permits under the Mines Act and Environmental Management Act, the mining ministry spokesperson said.

But reports submitted to the environmental assessment office show the company plans to extend mining in two phases. The first phase, until 2036, would see additional mining contained largely within the existing mine permit area and involve raising the height of tailings dams, according to a report by the BC Environmental Assessment Office. The second phase would see mining continue for an additional eight years.

“This will greatly prolong the current and existing impacts of the mine on Xatśūll’s Aboriginal title, rights, culture and way of life,” Phillips wrote.

Xatśūll asked the assessment office to require an environmental assessment for both expansion phases.

But the office only considered whether to require an environmental assessment for the first phase, noting, as far as it understands, “Gibraltar’s contemplation of any phase 2 activities is conceptual and forward looking.” In a subsequent letter,  Xatśūll First Nation described the decision as a “critical scoping error.” 

Phillips told The Narwhal, “The lack of meaningful consultation in this process is troubling.”

“There’s risks posed to our lands, our waters and our way of life, it just can’t be overlooked anymore,” she said. “The expansion and any other projects that are happening within our territory should undergo a comprehensive environmental assessment to ensure that these impacts are fully understood and addressed.”

“Our voices are not being heard, we’re being overlooked,” she said. “It’s like drive-by consultation.”

“We’re not going to allow that to keep happening.”

There are concerns about the environmental oversight of incremental mine expansions elsewhere in the province as well.

The Greenhills mine opened in 1981, before B.C. had an environmental assessment law. The mine, now majority-owned by Glencore and operated by Elk Valley Resources, went through an early iteration of a provincial environmental assessment in the 1990s when a major expansion was proposed. Since then, the B.C. government has approved several more expansions through its mine permitting process.

In early 2023, Teck, the mine’s previous owner, notified the assessment office of plans to expand the Greenhills mine again, extending the mine’s life by one year, from 2027 to 2028. The proposal, which Teck called Cougar Phase 7-2, involved extending the existing mine pit by 54.5 hectares and the mine’s permitted boundary by 18.3 hectares. Teck said that would allow it to mine an additional 6.4 million bank cubic metres — a volume measured before it’s extracted from the earth — of raw coal, according to a report by the assessment office. The additional mining was also expected to generate 82.3 million bank cubic metres of waste rock.

The assessment office agreed with Teck that the proposed expansion didn’t meet the threshold for an environmental assessment.

By then, the Greenhills mine had grown 52 per cent in less than 20 years, from 2,669 hectares in 2001 to 4,053 hectares in 2023, Ktunaxa Nation Council noted, according to the government report.

Ktunaxa Nation Council argued those past expansions — considered together — would have exceeded current thresholds for an environmental assessment.

The council also noted Teck was likely planning future expansions of the Greenhills mine and suggested those plans should be considered by the assessment office as it weighed whether the company’s latest proposal would require an assessment.

While the office acknowledged Ktunaxa Nation Council’s concerns about cumulative effects, it said it viewed further expansion of the mine as “speculative,” given the limited information Teck provided regarding future proposed work.

Meanwhile, in late December 2022, Teck produced a technical report about the Greenhills coal mine saying coal reserves would support mine life until 2059. Teck’s report noted four more expansion phases were planned, saying it would require permits for them by 2025, 2028, 2031 and 2036 respectively.

Simon Wiebe, a mining policy and impacts researcher for the Kootenay-based conservation group Wildsight, said it’s “very common” for mines to get bigger over time. But he warned that by specifying the triggers for an automatic environmental assessment, the B.C. government has given companies a roadmap to avoid a review by splitting projects up.

“They know exactly what they’re doing and the government knows exactly what they’re doing, it’s just the sort of dance that they do,” he said in an interview.

“It would be very positive if we were able to take a step back from all these small expansions and take a look at the big picture and see what are these impacts going to be —  cumulative impacts over the lifetime of the mine.” 

“Currently, we’re getting these little permits here and here, there and there and you eventually nickel and dime your way up to an enormous mine.”

Last year, Elk Valley Resources applied for a permit amendment to proceed with the first of its next four phases for the Greenhills mine: Cougar Phase 5. The application is currently under review.

The expansion is 98 per cent contained in an already disturbed area of the mine and would involve mining deeper into a previously mined pit, according to the project application. 

One of the key environmental concerns in the Elk Valley involves the waste rock leftover after coal has been extracted. When the piles of waste rock are exposed to rain and air, contaminants like selenium leach into the water, eventually finding their way into local streams and rivers. While selenium is necessary for life in tiny amounts, too much of it can be toxic to fish and other aquatic life. 

“We’re in a situation where the more waste rock that is produced directly leads to more selenium in the water,” Wiebe said.

Teck invested $1.4 billion in water treatment and Glencore has committed to building new facilities to address the contamination, but selenium levels in the rivers downstream of the Elk Valley coal mines remain higher than the level the B.C. government recommends to protect aquatic life. 

In a statement to The Narwhal, Chris Stannell, Elk Valley Resources’s communications manager, said the Cougar Phase 5 project incorporates additional measures to manage water quality, including moving waste rock out of the upper Fording River watershed.

Stannell said the next two mine expansion phases — Cougar Phases 8 and 9 — would undergo an environmental assessment process to amend the assessment certificate issued to the mine in the 1990s.

“[Elk Valley Resources] is committed to responsible resource development which includes adhering to robust regulatory requirements to protect health, safety and the environment,” he said.