My speech at the HBMN forum, October 1st, 2008

Address to the Hudson Bay Mountain Neighbourhood fundraiser and forum, by Morgan Hite. October 1^st, 2008, the Old Church

I’d just like to start by reviewing the basic parameters of what Blue Pearl is proposing here:

• We’re looking at an 11 hectare industrial facility on the road to Twin Falls, visible from all over the valley in what is otherwise a forested, undeveloped area
• We’re looking at 50 trucks a day to Endako and back, with all the noise, dust, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that that implies
• We’re looking at a new road being pushed north along the base of the mountain from the Twin Falls area to Evelyn
• We’re looking at—or listening to—noise that will always be audible to Glacier Gulch residents, sometimes audible in town, and certainly sometimes audible across the valley
• We’re looking at wastewater being discharged into the Bulkey carrying enough heavy metals, and organic compounds to require a provincial permit
• 125 jobs

Now the place I’d like to start talking about this is that these are nice people. I’ve been involved with Hudson Bay Mountain Neighbourhoods for about three and a half years, and I’ve been to countless PLC meetings with Blue Pearl and Rescan.

They are friendly and civil, and, incredibly, they seem glad to see me when we meet. So we don’t have a problem with the proposed mine from that point of view.

I imagine you’ve all had the experience, though, that sometimes groups of good people can bring forward bad plans. So I want to talk a little bit about the process that appears to have generated this Application.

If you were at the Open House last Wednesday, the most telling moment was when Randy MacGillavry, the senior Blue Pearl representative, put up a map of the 11-hectare loadout facility, and someone asked him to point out the road to Twin Falls on the map. The road to Twin Falls runs right by their facility, but he didn’t know where it was. It took him a minute to find it.

It spoke volumes about the level of awareness that Blue Pearl has about what goes on here in the Bulkley Valley.

They did not ask themselves, “What are the daily uses people already have for these areas we want to appropriate?” These parts of the landscape and the soundscape, and the aquatic environment, let alone whether we’re attached to what the identity of the town is like at present.

They asked themselves, “How can we put a mine in here?”

• Their plans were not shaped by how we take visitors to Twin Falls.
• Their plans were not shaped by the 40 households in the Glacier Gulch neighbourhood that draw water from a surface well.
• Their plans were not shaped by a desire to fish the Bulkley
• Their plans were not shaped by driving highway 16 every day.
• Their plans were not shaped by the pleasure we take in that clean and pretty mountain.

A few moments later Randy said he also hadn’t actually read the Application, that they had hired Rescan to write it.

Which is the way their business is. But I know a bit more about that story. I spoke to the president of Rescan, Clem Pelletier, in 2005. He called me because he was upset about some things we said about Rescan on our website, and he explained to me, “We want to do the best job possible, but we can only do what the proponent hires us to do.” In other words he was saying to me, Don’t be tough on me—it’s not my fault.

So there’s the complete picture: neither party really has to take responsibility for the quality of what’s proposed in the Application. And of course that’s a great way to get a good end result.

So we have an Application where:

• the loadout site and haul road are cited as having a potential visual impact, and mitigation is proposed; but the so-called development rock storage pile, far higher on the mountain and lying in a saddle at 1000 meters easily visible from all over the valley is not.
• You have the haul route options being evaluated with a somewhat progressive formula, where they quantify the costs and then weigh the socio-community and environmental costs each 45%, and economic costs only 10%. But when we come to evaluating the alternative loadout locations for this side of the mountain, they use a very different method, ranking them in categories, and then summing the rankings. When we get to evaluating the alternative of putting the loadout on the west side of the mountain, first they sequester it away in its own special section, and then provide no kind of quantitative analysis save the mention of a cost of some $18 million.
• You have a situation where although the loadout is carefully designed so that all surface water is trapped and treated, the sewage treatment plant itself is located outside the capture and treatment area, on it own in the Glacier Gulch watershed.
• You have the number of stream crossings of the proposed haul road being 9 in the Application, 6 in Appendix C11, the “Haul Option Report,” and 7 in Appendix Q2, the Davidson Project Stream Crossings Memo.
• You have an application where it’s unclear whether the risk management procedures were designed for 10 years or 30 years.

It’s tempting to conclude that when this Application was put together, the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing, and sadly it indicates exactly the kind of deal we’re being offered—a deal where even Blue Pearl isn’t sure of all the details.

If you give us money—and this is a fund raiser—this is what we will spend it on: hiring experts at CSP2—Center for Science and Public Participation—in conjunction with GGWG to examine the Application and analyze what aspects of it are unacceptable.

We’ve got three things every citizen can do.

1. We would really like you to write a letter to the EAO—the Environmental Assessment Office. Talk about the issues that matter to you. Do this by November 12^th. The address to send it to is on our website at hbmn.ca
2. Ask for a ‘panel review.’ A panel review will cause the details of this Application to come far more out into the public eye. Hearings would be held here. Independent experts would be summoned. Blue Pearl would come under far more scrutiny, and not just by regulators who might be under pressure to find a way for this mine to work.
3. Copy your letter to us at HBMN. We’re collecting all the issues people have raised.

Lastly, let me say a few words about the game we’re in. The EA process is a bit of a rigged game, and I don’t want to encourage unrealistic expectations of what may happen.

In the EA process mines almost always get approved. Only a mass popular uprising here in Smithers could stop it—and of course that could happen. It’s still our first choice.

But barring that, the next best thing we can hope for is that public criticism of the plan is so overwhelming that the company is sent back to the drawing board to make significant changes.

I don’t mean window-dressing changes like changing the haul route: I mean revising the mine completely. Throwing out this current proposal that Mayor Davidson has aptly termed ‘old school’, and turning Rescan loose to design the state-of-the-art-mine, the 21^st century mine, the mine the valley deserves—the no carbon footprint, silent operation, no need for a permit to pollute the Bulkley, not in somebody’s watershed, not next to a neighbourhood, no trucking, no airshed concerns way to get the Davidson molybdenum out. Remember, this deposit is worth hundreds of millions in profit. It’s just a matter of money.

But, we may not even get that. With moderate public input about unacceptable elements of the plan, we’re probably looking at the Application being approved, but with some conditions imposed on it by the EAO to safeguard the local environment and quality of life. There would be improvements to the plan, and some of those would matter. They are worth asking for. The mine would probably go right where they want to put it now, but it’ll be somewhat less of an ill-thought-out mine.

The worst thing that can happen—and I want to spend a minute on the real disaster scenario—is that we let the negativity of all this get to us. We take it all so seriously that we become depressed, stop smiling, become resentful. We become the not-fun people. Then it won’t matter if this project gets sent back to the drawing board or not—because the damage, the real damage will have been done.

So if I can put in a word for the dark side, make sure you Don’t Have Fun. Whatever you do, however you get involved in trying to change the course of this big cruise ship entering our valley, writing letters, or talking to your neighbours, or phoning your political representatives, whatever you do don’t let yourself smile, don’t giggle occasionally, don’t make jokes, don’t stop for a break and don’t go out and take a walk.

That’s why we’ve invited these musicians here tonight, to remind us of the big picture.

We’re going to be dealing with this deposit and the miners it attracts for a long time, and we’d better start getting good at doing it in a way we can keep up our spirit for years.

Thank you.