This item is written by Joan Baxter.
It’s nearly a year since Atlantic Mining NS — which operates in Nova Scotia as Atlantic Gold — submitted its proposal to Nova Scotia Environment for modifications at its Touquoy open pit gold mine in Moose River in HRM, 63 kilometres northeast of Halifax and 29 kilometres south of Middle Musquodoboit.
The proposed changes are substantial.
Atlantic Gold wants to use the open pit at Touquoy for the toxic mine tailings that will come from three more gold mines it has proposed on the Eastern Shore. It also wants to expand the areas where waste rock is stored and clay is procured on the site, and reroute the road it uses to access the mill facility and administrative buildings.
Twice, that proposal has failed to pass muster with Nova Scotia Environment.
The first time was in September 2021, when Nova Scotia Environment Minister Timothy Halman determined that the information Atlantic Gold provided was “insufficient to make a decision,” and that additional information was required on the proposed changes to the Touquoy mine site.
Then last week, on May 12, Minister Halman again came to the same conclusion, noting that the company had failed to “provide previously requested information regarding in-pit mine tailings disposal, ground and surface water, fish and fish habitat, and historical mine tailings.”
The information, Halman wrote, is required “to evaluate potential environmental effects that may be caused” by the changes.
Halman informed Atlantic Gold that it has a year to provide the “previously requested information” to Nova Scotia Environment.
Since then the Halifax Examiner has received reports that Atlantic Gold — owned by Australia’s St Barbara Ltd — has been filling the giant pit at Touquoy with material, even in advance of receiving environmental approval for the modifications to the site and permission to dispose of mine tailings in the open pit, which is nearing the end of its productive life span.
The Halifax Examiner contacted Nova Scotia Environment (NSE) to ask what material is going into the Touquoy mine pit.
NSE spokesperson Tracy Barron replied that, “Atlantic Gold requested authorization in January 2022 to temporarily store up to 2.65 million tonnes of waste rock in the open pit at the Touquoy mine.”
Barron specified that the authorization is valid only until July 2022.
For perspective, that means Atlantic Gold is permitted to dump an amount of waste rock weighing 22 times more than Toronto’s CN Tower, the tallest freestanding building in the Western hemisphere, into the yawning pit where it has been extracting gold — more than $700 million worth of the metal — since late 2017.
Oddly, though, that waste rock going into the pit will soon have to come out again.
“The material must be removed when the authorization expires, unless an extension is requested,” Barron wrote in an email.
“The company is not authorized to store or dispose of any mine tailings in the open pit,” she noted.
The Examiner also contacted St Barbara / Atlantic Gold spokesperson Dustin O’Leary for an explanation of why the company needs to store waste rock in the open pit, what it plans to do with the waste rock when it has to be removed from the pit, and why it had not provided Nova Scotia Environment with the information that had been previously requested on the proposed mine modifications.
So far, he has not replied.
In February 2022, Atlantic Gold pled guilty to federal and provincial environmental charges and was sentenced to $250,000 in fines and penalties.
While Nova Scotia Environment awaits the information it requires from the company for its assessment of the proposed changes at the Moose River gold mine, Atlantic Gold continues to seek approval from the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada for three more open pit gold mines it proposes on the province’s Eastern Shore at Beaver Dam, Fifteen Mile Stream, and Cochrane Hill on the banks of the St. Mary’s River, near Sherbrooke.
As the Examiner reported here, the ore from all three of these would be transported by truck, including on public roads, to the Touquoy site for gold extraction, and tailings would be deposited in the exhausted open pit at Touquoy — providing Nova Scotia Environment approves the proposed modifications at Touquoy that would allow this to happen.
Atlantic Gold / Atlantic Mining Nova Scotia has yet to file the mandatory annual report on payments it made in 2021 to governments in Canada, under the Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act (ESTMA).
The company’s ESTMA reports from 2017 to 2020 show it paid no federal or provincial taxes in those years, despite production at the Touquoy mine of gold worth many hundreds of millions of dollars.