Last January in Prince George, Premier Christy Clark was in fine form, doing what she does best, talking about good jobs and better industry in front of a business-friendly audience.
She was around half a year and what columnist Stephen Hume called the release of "almost 15 million cubic metres of toxic slurry into the most important river system in British Columbia" away from the Aug. 3 Mount Polley disaster, in which a dam containing a tailings pond at an Imperial Metals mine near Likely breached.
The happier occasion was the Premier's Natural Resource Forum and she talked then, according to a government transcript, about how mining was B.C.'s comeback industry. It had gone through "a very rough decade in the 1990s" but she said "I won't go into that; I don't think we need to", invoking The-Party-That-Must-Not-Be-Named and its economy-killing reign of Bolshevik darkness. No need to dwell on that, but on a B.C. Liberal mining renaissance, that, said Clark, since 2001 saw 19 operating mines and increased production values of half a billion dollars.
"And with Bill Bennett in charge of mines, we are working on more," Clark said. "We are going to reach that goal we set by 2015, aren't we Bill? Absolutely, we are, because in the jobs plan we have committed to eight new mines and nine expanded by 2015."
No doubt Bennett was absolutely trying - the minister had travelled to Ottawa two weeks earlier to lobby the federal government to approve Taseko Mines' New Prosperity project. According to Business in Vancouver, the mine had already been rejected by an independent panel once for its plan to turn nearby Fish Lake into a tailings pond; a second panel rejected an amended plan in Oct. 2013 as still being too environmentally risky.
Nevertheless, Bennett wanted the feds to give the mine and its tailing pond the go ahead, saying, "I am lobbying on behalf of the people of B.C. and the people of the Cariboo. Everyone can see we need jobs and we need jobs that pay well."
Last February, the federal government denied New Prosperity the go-ahead again.
Yet more mines, more jobs, more growth, is still the mantra of Clark, Bennett and the Liberals - it's one of the keystones of the government and one of the first cudgels it reaches for when it wants to bash the opposition NDP for being supposedly anti-development. Promoting mines is a major government activity - as seen by Bennett's pro-Prosperity lobbying trip and by Clark's promise in Prince George that, on resource projects and regulation in general "We have to make sure that we know our job every day is to try and get to yes rather than trying to erect barriers that are essentially intended to make sure we get to no."
Well, not quite - sometimes those barriers are essentially intended to keep vast amounts of industrial sludge from rushing into B.C.'s ecosystems. And that's the problem when the B.C. Liberals attempt to play cheerleader and cop when it comes to regulating industry; it's hard for anyone to take you seriously when you're flashing a badge in one hand and waving a pom-pom in the other.
This is the same band of Untouchables who are in charge of cleaning up the Mount Polley breach, figuring out what was responsible for the potential ecological disaster, examining the current regulatory regime to prevent future breaches and protecting the public interest when it comes to assessing who's going to pay for the damage. That's just gangbusters.
The government simply lacks credibility when it comes to regulation. Bennett flew some 4,369 kilometres to Ottawa to swear an independent panel had gotten itself wrong twice and that Taseko's much-maligned tailings pond plans were safe.
According to Hume, from 2001-2008, the number of mine inspections were halved, the number of ministry of environment staff shrank by 25 per cent and the province's chief mining inspector had insufficient bodies to complete annual mine monitoring reports. That ministry was aware of a report, finished in 2011, that, according to the CBC, even then warned the tailings-pond levels were getting too high at Mount Polley and measures to deal with it were needed; it also repeatedly warned Imperial Metals about the tailings pond, most recently last May.
Yet the problems persisted and now there's slurry coating the Cariboo.
Hume is calling for an independent review into Mount Polley, but, as she did with two other high-profile industrial disasters, the Babine and Lakeland mill explosions, the premier is dismissing the need for such a probe, saying "I don't know that a long, drawn-out public inquiry is going to be the best way to get those answers."
And, really, who needs uncomfortable answers when "our job every day is to try and get to yes." Isn't that right, Bill?
