In Welsh mythology there is a magical cauldron, possibly inspired by the ancient art of metallurgy, that can transform and resurrect the dead.
Perhaps the old smelter cauldron in Wells had a bit of that magic. When the mines shut down in the 1960’s, the town metamorphized into a lively arts and tourism scene anchored by the nearby Bowron Lakes chain and Barkerville historical site.
But if and when Osisko’s big roughly $10 billion Cariboo Gold Project starts operating right on the hillside beside downtown Wells, that metaphorical mining industry cauldron may lose its magic.
When Wells was established in the 1930s, the mine built a nice community. They based the urban design on walking, not driving. It also was family-oriented.
Fred Wells and his Cariboo Gold Quartz Mining Company specifically preferred married men working in the mines. Legend has it being able to play a musical instrument increased the chances of being hired.
The mine would therefore invest in all the amenities necessary for a functional community with children.
They built a hospital, a school, and the Community Hall. They encouraged independent entrepreneurs to add other infrastructure, like the Sunset Theatre.
Like many old company towns, this created a built legacy that became the foundation for a thriving community focused in recent decades on the arts and tourism.
The new mine won’t be building anything like that. So far, they’ve taken things away from the town.
Starting around seven years ago Osisko, the mine proponent, and a company housing drillers for Osisko, bought both of the motels and one of the RV parks in Wells, supposedly to house mine workers.
That eliminated 80 per cent of the visitor accommodation in Wells and half the RV capacity. One motel was recently reopened, but only temporarily.
It didn’t help that there were the 2017 and 2018 fires, followed by COVID. But the loss of most of the visitor accommodation was another major factor in the loss of one of the four restaurants and two out of three of the food trucks.
It is not clear what the mining companies needed the accommodations for. Osisko now will house their workers outside Wells at their work camp called Ballarat. That facility has 79 beds and would be expanded to 260 camp beds. Already, logging contractors and other industrial customers who had previously stayed in Wells have been drawn out of the local economy to stay at Osisko’s camp instead.
This temporary camp won’t be contributing to the community or leave a lasting legacy of housing and community spaces like the original mines did. Once the mine runs dry, it will likely all be pulled out.
Far from hiring married men, or women, or creating a community where you could raise kids, it’s almost like today’s goal is the opposite of this. The big projects bring in transient workers, along with their problems, and create its counterpart: a humming, empty void of camp-life alienation and detachment bent on maximum exploitation and minimum local connection.
The new gold rush has been catastrophic for the local restaurants and tourism industry, and this is before production has really even started.
There are other lost opportunities as well.
Rather than investing in the municipal wastewater infrastructure to handle the new population, the camp sewage will be put in trucks and hauled all the way to Quesnel.
The gold concentrate will go even further for processing.
Up until last month the plan was to put the ore on trucks for the 140-kilometre trip down the highway and a forest service road to the QR Mill near Likely, a large facility where the gold bars were already being produced from the Bonanza Ledge project.
Now it appears that Osisko will build a noisy ore concentrator directly overlooking Wells. While this will reduce the tourism draw of the town, it will also reduce the amount of raw ore being trucked to QR. But the flip side of that plan, announced in a recent filing is that the concentrate and the jobs will now go all the way to Qingdao, China, for final processing.
Theoretically the public is supposed to get some of this gold back. After all, the mine is operating on public land. We should be getting a royalty payment on the Net Smelter Return.
If we are shipping out concentrate with an undetermined amount of gold to a country with a shoddy record of transparency, a percentage of which is owed to the public, how are we sure we won’t be getting swindled? Who audits the samples?
Probably by the same logic we collect stumpage on public timber: with minimal public scrutiny and a lot of trust the corporations are being honest about what they owe.
Maybe it’s no surprise then, that the government doesn’t appear to make much money off many of the mines in operation. The government talks about over $1 billion in annual tax revenue, half of which is specifically from the mineral tax (tourism brings in $2.5 billion in tax revenue), but a recent study looking at the 27 mines approved since 1995 in BC shows that where data is even available, they have yielded zero mining tax revenues.
It’s nearly impossible to determine where the $497 million in mining tax revenue comes from, but it’s likely much of that is from the trainloads of coal and older mines like Highland Copper.
Most of the big corporate subsidies and flow-through tax credits for operations like Osisko’s will likely only ever amount to more gifts for the elites.
Oh well, as long as the big corporate camp suppliers, many of them based in Alberta, and the offshore equipment manufacturers make some cash, I guess.
If there’s one constant in the world today it’s that age-old theme Scott Cook sang about in a beautiful old church during this this year’s Arts Wells directly across the small valley from where the concentrator will loom. In his song A Bigger Tent, a call for seeing across the political divide, he sang: “It’s less about the left and right than the top against the bottom.”
Just like Osisko’s project out east at the Quebec town of Malartic, where hundreds of houses and the school were moved or torn down to make way for one of the largest open pit mines in Canada, the community and the public good wasn’t the government’s priority.
Quebec and Osisko may have assured the town good times were ahead, but as Nicolas Paquet’s excellent documentary Malartic shows, the billions in profit seemed to pass the town by. There were some jobs, but also a lot of closed businesses, rundown buildings, and a long list of regulatory infractions.
That could be the legacy for Wells, too. Osisko’s local list of infractions is already pretty long.
The irony in Wells is that there has been a strong tourism industry that was providing a way out from under the weight of its history. The Bowron Lakes, historic Barkerville, Island Mountain Arts, Arts Wells, and countless hiking trails were all bringing in money and creating a resilient economy.
That kind of alternative reality was obviously a threat to industry. The megacorps are always better served by a desperate populace without choices. And the cynic would say the province thinks the same way.
They allowed the industry to use its lopsided power to take a large part of the tourism accommodations off-market.
They then allowed this same industry to offer their camp to draw off industrial traffic, further undermining Wells businesses.
Then they directly cut funding for theatrical programming at Barkerville, reducing the tourism draw and shortening the season.
And now the provincial Mines Act will allow a large outside corporation to override municipal jurisdiction, contradict their Official Community Plan and zoning bylaws, and dictate Wells’s descent into a soulless industrial mine where the gold will be taken to China.
The province, and the billionaires and investor elite it serves, has a new priority for the area.
I guess change is a constant, and a good thing can never last. The cauldron of rebirth in those old fairy tales are just fairy tales.
Things die and they can’t be brought back to life. But the way we allow the province and these large corporate interests to exploit and undermine our communities, increasingly for the benefit of the few, with minimal public payback, can’t last either.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
