Boom and Bust in B.C.’s Northwest

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Six times a day, yellow transport trucks carry copper concentrate from the open-pit Huckleberry mine down the main drag of Stewart, B.C. They rumble past the pastel-hued tourist traps, kicking dust onto the windows of the recently closed Home Hardware store, en route to a dying deepsea port that 100 years ago was poised to become B.C.’s biggest.


Sitting in Temptation Bakery as the trucks roar by, John “Rooster” Olson, now in his early seventies, says he has seen the boom and bust come and go. Born in Saskatchewan, he started working in remote northern B.C. logging camps in the early 1960s, blowing his earnings on Vancouver’s skid row before heading back north for the next run. He has fished commercially and tried his hand at prospecting, too, but never has he seen things as bad as this. “Every industry I have worked in has gone down,” he says with a tired shrug. “I’m sure glad I’m not a young man trying to get going in this.”


Others in this town share his assessment. There is talk of the dirty ’30s, when Stewart was nearly abandoned altogether, and of the future as well; in two years the Huckleberry mine will be exhausted and the port’s last bulk-ore customer will be gone.


Yet in September 2008, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell delivered hope to Stewart and a string of small towns set along Highway 37, more commonly known as the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, which cuts northwest through the rugged B.C. boreal forest in rough parallel to the Alaska Highway. The premier revived a decades-old scheme to extend the B.C. electrical grid into the northwest corner of the province, roughly following the existing highway to Bob Quinn Lake, within reach of numerous potential coal, metal and energy projects that today face an uncertain future.


“The communities in the north have a vision to further open their region to economic opportunities on a global scale, and today I want them to know that we share their vision,” said Campbell, who went on to cite a study predicting that the line would draw $15 billion in investments and create 11,000 new jobs.


With this single announcement, the premier joined generations of politicians, entrepreneurs and assorted madmen who have dreamed big about bringing economic development to this pristine, inhospitable, mineral-rich corner of B.C. that is bigger than some European countries. 


Soon after the premier’s announcement, the world economy collapsed, and with it, the latest mining exploration boom that sustained businesses in Stewart, Bob Quinn Lake, Iskut and Dease Lake. It suddenly seemed that the power-line plan, which had been devised earlier this decade to accompany NovaGold Resources Inc.’s ill-fated Galore Creek mine northeast of Stewart, was destined for the trash heap of history, like so many other ambitious infrastructure plans of the past.

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John “Rooster” Olson has watched his town, Stewart, cycle through good and bad for 50 years.

But more than a year later, this latest big northern infrastructure – currently in the pre-application stage of environmental assessment – is more alive than ever, buoyed by September’s injection of $130 million in federal funding, which comes in addition to the $250 million already pledged by the province. And with the new certainty that this funding affords come wildly conflicting visions of how development should proceed on B.C.’s last frontier, at what pace, and at what price.


Sitting in his Hornby Street boardroom in Vancouver’s business district, Imperial Metals Corp. president Brian Kynoch is dwarfed by monstrous satellite photos of the Mount Polley mine, his company’s principal mineral property 100 kilometres northeast of Williams Lake. “The mines of this kind of scale, the big open-pit copper mines, don’t work with diesel generators,” he says, pointing to the photos. “Without grid power, there’d be no mines of this scale in the south of B.C. either.”


A 30-year veteran in B.C. mining, Kynoch says virtually all of the big mineral deposits in the north, including Red Chris and the Huckleberry mine farther south near Houston, have been known since the early ’60s, when an ambitious Utah-based company named Kennecott Minerals Co. scoured the northwest in search of riches.


He talks about Imperial’s Red Chris mine, a proposed open-pit copper mine about 17 kilometres off the Stewart-Cassiar Highway near Iskut that is currently the farthest along the path toward approval of any proposed metal mine in the region. The project would directly employ 250 people for at least 25 years, providing high-paying jobs to residents of Iskut and Dease Lake in addition to supplying much-needed port traffic to Stewart. On the downside, the mine is expected to generate more than 180 million tonnes of tailings and 300 million tonnes of waste rock over its life, requiring acid rock drainage remediation for at least 200 years.


It would also need an electricity feed of 37 megawatts to pulverize 30,000 tonnes of rock a day from the side of Todagin Mountain, and therein lies a problem. A 2005 feasibility study assumed that grid power would be available from Tatogga just south of Iskut, 23 kilometres from the mine, but the grid currently reaches only as far as Meziadin Junction, more than 250 kilometres away. Kynoch tells me his company is prepared to build its own 187-kilovolt “extension cord” from Meziadin if the province does not build the line, but he knows this likely will not be necessary: “I don’t think the province can afford to abandon a quarter of the province.”


Blair Lekstrom, B.C.’s minister of energy, mines and petroleum resources, agrees that the infrastructure is needed. Immediately after the September announcement of federal funding, he confirmed that the project will move forward, breaking ground as early as 2010 and potentially commencing operations by 2012. “We are committed to building the line,” he says.


Red Chris is one of about a dozen mines that are in various stages of development in what has become known as the Golden Triangle, stretching from the Alaska Panhandle east of Highway 37 below Bob Quinn Lake, with its apex touching the Cassiar Mountains just below the Yukon. Fortune Minerals Ltd.’s Mount Klappan mine, which would tap North America’s largest undeveloped deposit of metallurgical-grade anthracite coal, is one of the projects that’s closest to starting operations. 

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Fortune Minerals has conducted a study suggesting that it is economically feasible to remove three million tonnes of coal a year near the head of the Little Klappan River along the Spatsizi Plateau Wilderness Provincial Park boundary and move it to Stewart by diesel truck. Because it requires vastly less energy than Red Chris, company president Robin Goad says the mine could move forward without grid power. 


But with the power line, the company could shave $12 per tonne of coal off its transportation expenses by building a 25- megawatt conveyor system to move the ore from the mine to the highway. But no matter what, at least 100 kilometres of new road will need to be constructed through extremely rough terrain east of Highway 37, power line or not.


The Northern Transmission Line

Goad says the company is currently focusing on another project while it searches for a partner with the wherewithal to develop the Mount Klappan mine. 


What he does not mention, however, is how angry many of his closest Tahltan neighbours have been ever since his company and others started punching roads and drilling wells and test mines into the Klabona, the Tahltan’s traditional hunting grounds (east of Highway 37) and fragile headwater region of three of the northwest’s great salmon rivers – the Nass, Stikine and Skeena.


One such neighbour is Iskut-based Tahltan Oscar Dennis, a 44-year-old university-educated businessman and musician who rose to local and national prominence when, as he puts it, “Shell Canada landed on my dad’s trap line.” Through the summer of 2005, Fortune Minerals faced blockades, which saw highly publicized arrests of Tahltan elders, including Dennis’s father. Stung by the public outcry, Fortune Minerals has been forced to back off, according to Dennis. Shell Canada, which met with the same frosty reception, is currently observing a two-year moratorium on any activity on its coal bed methane tenures. 


On the August afternoon I meet him in Iskut, Dennis appears in camouflage cut-offs and an orange hoody, more intent on promoting resource projects than denouncing them. With the support of the band council based in Iskut (one of three reserves on the roughly 150,000 square kilometres the Tahltan claim as territory), Dennis and his local business partners have prospected wind sites in anticipation of the power line being built. He says they are in discussions with potential developers to build the first phase of their wind farm. All they need now is a power line to bring their energy to market.


“Eskay Creek left with billions, and everyone’s out of a job now,” he says, referring to the Barrick Gold Corp. mine near Stewart that closed in early 2008. “By taking control of the energy, we control what happens on our territory, and that means building an economic base that is totally independent of INAC [Indian and Northern Affairs Canada] and industry.”


Dennis envisions a “new model” for resource development on B.C. First Nations territory, which would end an era of Tahltans temporarily “holding shovels” and scooping small bits of industry revenue off the top. He complains bitterly about the nearby Forrest Kerr hydro project – at nearly 195 megawatts of capacity, poised to become one of B.C.’s biggest – which is the alternative-energy project that’s closest to being developed in the region. When it was sold in 2008 to Alta Gas Income Trust for $40 million, the Tahltan did not receive a cent, he says, even though it was their approval that provided the certainty necessary to move forward.

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Reached in Vancouver while negotiating the future terms of this very project, Annita McPhee, the elected chair of the Tahltan Central Council – a not-for-profit society created to negotiate with industry and government on behalf of the roughly 5,000 Tahltan – says she has to maintain a “delicate balance” when talking with companies about development.


“It’s challenging as a leader,” she says. “We want to continue to enjoy our way of life, being able to fish and hunt, but our people are now used to a standard of living, and Eskay Creek is gone.”


McPhee says the Tahltan Central Council has not yet endorsed Oscar Dennis’s wind plan, and it becomes clear that the Tahltan are not on the same page when it comes to developing resources: while the Tahltan Central Council has not formally endorsed the power line, the pro-development Tahltan Nation Development Corp. has. Now Dennis and his Iskut-supported venture are openly supporting the line, provided it is built to export their wind power. 


McPhee says the Tahltan were not prepared for the onslaught of resource development exploration that brought companies such as Fortune Minerals and Shell Canada to their territory, and the current downturn is providing the time needed to conduct internal land-use planning and develop processes to ensure unity when the inevitable next wave of projects emerges.


Teena Wright, the owner of the Tatogga Lake Resort on Highway 37, the closest point on the highway to Imperial’s proposed Red Chris mine, agrees that the recession is providing an opportunity for sober reflection. Wright’s business welcomes thousands of tourists every year, including a disproportionate number of German, Austrian and Swiss adventurers seeking a wilderness they can’t find in Europe. 


“The people who come here come for one reason,” she says. “There are no services, and there is virgin boreal forest. If it becomes a mini-Alcan, the [Stewart-Cassiar] highway becomes just another highway.”


Wright talks about hunting guides and outfitters who have sustained profitable businesses and local payrolls in the same area as Red Chris for 60 years, exploiting the renewable resource of Stone sheep, a species prized by elite trophy hunters and nature buffs alike that does not exist in such abundance anywhere else.


About 150 kilometres south of Tatogga is the Bell 2 Lodge, a prosperous off-grid tourism operation catering to foreign visitors who pay big money to heli-ski and fly-fish in remote alpine locations. One of the seasonal workers I speak to there – who requested that her name not be used – expresses frustration when asked about the future.


“Wilderness is a product; that is what it’s come to,” she says. She describes the Catch-22 that mines are needed to sustain places such as Stewart, yet the region’s wilderness and wildlife – an economic commodity unique in the world, she says – cannot coexist with the big mines as envisioned. “If the line gets built, everything is going to change up here,” she says.

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Many people I encountered along Highway 37 in August expressed similar conflicting concerns: the need for jobs to support families, local schools and necessary community services is paramount, but fears persist that the natural resources – which are plentiful enough to generate wealth for many generations – could be exhausted much sooner. The prospect looms of even worse chronic unemployment, acid rock drainage from closed mines and a spiderweb of access roads.


Such fears were fanned in May when the Northwest Powerline Coalition, a broad group of mining industry and community stakeholders pushing the province to expedite the power line, published a report identifying 11 big projects that could move forward if grid power were available, exhausting their supplies by around 2040. An earlier version of this same report was the original source of the statistics – $15 billion of investment and 11,000 jobs – that Premier Campbell used to justify the government’s $10-million kick-start of the environmental assessment in September 2008.


“The report risks giving the impression that we’re going to go in and have 10 to 15 mines going into production at the same time . . . but some of these [projects] are more real than others,” says Pierre Gratton, president and CEO of the Mining Association of B.C., a driving force behind the coalition. “The point is, there’s this huge untapped resource up north, and if we do nothing . . . [northwesterners] can guarantee their children and grandchildren that those opportunities will not be there for them.”


Back in Stewart, a port town and the terminus of northwestern resource roads, there’s a remarkable document in the town museum that illuminates an ambitious infrastructure project not unlike the northwest transmission line. It’s an undated map, conceived by Sir Donald Mann, a wealthy early-20th-century railway developer, who envisioned Stewart as a seaport rivalling today’s Port of Vancouver. 


His vision, still visible on the crumbling sepia map, was for Stewart to emerge as the port terminus for a broad “natural hinterland” that would see resources from as far as Saskatchewan funnelled along a rail line terminating at Stewart.


“The Portland Canal Line [railway] will tap bigger and vastly better agricultural, coal, metal mineral and water power resources than all the Maritimes together with New England and New York,” the caption gushes. Mann’s vision died with the economic crash of 1913 and the onset of the First World War, which saw the 23 kilometres of existing track ripped up and recycled for the war effort.


Grandiose visions like Sir Mann’s, promising to open up the resource-rich northern hinterland, have often crash-landed in B.C. Stewart’s current three-term mayor Angela Brand Danuser admits as much, as we sit in her video store on the main drag of town.


“Stewart was always a boom and bust mining town,” she says, noting that the recession of the early 1990s never ended here. She pauses as a yellow transport truck appears and passes along Fifth Avenue. “The question now is, when Huckleberry closes in two years, where is the next one?”