Not Fit for Purpose: Oil Sands Mines and Alberta’s Mine Financial Security Program

• Published in: The School of Public Policy Publications
• Main Authors: Martin Olszynski, Andrew Leach, Drew Yewchuk
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Calgary 2023
• Subjects: Political institutions and public administration (General); JF20-2112; Northwest Territories
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.55016/ojs/sppp.v16i1.77856; https://doaj.org/article/183b596dd18149f3bc8c7af37920c257

Mining jurisdictions around the world are grappling with the significant environmental harms and costs associated with orphaned mines, i.e., mines whose owners are financially unable or otherwise unwilling to remediate and reclaim their mine sites. Numerous Canadian examples, including the notorious Giant Mine in the Northwest Territories, have significantly harmed water, soil, air, and wildlife, as well as human health, safety, and well-being. Such impacts can be particularly devastating for Indigenous peoples, who continue to rely on their traditional territories for cultural and other purposes. Canadian governments have gradually developed remediation and reclamation liability regimes to ensure that mine operators remediate and reclaim in a timely manner, or to at least ensure that governments have access to sufficient funds to carry out this closure work themselves. While they differ in various ways, the basic logic of such regimes is the same: by requiring mine owners to set aside some funds (e.g., in the form of cash or a letter of credit), they act as a kind of insurance that the public will not bear the costs of remediation and reclamation. Unfortunately, Alberta has refused to develop an effective regime to protect Albertans from bearing the costs of oil sands mine remediation and reclamation. The regime in place today will not ensure that there are sufficient funds set aside to complete this closure work in the event that operators fail to do so. In some respects, this is not news. It has been over two decades since Alberta’s Auditor General first identified serious deficiencies in Alberta’s regime. Continued mismanagement has left Albertans with a significant risk that they will be responsible for cleaning up oil sands mines that threaten potentially irreversible environmental harm, including a growing inventory of nearly 1.6 trillion litres of toxic tailings. Alberta’s Mine Financial Security Program (MFSP), which applies to both coal and oil sands mines, is a misnomer. While it allows mine owners to ...