This is Part 1 of a three-part story about the toxic legacy from historic gold mines in Nova Scotia, which its citizens will be paying many millions of dollars to try to clean up, and how the contamination at just one of these sites — Montague Mines in HRM — is still affecting lives today,...
Mining for (public) dollars
The Mining Association of Nova Scotia (MANS) has created a new organization called the Minerals Research Association of Nova Scotia (MRANS) with the aim of leveraging still more provincial grants to further enrich global mining companies — and their local operatives.
In the beginning, by which I mean 2007, there was the Mining Association of Nova Scotia, also known as MANS, an appropriate acronym for an industry lobby group with a 17-member board of which 15 are men. It should be said, however, that MANS is not registered with the Nova Scotia Registry of Lobbyists, although […]
Nova Scotia government doubles down on gold mining
There were moments during last week’s “Water Not Gold” rally outside the Alt Hotel at the Halifax airport where the “Gold Show” was in progress, when I was reminded of a video from 2011 during Occupy Wall Street. That footage shows protestors marching along Wall Street, calling out money barons, greed, and the neoliberal system […]
The $722 million deal
An Australian company is buying the Vancouver company that owns Nova Scotia’s largest gold mining operation; what’s in it for us?
Here’s the deal. On Wednesday, May 14, an Australian gold mining company called St. Barbara Limited, with one gold mine in Australia and a second one in Papua New Guinea, agreed to pay $722 million for Atlantic Gold Corporation, which operates one open pit gold mine in Nova Scotia, has proposed three more along the […]
Like blood from a stone: trying to get information out of the Department of Energy and Mines
Late last year, Nova Scotia’s Minister of Energy and Mines, Derek Mombourquette, penned an op-ed that his department sent out to the media. As I mentioned in Morning File on January 16, 2019, the opinion piece was entitled “A little piece of Nova Scotia, everywhere,” and it claimed that the province’s mining industry was “something we can all take […]