Canada

B.C. has halted work on a strategy aimed at ensuring taxpayers don’t bear the massive cleanup costs arising from abandoned industrial sites and disasters like the Mount Polley mine breach.

The province initiated its Public Interest Bonding Strategy amid an unfolding environmental catastrophe at the Port Alice pulp mill on northern Vancouver Island. The mill’s owners abandoned the site with toxic waste flowing directly into a sensitive estuarine inlet. After $170 million in public spending, the site remains dangerous and unstable.

Port Alice is a “symptom of a wider problem,” provincial officials admitted internally in a 2021 briefing note. The province has no powers to compel companies to close and clean up their industrial sites or to collect funds to compensate taxpayers if they go bankrupt.

The Public Interest Bonding Strategy was designed to fix that, then-environment minister George Heyman said in 2023.

“We’re long overdue to reduce unnecessary environmental cleanup liability to the government, also known as the taxpayers of British Columbia,” Heyman told the legislature as he introduced the strategy’s first legal amendments in the legislature. The amendments would allow the government to require cleanup and collect bonding insurance from industrial sites for the first time.

The new laws required regulations to take effect, but those regulations never arrived.

Last week, the province told official interveners that it had indefinitely paused the strategy. The government has not announced the pause publicly, but in an email to The Tyee, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment and Parks confirmed that work had been halted.