Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Giant Mine makes history one last time

Twenty years ago one could scarcely open the Globe and Mail without seeing some fawning tribute to Peggy Witte, the brilliant woman who had clawed her way to, if not the pinnacle, at least the higher reaches of the Canadian gold mining industry.

Peggy's Royal Oak Mines ran the Giant Mine in Yellowknife.

The Globe was writing about the Giant mine again today. The mine is well on it's way to becoming the most expensive pollution cleanup in Canadian history.

Canadian taxpayers face the prospect of spending at least a billion dollars on site remediation. We've been gifted, among other things, "a toxic smorgasbord of buildings, tailings ponds, and a quarter million tonnes of arsenic".

Nowhere in today's article was Peggy's name mentioned. Nor was the fact that the union lock-out she initiated led to the bloodiest labour conflict in Canadian history. Nor was the fact that a few years after she succeeded in breaking the union her mine went into receivership anyway.

An accidental oversight I'm sure.

No comments:

Post a Comment