"Supreme Court confirms death of “zombie” New Prosperity Mine project," 14 May 2020

In a victory for the Tŝilhqot’in Nation, but also for the integrity of environmental assessment processes, the Supreme Court of Canada today dismissed Taseko Mines Ltd.’s application for leave to appeal last year’s Federal Court of Appeal (FCA) ruling about the federal assessment of Taseko’s proposed New Prosperity copper-gold mine in Tŝilhqot’in territory in central British Columbia.

A federal assessment panel found in 2013 that the mine project would have several significant environmental effects, including “effects on water quality in Fish Lake, on fish and fish habitat in Fish Lake, on current use of lands and resources for traditional purposes by certain Aboriginal groups, and on their cultural heritage”.

The FCA found that the federal review panel was well within its authority to make these findings, and that Taseko had not shown any inadequacies in the way the panel had evaluated the information it received. The Supreme Court’s decision today means that the FCA’s ruling stands...

MiningWatch Canada, represented by Ecojustice lawyer Sean Nixon, intervened in the court case in order to reinforce the integrity of several key aspects of the environmental assessment process, which echoed earlier findings that the project in its original form posed an unacceptable risk to the environment and specifically to Teztan Biny (“Fish Lake”), a site of great importance to the Tŝilhqot’in Nation...We submitted to the Court, and the Court agreed, that one of the core purposes of environmental assessment is precisely to look at a range of scenarios and investigate potential problems – and their solutions – before a project can be approved.