Pollution

This is Giant Mine

This gold mine was once so dangerous that it killed a toddler who ate snow two kilometres away. Canada’s second-largest environmental liability is inside Yellowknife city limits — and intrinsically tied to the city’s history and future. Since the mine's owner went bankrupt, the federal government has inherited the billion-dollar cleanup effort that could span a century

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The toddler was a relative of Elder Muriel Betsina, who today lives in Ndilo, a Yellowknives Dene community across Back Bay from Giant Mine. Though she only arrived in Yellowknife in 1962 after she left residential school, she immediately saw the effect the arsenic was having on the community.

“We got so scared,” Betsina recalls. Children were getting rashes from wearing clothes washed in the same lake water that had always been a clean source for the community.

“‘One day all this arsenic will kill you’ — nobody ever explained that to us,” she says.

On the way out of Ndilo from Betsina’s house, I pass K’alemi Dene School, where VICE News’ Hilary Beaumont reported in December that the soil has been tested at nearly three times the safe exposure limit for arsenic. Children play on a fenced Astroturf field.

Meanwhile, researchers from the University of Ottawa have begun taking fingernail clippings and urine samples from locals to measure how much arsenic remains in the people who live here.

The government has never compensated the Yellowknives Dene for the loss of their land, or the health impacts of the arsenic on their health. A letter the territory sent to the federal government to demand compensation and an apology for the First Nation was met with a simple acknowledgment, but no promises.

By 1960, the mine had drastically cut back its arsenic emissions with the installation of new technologies. But it didn’t stop the gold-smelting process from producing the poison, only from emitting it out the stack. That’s where the 237,000 tonnes of arsenic came from; it was caught, gathered up and air-pumped back underground for safekeeping. That left Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada with a seemingly impossible task: to secure, for at least 100 years, chamber upon chamber of fine deadly dust.

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