ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-CANADA: Canadian Mining Company Taken To Court

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Jun 27 1998 (IPS) - Can a Canadian-based company be sued in its home country for the damage mining activity has done to the environment, health and livelihood of the inhabitants of another country?

Yes! But only in the province of Quebec, where the legal system is governed by the French oriented civil code, not the common law which applies in English-speaking Canada, argues the activist organization, Recherhes Internationales Quebec (RIQ).

RIQ has now launched a USD 47-million class action suit in the Quebec Superior Court on behalf of 23,000 Amerindians in Guyana against the Montreal based Cambior Inc, the operator and the majority owner of the Omai open pit gold mine in that country.

Almost two years ago, a rupture in the tailings dam at the Omai mine led to the spill of about 3 billion litres of cyanide- laced effluent over a four day period into the Omai creek which empties into the Essequibo River, a major waterway and transportation route in Guyana. The mine, which employs 1,000 people, was temporarily closed for six months, but has since reopened.

Geoffrey King, a director of communications for Cambior told IPS, that the water spilling out of the tailings dam had been diverted back into the open pit mining by a coffer dame built by the company.

King maintained that the Omai mine site is an isolated spot in the Guyanese rainforest with no permanent residents living in the vicinity and the closest town 30 to 50 kilometers away. Also the miners are bussed into the site and stay in a temporary work camp.

The exception are independent gold miners who pan anddredge the river some distance upstream and downstream for gold and live in temporary camps, says King. “In my visits to the mine, these are the only people I’ve seen in the neighbourhood. There may be Amerindians around, but I have never seen them.”

But Mark Fried, involved with the Americas program at Oxfam Canada, says that the spill is of concern to the wider population in Guyana, particularly the Amerindians or local aboriginal people who live near the Essequibo river and rely on it for local drinking water and the fish and game that depend on it.

Fried adds that Amerindian People Organization, which has been monitoring the Omai operation held a press conference four months before the accident predicting that a buildup of the tailings would breach the mine’s dame.

“It is important to remember that there has never been an environmental audit of the disaster and it has always been one of the outstanding issues (with Cambior),” says RIQ spokesman, Dermod Travis. “The people who live along the river have a right to know the state of their river.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, one of the international bodies invited by the Guyana government for assistance, subsequently called for a scientific evaluation of the impct of the spill on the environment and human health.

“To date, they (the Amerindians) have received a bottle of water and an apology,” says Travis. “There is some concern that some of Cambior’s efforts to clean up Essequibo River at the time of the disaster caused more damage than the original spill.”

RIQ has taken the position in the Quebec Superior Court that, because Cambior is headquartered in Quebec, it is the only jurisdiction where the company can be sued for its actions in Guyana. “As far as we’re concerned, the responsibility lies right here in Montreal,” the group’s lawyer James Hughes told reporters.

Cambior’s lawyer countered during its motion to dismiss RIQ’s suit that Guyana is a sovereign country and that the proper forum for litigation over the mining accident is in that country. “The mine is there, the failure occurred there, the people concerned lie there and any mandatory injunction would [before Justice C.B. Maughan] have to be enforced there.”

The Montreal Gazette reported that Kenneth George, the Guyanese official who headed a committee that investigated the Omai spill, denied the contention by various U.S. human rights reports including one from a centre headed by a former American president Jimmy Carter that Guyana’s judicial system is not fully independent and denies due process of law.

George’s report did not attribute direct blame for the spill but did find Omai Gold Mines Ltd., a subsidiary of Cbior, liable “for all the forseeable loss and damage” along the Essequibo River. Is it possible that the class action suit will never reach the court and instead the RIQ and Cambior will sit down and resolve their differences?

“The most extensive conversations that Cambior have had were in the corridors of the courtroom over the past three weeks,” says Travis. So far, there is no indication that Cambior will go beyond small talk with its adversary.

“I prefer not to say anything at this point,” says King. But Ken Traynor, a researcher for the Canadian Environmental Law Association says that a similar case in Australia, where the ability of Papua New Guinea landowners to obtain legal standing forced a large corporation to the bargaining table, could happen here.