Canadian Federal Govt. Dumped Plans For Alberta Coal Mining, So Denier Gina Rinehart Is Suing Them
Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart, a climate change skeptic who believes governments are strangling the mining industry with red tape, is taking the Alberta and federal governments to court after they rejected her controversial Grassy Mountain project in southern Alberta’s foothills. Last week Benga Mining, a subsidiary of Riversdale Resources owned by Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, applied to the Federal Court of Canada to overturn Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson’s decision to kill the open-pit metallurgical coal mine on the grounds it would cause “significant adverse environmental affects.”
Wilkinson partly based his decision on an extensive 679-page Joint Review Panel report led by the pro-industry Alberta Energy Regulator and the federal Impact Assessment Agency. Last June the panel concluded the company had grossly underestimated the impacts of selenium pollution on the Oldman River basin and overestimated economic benefits of the mine.
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Katie Morrison, southern Alberta conservation director for Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, said the legal action amounted to a corporate temper tantrum. “I think that Benga thought that just going through the motions of an application entitled them to a project approval. But that is not how it works, and in the end they couldn’t prove to the Joint Review Panel or to the federal government that they could protect the important ecological or social values of the area, particularly clean water and threatened species,” Morrison told The Tyee.
“So with the rejection of the project, they are now grasping at every straw to try to find fault in the process rather than accepting the outcome that they are unhappy with.” In a press release Benga Mining said it decided to take the Canadian government to court after the environment minister ignored its June request to delay a final decision on the mine until its legal action against the Alberta Energy Regulator in the Alberta Court of Appeal was resolved.
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https://thetyee.ca/News/2021/08/20/Aussie-Billionaire-Sues-To-Reverse-Rejection-Open-Pit-Mining/