RE:RE:Ontario Justice Conway Court Order - VG Receiver AppointmentWell mdjBrown, this is what happens when there is a lack of leadership during a crisis event. This was not YTG's first rodeo with a mining environmental crisis and yet it would seem they were ill prepared to immediately respond with a solid emergency response plan right after the slide ocurred.
And by having an effective Emergency Response Contingency Plan I mean a plan that has pre-arranged steps, resources and equipment and that gets an emergency response team and all required equipment and experts mobilized and on-sie within hours NOT weeks. Instead, essentially what happened here is that EMR Inspectors responded to the site (allegedly were refused site access...likely more for their own safety but that's not how it came out), made some quick observations and then left VG to deal with it all.
By comparison, if a massive forest fire broke out in the Yukon today and was threatening public safety, the environment, and property, the YTG would have fire fighting crews mobilized, equipment moving, and coordinating the efforts within hours. They wouldn't be initally standing around and chattering about how the fire started...who cares....or worried about the costs because the crisis has to be dealt with now not in 7 weeks! If your house is burning down, are you going to worry about the price of water or put the fire out first?
Yet when an event such as a HLF slide failure occurs (regardless of how and why it occurred at the initial stage), YTG can't even coordinate their emergency response efforts within hours? And 7 week later are still criticizing VG and petitioning the courts to order the company into receivership and only now bringing in Parsons as the Enviromental Lead to fix it all. Why wasn't Parsons pre-contracted by YTG to be ready to effectively respond to such events in hours not weeks? If YTG doesn't have the legal authority to immediately step in and take charge of the crisis then I'm sure they could legislate that authority pretty easily. It's no wonder the FNs are ticked with YTG and VG and so they should be. As Husky likes to say, "This is a Gong Show".
Is FNs going a bit extreme with their assessment of the environmental impact, especially at this point, I'd say yes, but then as Chief Dawna Hope has said, they weren't seeing much of a sense of urgency on the part of VG or the YTG. I believe VG and YTG understood the sense of urgency of the situation but the only one who seemed to be doing more than talking and taking real on the ground mitigation action / efforts was VG.
So considering that VG was pretty much left (at least initially) to deal with all this on their own with their limited resources and cash, I'd say they did pretty good in 7 weeks. For those that disagree, take VG out of the equation immediately after the slide, leaving FNs and YTG to mobilize equipment and workers on site, contain the 300 milion litres of cyanide solution, buiild storage ponds, redesign the water treatment plant, etc, and then consider what the environmental damage would have been! Instead VG worked hard "heads down and tails up" only to be constantly criticized and then forced into Receivership anyway because they weren't doing enough, fast enough, and good enough. Can't wait to see how much progress their replacement makes in the next 7 weeks.
In one of the videos I watched that was about on Aug 12th or 14th, Chief Hope mentioned how the only time after the slide that she personally only ever saw / met with JM was on June 26th when he provided an update on the slide event to FNs representatives and Council. She says she never personally saw or spoke with JM again after that. Now I don't know what transpired on June 26th at the meeting but my guess is that JM probably took a good verbal beat down and if so it's no wonder he went silent. So how can a crisis be efectively managed when everyone for the next 7 weeks is pointing fingers at each other and with FNs and YTG constantly publicly criticizing VG for not doing enough, fast enough, good enough?
So back to my initial point. YTG is the authority and is ultimately responsible for managing this crisis and clearly did not handle this properly from the get go. YTG are the ones that needed to take the lead and take charge with respect to an environmental emergency response. Cover any initial costs if required, in other words deal with the crisis, and worry about recovering costs later once the immediate crisis is under control. If that meant later petitioning the court for appointment of a receiver to secure cost recovery, the so be it.
The YTG's poor handling of this incident won't go unnoticed by Yukoners and I'm going to bet that the Yukon Liberals won't be in power after elections in Nov 2025.
My opinion only.
HB77