Dane Gibson
Northern News Services

NNSL (May 12/99) - Lawyers attending an environmental seminar on Monday ended up being drilled about the environmental cleanup of the now bankrupt Giant Mine.

The law firm, Lawson, Lundell, Lawson and McIntosh planned the event last July, and answering specific questions about bankrupt Royal Oak, and Giant Mine, was something they weren't prepared for.

"The answer to (who is responsible for Royal Oak property clean up) is a complex one because the facts are different in every case," lawyer Bradley Armstrong said.

"As environmental law stands now, the mine owner is responsible for environmental cleanup. The difference here is the owner has become insolvent. What's going to happen in the case of Royal Oak remains to be seen."

Federation of Labour regional vice-president, Steve Peterson, was at the seminar. He feels no Royal Oak solutions will be found until someone takes responsibility for the environmental liability attached to properties like Giant mine. The cost of cleaning up the arsenic at Giant is estimated somewhere between $250 million and $1 billion.

"What was made apparent in this thing is that throughout the maze of legislation that exists, there's no real implicit language to force the federal government to clean up the sub-surface areas (of Giant Mine)," Peterson said.

"Essentially what they said is the government would have to clean it up on a moralistic aspect rather than an actual legal one. The argument is that the government met the required criteria for dealing with the arsenic at every stage," he said, adding, "What they're saying is the government may have been naive, but there was certainly no intent or deliberate motivation to create this problem."

Yellowknife lawyer, Heather Potter, gave a presentation about bankruptcy law and claims for environmental damage. She said one of the key operating principles of bankruptcy law is that debtors should be entitled to a fresh start following bankruptcy procedures.

"In dealing with contaminated sites, the question always arises as to who should be responsible for the cleanup -- one of the key operating principles of environmental legislation is that people should be held responsible for the long-term effects of their actions on the environment," she said.

"These are largely incompatible goals, and the law is constantly struggling to find a balance between these two approaches."