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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
A mining company and the government-appointed watchdog tasked with reviewing development proposals are crossing swords over who's to blame for the length of time it takes for projects to wind their way through the NWT's regulatory process.

Vern Christensen, executive director of the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board, says everyone needs to do their job efficiently - including developers - for the review process to work properly. - Thandie Vela/NNSL photo

Don Bubar, president of Avalon Rare Metals, said it was a long, aggravating five months before the Mackenzie Valley Impact Review Board determined that Avalon's developer's assessment report fulfilled its terms of reference, moving the process on to the next phase earlier this month.

He said the long wait like the one his company endured is undermining industry's confidence in the NWT as place to explore and develop.

"We're another example of how this process seems unnecessarily slow," Bubar said.

"It's clearly just inefficiency generally in the system related to internal capacity."

But Vern Christensen, the review board's executive director, said some of the blame needs to be shared by the mining companies themselves.

While Christensen agrees the board does face capacity issues in terms of funding shortfalls and at least one vacancy in its staff, developers must also make sure the reports it submits are complete, he said.

"The board wants to be accountable for that part of the process it has control over," Christensen said.

"But the developer himself is managing his own fate if you like, in terms of timeliness by how well it prepares its assessment report, how quickly it answers the information requests, and produces other information that's required by the process."

Delays in Avalon's conformity assessment were caused by deficiencies in its developer's assessment report, the board said, and thus it requested additional information at least twice because the developer had not provided an answer to all the questions in the terms of reference.

Deficiency statements are not uncommon, however, and were also issued in the assessments of reports submitted by Imperial Oil, De Beers Canada, Canadian Zinc, and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada's Giant Mine remediation report.

"People need to understand that for the overall process to be as timely as possible, everybody needs to do their job efficiently," Christensen said. "And that includes the developer, and it includes government because at the back-end of this process, government makes the decision finally."

For its part, the review board recently paid for an external review on improving the timeliness of the environmental permitting process.

"We're not wanting to shirk our responsibility or to shy away from accountability," Christensen said.

"We want to be accountable for our part of the process and based on this external review, there are areas where we need to look at to see if we can do things in a more timely way."

He added when Avalon's developer's assessment report landed on the review board's desk in May, it happened to arrive at about the same time as two other major development reports.

The 1,000-page document for the mineral exploration company's Nechalacho rare earths project at Thor Lake joined the line behind Fortune Minerals Ltd.'s gold-cobalt-bismuth-copper NICO project, and Tyhee Gold Corp.'s Yellowknife gold project. "We were caught a little off guard," said Christensen.

Aboriginal Affairs is also working on a strategy to improve the regulatory regime with its Northern Regulatory Improvements Initiatives, based on a report by Alberta lawyer Neil McCrank.

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