“The new gold rush has been catastrophic for the local restaurants and tourism industry, and production hasn’t even started.”
–James Steidle
When Fred Wells established the Cariboo Gold Quartz Mine in the 1930’s, his company built a robust community to support the workers and their families. They based the urban design on walking, not driving. It also was family-oriented. Wells and his gold company specifically preferred married men working in the mines. Legend has it being able to play a musical instrument increased the chances of being hired.
The mine would therefore invest in all the amenities necessary for a functional community with children.
They built a hospital, a school, and the hub of the town, the Community Hall. They encouraged independent entrepreneurs to add other infrastructure, like the Sunset Theatre.
Like many old company towns, this created a legacy that became the foundation for a thriving community. After the mines shut down in the 1960’s, Wells evolved to focus on the arts and tourism, as well as “the gateway to historic Barkerville.”
But times have changed.
The gold mine has been revived and whenever the current proponent, Osisko Development, starts operating the $10 billion Cariboo Gold Project on the hillside beside downtown Wells, it won’t build anything like that.
So far, all Osisko has done is take things away from the town, and this is before production has really even started.
Osisko’s legacy is failing local businesses
Osisko launched an environmental assessment application for the mine in 2019, finally obtaining approval from the BC NDP government last year. The mine is expected to produce nearly two million ounces of gold over 10 years.
Cariboo Gold Project maps
Starting about seven years ago, Osisko Development and a company housing drillers for Osisko, bought both of the motels and one of the RV parks in Wells, supposedly to house mine workers. That eliminated 80 per cent of the visitor accommodation in Wells and half the RV capacity. One motel was recently reopened, but only temporarily.
The 2017 and 2018 fires didn’t help. Neither did Covid. But losing most of the visitor accommodations dealt a staggering blow to the community, and it led to one of the four restaurants closing, and two of three food trucks shuttering.
After all that, it is not clear why the mining companies needed the accommodations.
Osisko now will house their workers outside Wells at their work camp called Ballarat. The facility has 79 beds, with expansion capacity to 260 camp beds. Already, logging contractors and other industrial customers who had previously stayed in Wells have been drawn out of the local economy to stay at Osisko’s camp instead.
This temporary camp won’t be contributing to the community or leaving a lasting legacy of housing and community spaces like the original mines did. Once the mine runs dry, all the company’s infrastructure will likely disappear as well.
This temporary camp won’t be contributing to the community or leave a lasting legacy.
Far from hiring married men or women, or creating a community where you could raise kids, with Osisko, like other similar big projects, the goal seems to be the opposite. They bring in transient workers, along with their problems, and create a humming, empty void of camp-life alienation, detached from the community, bent on maximum exploitation and minimum local connection.
Where the original Cariboo gold rush created communities and helped build the province, the new gold rush has been catastrophic for restaurants, tourism and the Wells economy.
Gold will be shipped out of the region for refining
There are other opportunities lost to Wells residents.
Rather than investing in the municipal wastewater infrastructure to handle the new mining population, the camp sewage will be put in trucks and hauled 75 kms away to Quesnel.
The gold concentrate will go even further for processing.
Up until last month the plan was to put the ore on trucks for the 140 km trip down the highway and a forest service road to the QR Mill near Likely, a large facility where the gold bars were already being produced from the Bonanza Ledge project.
Now it appears that Osisko will build a noisy ore concentrator directly overlooking Wells. This will not only damage the town’s tourism appeal, it will also reduce the amount of raw ore being trucked to QR. Because the new plan, announced in a recent June 11th filing, will be to produce gold doré bars on site and ship them to yet unnamed North American refineries for refining.
The remaining gold “flotation” concentrate (much lower quality gold, contaminated by other trace elements) will be trucked to the Port of Vancouver and shipped to Qingdao, China, for further processing.
What, if anything, that has to do with this week’s development is unknown, but officials from Osisko, a North American company with significant foreign financing, announced they’d secured $450 million through the UK’s Appian Capital towards production of Cariboo project. Appian caters to the global mining market. It recently opened an office in China and managed an all-cash sale of a Brazilian open pit copper-gold mine to Chinese state-backed mining company, Baiyan Nonferrous.
While some Canadian companies may win a contract to refine gold doré bars from the Cariboo mine, the QR mill will not. So how else will the local community benefit? Because, theoretically, the public is supposed to get some of this gold back.
The mine is operating on public land. If the government won’t hold the company’s feet to fire to create jobs and feed the local economy, will the taxpayer coffers at least get a royalty payment on the net smelter return?
Theoretically, the public is supposed to get some of this gold back.
And if we are shipping out concentrate with an undetermined amount of gold to a country with a shoddy record of transparency – a percentage of which is owed to the public – let’s hope the system auditing the exported gold doesn’t rely on the same process as the forestry industry, where we collect stumpage on public timber with minimal public scrutiny and a lot of trust in the corporations to be honest about what they owe.
‘It’s less about the left and the right’
Despite the enormous revenues, government doesn’t appear to make much money from many of the mines in operation.
The B.C. government talks about over $1 billion in annual tax revenue, half of which is specifically from the mineral tax (tourism brings in $2.5 billion in tax revenue, but i digress). Yet a recent study looking at the 27 mines approved since 1995 in B.C. shows that where data is even available, they have yielded zero mining tax revenues.
It’s nearly impossible to determine where the $497 million in mining tax revenue comes from, but it’s likely much is from the trainloads of coal B.C. exports, along with minerals from older mines like Highland Copper. Precedent in B.C. shows, big corporate subsidies and flow-through tax credits reward operations like Osisko.
Early company estimates indicate 600 jobs will be created during construction. But the existing camp supplier is Calgary-based Evolution Camp Services, and most of the big equipment purchases will likely be going offshore. If other local businesses will benefit, it’s not apparent.
If there’s one constant in the world today it’s that age-old theme Scott Cook sang about in a beautiful old church during this this year’s Arts Wells directly across the small valley from where Osisko’s concentrator will loom.
In his song “A Bigger Tent,” a call for seeing across the political divide, he sang: “It’s less about the left and right than the top against the bottom.”
Osisko violated environmental regulations hundreds of times
Just like Osisko’s project out east at the Quebec town of Malartic, where hundreds of houses and the school were moved or torn down to make way for one of the largest open pit mines in Canada, the community and the public good doesn’t appear to be a government priority in Wells.
Quebec and Osisko may have assured the town good times were ahead, but Nicolas Paquet’s documentary “Malartic” shows the billions in profit seemed to pass the town by. There were some jobs, but also a lot of closed businesses, rundown buildings, and a long list of regulatory infractions.
That could be the legacy for Wells, too. Osisko’s local list of infractions is already pretty long.
The B.C. Ministry of the Environment reported 417 separate violations on 68 different days in 2020 and 2021, along with 215 incidents in 2017, and 463 between 2018 and 2019, according to a report by the CBC.
Government isn’t defending the public good
The irony in Wells is that there has been a strong tourism industry that was providing a way out from under the weight of its history. The Bowron Lakes, historic Barkerville, Island Mountain Arts, Arts Wells, and countless hiking trails were all bringing in money and creating a resilient economy. To add insult to injury, the province cut funding for theatrical programming at Barkerville, reducing the tourism draw and shortening the season.
Instead of building on the community’s hard-won successes, and leaning on the industrial player to contribute to the local economy, the province allowed Osisko to use its lopsided power to undermine Wells businesses.
Worse, it continues to permit this same North American corporation to operate unimpeded, violating environmental regulations hundreds of times, over several years.
Fast-tracking provincial legislation will now allow this largely foreign-funded entity to override municipal jurisdiction, contradict the Official Community Plan and zoning bylaws, as Wells descends into a soulless industrial mine town where the gold processing and all spin-off benefits bypass community businesses and manufacturers and gets shipped off to China.
The province, and the investor elites it serves, apparently have a new designs for the area that don’t include the long-term betterment of the community where the resource is being extracted.
I guess change is a constant, and a good thing can never last.
But the way we allow the province and these large corporate interests to exploit and undermine our communities, increasingly for the benefit of the few, with minimal public payback, is unsustainable too.
Original edited, updated and reprinted with permission from the Prince George Citizen.