Baffinland’s environmental impact statement flunks review

Workers stand near Baffinland Iron Mines Corp.’s Mary River mine about 160 km southwest of Pond Inlet. The Nunavut Impact Review Board wants the company to put more information into its environmental impact statement for its Phase 2 railway-based expansion plan. (FILE PHOTO)

If the Nunavut Impact Review Board were a school teacher, the Baffinland Iron Mines Corp.’s environmental impact statement for its big railway-based expansion plan would be marked “incomplete.”

That’s essentially what the review board told Baffinland earlier this month, in response to the company’s submission of the statement this past August.

After receiving that document, the review board’s first task was to do what’s called a “conformity review.” That means their staff studied the EIS to find out if it meets guidelines the review board gave the company in 2015.

And that’s where the EIS failed.

“The NIRB has now completed its conformity review of Baffinland’s FEIS Addendum submission and determined that it does not conform to the NIRB’s EIS Guidelines, as the submission contains deficiencies which must be addressed to facilitate an efficient technical review of the document by all parties,” Ryan Barry, the review board’s executive director, said in a letter to Baffinland.

(The document in question is actually called an “FEIS Addendum”—which means an add-on to the company’s final environmental impact statement, which was accepted in 2012.)

This means Baffinland now has to take the review board’s response and fill in the missing details.

To that end, the review board has supplied the company with a 78-page spreadsheet, called a concordance, that lists the items where Baffinland has supplied acceptable information and the items that need more work.

Only then can the review board preside over a technical review, which would be the first step in an environmental assessment.

Baffinland is proposing to build a 110-kilometre railway between Mary River and Milne Inlet to replace its existing tote road.

That means its fleet of haul trucks would be replaced by five diesel-powered locomotive engines and 176 ore-carrying rail cars.

In its phase-two application, first filed in 2013, the company wants to use the railway to help expand annual iron ore production at Mary River from 4.2 million metric tonnes to 12 million metric tonnes.

The review board has already recommended to Northern Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc that a separate request from Baffinland, for an increase in the amount of ore it’s allowed to carry by truck to Milne Inlet, be rejected.

Baffinland, in the smaller separate production increase application filed in late 2017, wants to raise its permitted level of production from 4.2 million metric tonnes to six million metric tonnes per year.

LeBlanc has yet to respond to that recommendation.

But the review says that its recommendation on the small production increase proposal will have no bearing on its assessment of the railway proposal.

NIRB letter to Baffinland by on Scribd