NIRB flashes green light for Jericho mine

After a series of public hearings held in Kitikmeot communities from Jan. 5 to Jan. 9, the Nunavut Impact Review Board has said yes to the Tahera Corporation’s environmental impact statement for the proposed Jericho project.

That means that when Andy Mitchell, the minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, approves the document, Tahera can apply for a water licence and land lease permits.

And after that it can more easily raise the $53 million it will need to pay for the mine’s one-time start-up costs.

Under the recent Inuit impact and benefits agreement between Tahera and the Kitikmeot Inuit Association, Kitikmeot Inuit could get up to 60 per cent of Jericho’s mine construction and production jobs.

That would include at least some of the 45 to 120 people who will be needed to construct the mine and an on-site diamond processing plant. Between 48 and 116 people will be needed for three years to work on open-pit mining, while another 48 people will work for two years in underground mining.

An on-site diamond processing plant, to be built and managed by a South African company called Dowding, Reynard and Associates, will employ about 40 people for eight years.

The company now wants to start shipping construction materials to Jericho via a winter road from Yellowknife in February or March of 2005. After a one-year construction period, Tahera hopes to produce diamonds by late 2005 or early 2006.

Nuna Logistics, owned by the Nunasi Corporation and the Kitikmeot Corporation, is the “preferred” contractor for the project. Nuna Logistics will finish building an ice road to Jericho and will construct a camp, diesel storage facility, workshop, explosive storage facilities, and on-site ice access roads.

The Jericho mine will be located about 25 km northwest of the defunct Lupin gold mine, about 350 km southwest of Cambridge Bay.

Under the KIA-Tahera benefits deal, the company will use its “best efforts” to bring its number of Inuit hires up to 60 per cent of the total by the fifth year of the eight-year project.

The deal, announced by Tahera and KIA Dec. 3, 2003, is still being called an “agreement-in-principle,” and no details were released to the public at the time.

But Tahera has now published most parts of that IIBA, except for three sections which are still confidential. Those sections deal with contracting rules, business issues, and the question of whether a Kitikmeot Inuit firm will get a chance to process rough diamonds.