this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
31 points (97.0% liked)

Canada

11290 readers
700 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 9 points 19 hours ago

I wrote them for information on the development. They never got back to me.

We need to develop technology to preserve the environment before we start mining.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 12 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

I’m all for reinvesting in our northern communities, becoming self sufficient, and improving our economy.

We just have to be careful and not repeat the same mistakes we made in the early 1900s. We can do this quickly AND cleanly, it just takes more effort

There are dozens of lakes in northern Ontario polluted by mine tailings. We thought “oh, this poison can’t hurt anyone if we dump it in a lot of water”. And we were wrong.

Decades later we discovered the arsenic cycle. All those poisons and heavy metals we dumped in lakes continuously interact with organic materials and enter a cycle where they constantly continue to leach into the water, but are also constantly pulled out of sediment and mud, perpetually keeping the poison at the top.

There is still no research on how to fix this.

This is our drinking water. The lakes where kids swim. The animals we hunt drink from. And it’s indigenous lands that we share with them. Ontario is our home.

We know the risks, now let’s build and plan for them, and not make the same mistakes again and again.

[–] GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

"Quickly" is relative. We can move more quickly than we are certainly, while maintaining the forethought to prevent unnecessary harm, but we have to take a balanced approach. We don't want to let perfect become the enemy of the good, but we also don't need to make mistakes that cost us more down the road than we ever benefit from the development in the first place.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2 points 17 hours ago

Yes, that’s very well put, thank you. 

I really want to see us do good, and revitalize the north, and liberate our country from having to pick the best evil in the moment. 

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 4 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

I am generally extremely pro workers right and pro environmental protection, but environmentalists really need look at the situation practically and holistically.

This article seems to suggest that it's impossible to mine ethically, and while I get that it causes inherent damage and destruction, the alternatives will cause more damage and destruction, just not here.

The sad reality of bill 5 is that environmental laws have been used to block infrastructure projects numerous times. And while local environmental concerns are obviously valid, in the real world that we live in, it is not obviously 'more ethical' to let them block the project so that it instead gets built in say Peru, or doesn't get built at all and we keep using fossil fuel infrastructure.

[–] el_eh_chase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

I think another piece of the puzzle is making sure a sizeable chunk of the earnings from extraction projects are captured by the government and set aside for remediation, as well as in something akin to Norway's Soverign Wealth fund. It's a shame that we didn't end up in the same boat as Norway given how long we've been exploiting our oil sands. Money like that could be put to use solving all sorts of environmental problems.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 hours ago

Wholeheartedly agree.

[–] patatas@sh.itjust.works 0 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

While I agree that those dynamics can exist, it doesn't have to be that way.

We could be saying to manufacturers "you are not allowed to sell products that contain materials or parts that are produced in ways that harm people and the environment in the following specific ways: ..."

and forming agreements with other countries and trading blocs (ideally through institutions like the UN) to that effect.

This stuff doesn't have to be a race to the bottom.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 hours ago

No we cannot.

We literally need those minerals to build things like solar panels and electrical infrastructure that will let us transition away from fossil fuels.

There is no perfectly clean energy source, and we need energy to keep humans alive, healthy, and happy.