Federal Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson tapped the brakes Thursday on the Vista coal mine expansion near Hinton with an announcement Ottawa will take a look at the environmental impact of the project after all.
In a report in the Globe and Mail, Mr. Wilkinson hinted he had concluded the mine’s owner — a subsidiary of Plano, Tex.-based Cline Group Inc. — may have been trying to pull a fast one by breaking its application to double or triple the output of the thermal coal mine into two parts. “That would lead me to be concerned that this is, perhaps, an exercise in project splitting for the purpose of avoiding a federal assessment,” the minister said.
So, according to the Globe, Mr. Wilkinson explained that Ottawa’s initial determination that no federal review would be needed was based on the first application alone, but with a second one submitted more recently its assessment had changed.
