Lewis Rifkind, the mining analyst at the Yukon Conservation Society, says the case of Wolverine mine reveals how nearsighted the current security regime is, leaving territorial taxpayers on the hook for cleanup costs down the road.Ī recent Yukon Supreme Court decision confirms the Yukon government will be the first recipient of dollars flowing from bankruptcy proceedings for Yukon Zinc, the company that built Wolverine mine in southeast Yukon.
Now the bill is growing every year to keep the Wolverine mine from polluting the landscape around it, the territory’s mine closure fund is drying up and its bankrupt owner has walked away - in a situation one mining analyst says reveals flaws in Yukon’s bonding system for mines. And in 2018, the Yukon government was forced to step in to start environmental monitoring as the mine site had been neglected by Yukon Zinc, owned by the private Chinese company Jinduicheng Canada Resources Corp. It left a flooded underground shaft and contaminated water in its wake.
It opened and closed with only a few years of production, due to plummeting stocks. Yukon’s Wolverine mine, which primarily extracted zinc before it closed in 2015, has a storied history of failure.
