OTTAWA - B.C. aboriginal leaders and environmental groups moved Wednesday to counteract an aggressive lobbying campaign by a mining company to get the federal government to consider its new bid to open a copper-gold mine in the province’s interior.
Their effort coincided this week with Taseko Mines Ltd. releasing a report that says the $1.5-billion New Prosperity mine would create 71,000 jobs and increase federal and B.C. government tax revenues by almost $10 billion between the 2013 construction launch and the projected 2036 mine closure.

It also comes as both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and B.C. Premier Christy Clark have promoted mining as a way for Canada to defy the global economic troubles.

The Harper government accepted last year a Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency review which rejected Taseko’s plan to drain Fish Lake for a tailings storage area.

The company has come back with a proposal to spend $300 million to build a tailings facility two kilometres upstream from Fish Lake, in an area about 125 kilometres southwest of Williams Lake.

“The company is on record admitting this new option is worse than the one that was rejected last year, and a CEAA review panel has already agreed with that assessment,” native leader Joe Alphonse told a news conference Wednesday on Parliament Hill.

“To proceed any further will place an unjustified burden on us and on taxpayers and will demonstrate the excessive influence that this company, its lobbyists and hired guns have on government,” said Alphonse, chair of the Tsilhqot’in National Government, which represents six First Nations in the area.

A coalition of 11 B.C. environmental groups also issued a statement Wednesday denouncing the project.

The CEAA is expected to decide early next month whether to conduct a comprehensive study or a review of the new proposal, said spokeswoman Annie Roy.

Alphonse was referring to the 2010 CEAA panel report which said it agreed “with the observations made by Taseko and Environment Canada” that the proposal to locate the tailings facility upstream from Fish Lake “would result in greater long-term environmental risk than the preferred alternative.”

Brian Battison, Taseko’s vice-president of corporate affairs, told The Vancouver Sun that the company believes it can convince the federal government that it has an adequate plan to mitigate the risks of having the tailings pond two kilometres upstream from Fish Lake.

Critics have drawn attention to Taseko’s heavy use of lobbyists to push its case. Phil Von Finckenstein, a well-connected lobbyist in Tory circles who once worked as Reform leader Preston Manning’s press aide, is a registered Taseko lobbyist who has met with senior officials in Harper’s office as well as CEAA, Natural Resources Canada and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, according to Federal Lobbying Commissioner Karen Shepherd’s registry.

Von Finckenstein’s efforts include meetings with Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver and Timothy Sargent, assistant secretary to the cabinet in the Privy Council Office (the bureaucratic arm of the government that directly advises Harper).

His lobbying involves seeking “timely approval of a proposed mining project” in B.C. as well as explaining the “economic value” of the project, according to the registry.

Taseko’s other hired gun is former senior bureaucrat Bruce Rawson, one-time deputy minister of fisheries and oceans Canada.

Rawson has had 31 meetings with high-level Harper government officials, both at the bureaucratic and political levels, regarding Taseko since mid-2008.

“We’re making every effort to provide the facts to people so they have a clear understanding of what the facts are, and not the rumour and not the innuendo,” Battison said.

“So it’s a communication effort we’re making to get everybody to understand the value and benefits of this project.”

One environmental group, West Coast Environmental Law, has drawn attention to the recent hiring of Jason Quigley, a former official at the CEAA, by Hunter Dickinson Services Inc.

HDSI shares the same Vancouver address as Taseko and is, according to a recent Taseko filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, a company “which has certain directors in common” with Taseko and “carries out geological, engineering, corporate development, administrative, financial management, investor relations, and other management activities” for Taseko.

Quigley is described on the HDSI website as someone with “more than 17 years experience as a consultant and senior executive, specializing in regulatory permitting, sustainability, fisheries and public consultation on large mining, energy and infrastructure projects. Currently, he provides regulatory and Corporate Social Responsibility expertise in support of HDI interests.”

Taseco vice-president Brian Battison told The Vancouver Sun that Quigley has had no involvement in the New Prosperity project. Another Taseko executive wrote to WCEL earlier this week noting that Quigley and the CEAA “discussed and agreed on the post-employment restrictions” he’d have to follow after joining HDSI.