The three members of Alaska’s Congressional delegation are calling for action from President Joe Biden on transboundary mining in British Columbia upstream of several Southeast Alaska rivers.
In a joint letter sent to the president last week, U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan and Representative Mary Peltola expressed concern over the impacts mining projects in the Canadian province are having on U.S. communities and resources downstream.
The letter said that without federal recourse, Canadian mining activity could increasingly damage salmon runs in Alaska and the environment. The letter CC’d the Secretary of State, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and multiple members of the International Joint Commission, which oversees issues affecting waterways along the Canada–U.S. border.
The bipartisan delegation wrote that they have pushed three different presidents at this point for financial and environmental protections of the Taku, Stikine, and Unuk rivers in Southeast Alaska, each of which they said have been adversely affected by Canadian mining projects at their headwaters.
The Delegation is renewing the call for action after a recent infrastructure failure at a gold mine in the Yukon led to a landslide which leaked mine waste, including cyanide, into a nearby creek that is part of the transboundary Yukon River system. The Yukon government found in a water quality report that, in some areas, the cyanide levels were enough to wreak significant damage on aquatic life.
“The failure was caused by poor design and negligence,” the letter states. It said: “We are only now beginning to understand the true scale of the environmental impacts, and each update is more discouraging than the last.”
Murkowski, Peltola, and Sullivan said that they “recognize that the minerals that come from Canadian mines are a key part of U.S. and allied national security and an important part of resource development.” But they said sacrificing our environment for energy and national security isn’t a necessary trade-off.
And so, they are asking Biden to publicly demand that Canada clean up an abandoned mine in British Columbia that the delegation said has been polluting international waters for decades and that all stakeholders – meaning Alaska, British Columbia, the U.S., Canada, and Indigenous groups – establish a binding, enforceable international framework under the international commission to prevent disputes like this in the future.
