Weighty sense of deja vu

“Our small struggle in Nova Scotia was uncovering a world surprising and somewhat shocking to most of us. Perhaps we had known about this piece or that piece, but now we were forced to see the total picture. It was a ruthless world of power connections that reached into the highest levels of the federal government and spread out tentacles into the farthest corners of the world.”

- Donna Smyth, Subversive Elements

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Lately, I’ve been feeling a weighty sense of déjà vu. Back in 1981 the names were Millet Creek, Kidd Creek and Aquitaine; now they are Titus, Capella and Tripple. While the names have changed, the intent is the same – uranium mining.

Twenty-five years ago I was a young mother developing anxiety attacks while covering Judge Robert McCleave’s uranium inquiry. I remember three years of division, the activists’ phones that appeared to be tapped, the gloom of those times and the stability that the 1985 moratorium brought. However, things are changing.

The recent rise in the world price of uranium launched it. Capella Resources Ltd. of Vancouver is a publicly traded, junior exploration company with over 25,000 mineral exploration claims covering more than 1.2 million acres in Atlantic Canada. On Capella's website, under the title Exploring for Energy, anyone can read a map of the company's claims.

There is a massive chunk of claims stretching from Windsor nearly to Mahone Bay, with another sizable chunk in the Middleton area, others around Digby and more in the Wentworth area.

The text makes it quite clear that their sole interest here is uranium and that drilling activity in Nova Scotia is underway.

Meanwhile, we know from a story in the Halifax Daily News in mid-December that Rodney MacDonald’s government is willing to look at lifting the moratorium. Environment Minister Mark Parent told the legislature "this government has an open mind" on uranium prospecting and is trying to think in "creative ways" if the province is going to curb its carbon emissions in an effort to fight climate change.

The Premier said, "if we want to be a truly green province and a province that's focused on reducing CO2 emissions, then we have to take a look at new options.

“Potentially, in the future,” he said, a nuclear power plant “could be one of those options."

In a more recent story in the Daily News, reporter Brian Flinn quotes government spokesperson Jennifer Gavin saying that Capella does not have to declare what it’s looking for to obtain exploration permits. If it finds uranium in concentrations greater than 100 parts per million, she said, it must report those results and stop digging.

We already know there is plenty of uranium in Hants County rock and likely it’s amply deposited elsewhere.

Having lived through some of the politics around this controversial ore, I want the MacDonald government to be up front about exploration leniency and what it intends. We deserve that much on the second go-round.

I’ve heard the Council of Canadians is planning a public meeting in Chester Jan. 18 to discuss the possibility for toxic ponds near the headwaters of the Gold and Avon Rivers. "Nova Scotia is too small a place for uranium mining," Rudy Hasse told Flinn. "It's just going to affect too many people."

What I want to know is do we still have a uranium moratorium in Nova Scotia or not? As Smyth wrote in her depiction of the 1980s controversy, “It is not enough for me to cultivate my garden. Whether we like it or not, we are webbed in, connected to each other.”