As Environment and Climate Change Canada lays five Fisheries Act charges against Teck Coal Limited for alleged deleterious deposits into British Columbia’s Dry Creek, the department also announced an $8-million Fisheries Act fine against Canadian National Railway Company for twice releasing a significant amount of crude oil into Ontario’s environment.
While few details have been released about the March 7, 2023 investigation at Teck Coal Limited’s Line Creek Operations Mine in B.C., adjacent to the fish-bearing Fording River, federal officials said the department “takes pollution incidents and threats to the environment very seriously.”
Teck Coal has been fined several times for contaminating the same waterways in B.C. In 2023, for instance, the company was fined $15.5 million, for failure to activate its Fording River South water treatment facility near Elkford, B.C., as required by the provincial permit for the discharge of wastewater. In 2021, Teck Coal was also ordered to pay $60 million in fines and monetary court orders after a guilty plea was entered on two counts of unlawfully depositing deleterious coal mine waste rock leachate into the upper Fording River.
In the case of the Canadian National Railway Company, the $8-million Fisheries Act fine relates to events that happened on February 14, 2015, and on March 7, 2015, when trains derailed near Gladwick and Gogama, Ontario. The derailments released a total of more than 3.6 million litres of crude oil into the environment, including wetlands and the Makami River that flows into Minisinakwa Lake, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada enforcement officers, who responded to the sites to inspect and collect samples.
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“The two derailments occurred after a piece of railway track broke under the weight of the passing train,” the department wrote in a statement. “Canadian National Railway Company failed to exercise due diligence in maintaining the tracks.”
Following the derailments, the railway renewed and restored the track infrastructure. The railway also completed forest restoration activities with the assistance of the Mattagami First Nation, including a planting program to restore lost vegetation species native to the area and the creation of a fish spawning lagoon in the vicinity of the Gogama bridge.
