Letters

Yellowknife’s Arsenic

Although fishing is my new favorite hobby since moving to the Northwest Territories, I have to be careful in deciding where to fish or swim. Arsenic contamination persists in Yellowknife— an issue that has always been the talk of town. Therefore, eating fish from highly contaminated lakes is not safe.

Giant Mine is one of the largest and richest mines in Canadian history. The city was built, flourished, and expanded. Jobs were created. From 1948 to 2004, 200 tonnes of gold were mined from the site just outside Yellowknife in the NWT. This is worth $2.7 billion.

Decades after its closure, the mine’s legacy is arsenic contamination, an issue that has affected the health of Yellowknife’s residents and is currently costing taxpayers millions. The gold extraction process used at Giant Mine created a highly toxic by-product, a dust called arsenic trioxide.

Environmental advocates confirm that there’s 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide stored underground. The pollution buried under the mine’s site is close to downtown and is posing a great threat to not only NWT residents, but Canada’s entire marine system. If contamination ends up in the Great Slave Lake, it might flow to Canada’s largest river: Mackenzie River.

The mining company doesn’t exist anymore. Who is paying to keep everyone safe? Government—or in other words, taxpayers. The temporary solution is freezing the arsenic, but eventually there needs to be a long-term solution that would prevent arsenic from leaking to all water bodies.

In the meantime, people in Yellowknife and the surrounding communities need to be aware and check arsenic updates regularly. It is safe to drink tap water in Yellowknife, but for instance, harvesting berries close to highly contaminated sites poses a health risk. A map provided by the Health Department indicates the level of arsenic concentration in lakes around the city by using coloured dots. It’s unsafe to fish or swim in lakes marked with red dots on the map.

Yusur Al-Bahrani
Yellowknife, NWT

Good News from Russia

We had a shortage of letters this time, so we wrote to friends in Russia, saying: “I’d like to print a collection of small messages called ‘Good News From Russia.’ The folks in Canada hear lots of bad news from Russia but we haven’t heard anything very good lately.” So here are a couple of letters that we received in reply:

Moscow is about to launch one of its most spectacular festivals: the Circle of Light. In this festival, lighting and multi-media designers from all over the world come to Moscow and create magic on the facades, squares, and parks of Moscow. Images come out of the darkness and dash or dance or twirl across buildings. Magical creatures dash out from behind trees and cavort on park lawns. Chariots roar acoss one of Moscow’s central squares. All this is accompanied by music, sound and narration—and all of it is absolutely free.

— Alexey Prokhorenko

The good news about Russia is about the excellent things that people are doing here. My friends Elena Vasilieva and Alexander Shpektor, after 25 years of hard professional and organizational work, created in Moscow a hospital working on the highest global standard in urgent cardiology.
My friend Alexey Ryantsev from the town of Chaplygin conducts a very creative orchestra and writes poetic music, and at the same time campaigns for the Yabloko party.
The priest Alexander Shabanov is carrying on research on Irish saints of the sixth century and works on organizing a hospice in his town of Tver.
And finally, have you seen the Russian town of Voronezh? It is in Europe! Against all odds, various people at different levels of activity are doing things that look very unexpected for the political and social situation in Russia.

—Victor Kogan-Yasny

Well-deserved award

Congratulations to Debbie Grisdale, recipient of the Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention 2018 Achievement Award.