The Application of Environmental Financial Assurance Regulations to Giant Mine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historically, mining has had a large negative impact on the environment. In order to combat this legacy of damage, the Government of Canada has implemented regulations in order to ensure the “Polluter Pays’ principle is followed, that is the party responsible for damage will pay for its rehabilitation. Giant Mine, located in Yellowknife, NWT, is a case where this principle was not applied. It is one of the most damaged legacy mine sites in Canada and is currently undergoing rehabilitation by the Government of Canada after its owner became insolvent in the 1990’s. Rehabilitation is estimated to cost B$0.5 CAD and requires maintenance in perpetuity. This thesis examines the Canadian application of environmental financial assurance regulations which are intended ensure that mining companies provide sufficient funding to the government to reclaim a mine in the event of default by applying modern regulations to the case study of the Giant Mine. Four primary types of assurances (cash, letters of credit, trusts, and corporate promises) along with their variations are applied retroactively to determine their impact on financial models of Giant Mine as a critique of modern EFA regulations. This model shows that on a pre-tax, undiscounted basis, Giant Mine would have been able to fund the entirety of its reclamation but would be unable to do so on an after-tax basis. This indicates that the project is sensitive to the tax treatment of the reclamation cash flows, which is variable depending on the specific tax jurisdiction in question. When the time value of money is considered, the project becomes attractive except when the EFA fund is held as cash. All other EFA vehicles showed positive economic value over a range of discount rates applied by mining companies. As a result, this thesis concludes that had modern EFA regulations been in place at the time of Giant Mine’s discovery, the mine could have successfully internalized its environmental impact and still have been considered economic despite the significant environmental damage it caused but would not be an attractive investment to smaller, less financially stable mining firms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".