Established in 2004, the Community of Interest Advisory Panel (COI Panel) is an independent multi-stakeholder group that monitors the Mining Association of Canada’s Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) initiative’s progress and serves as an external source of knowledge and experience. This executive summary provides a brief account of the meeting held on March 5th, 2014 in Toronto, Ontario.
At the fall 2014 meeting, the COI Panel agreed to have a substantive discussion on the breach of the tailings storage facility that occurred at Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley mine on August 4, 2014 and MAC’s approach to tailings management. More specifically, the Panel wanted to explore the theme of transparency and accountability of tailings management and regulatory regimes and potentially develop a specific output from the discussion that could be shared more broadly. With this in mind, the agenda included an update from Imperial Metals on the Mount Polley incident, an expert panel to provide context on tailings management, and a Panel group discussion on the information communities need to have confidence in the management and regulatory regimes around tailings across the lifecycle of the mine.
This was the first Panel meeting where the Panel chose to cover only one topic, and discuss a company-specific event. This meeting also differed from the norm as a large delegation from Finland’s Network for Sustainable Mining was invited to observe the meeting and offer reflections at the end.
