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More than 1,000 workers at Baffinland Iron Mines Corp. received termination notices and might be out of work by October if the Nunavut-based miner’s extraction permit isn’t renewed by the Federal government, the company said on Wednesday.
The workers received their notices on July 31, company spokesman Peter Akman said. He added that the notices would be rescinded if Baffinland receives the permit to increase its annual extraction limit of iron ore to six million tonnes from its original allowance of 4.2 million tonnes.
While the company was allowed to mine six million tonnes of iron ore every year from 2018 to 2021, an application to further expand the mine capacity to 12 million tonnes received a negative recommendation on environmental grounds from the Nunavut Impact Review Board (NIRB), a body that advises the government, in May.
“There are rules within the NIRB process that you cannot project split. You cannot apply for two elements of a project at the same time, and so …(we) said to NIRB we will not be applying for six (million tonnes) for 2022 (because of the 12-million-tonne application),” Akman said.
“We anticipated NIRB’s process to be done by 2021. If we didn’t get approval, we would then apply for the six-million-tonne permit in 2021 for 2022. But the recommendation got delayed. Had we known before 2022 that we wouldn’t be approved, we would have … set up our mining operation for 4.2 million tonnes over the entire year and not six million,” he added.
As things stand now, the company is expected to reach its extraction and shipping limits by September and October respectively. And if the ministry of northern affairs, which is expected to provide a decision based on the ongoing NIRB assessment for the six-million-tonne permit in late August, refuses to renew the permit, the company will have to stop mining and let its employees go until next year.
“We feel both anger and disappointment that our members are being let go, in our view unnecessarily, because of constant delays at the NIRB in making timely decisions, and also … the federal government,” Mike Gallagher, a spokesman for the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 793, which represents the company’s workers, said in a press release on Aug. 2.
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Image and article originally from financialpost.com. Read the original article here.