Laurent Robichaud loves rivers. He loves rafting them, canoeing them and watching sturgeon swim in them. The self-proclaimed “sturgeon whisperer” lives in the northern Ontario town of Timmins, built along the Mattagami River, where mining has been the economic driver for more than a century.
A lookout with panoramic views of the city, overlooking an open-pit mine, is a popular attraction. The Hollinger gold mine was active on and off for more than a century, only ceasing operations in late 2024. When it was active, security guards kept onlookers at a safe distance during blasting, which loosened nearly 30,000 tonnes of rock at a time, while they strolled and picnicked.
While the foundation of Timmins’ mining history is laid in gold, its future may lie in vast reserves of nickel, which are ushering in a different kind of rush.
Nickel is a “critical mineral,” needed for clean energy technology like batteries. It falls under the federal government’s controversial critical minerals strategy, which is meant to clear the way for mining projects that present a “generational opportunity for Canada,” and move us toward a greener, digital economy. It does this in part by fast-tracking environmental assessments and, critics say, limiting community participation in decision-making and underemphasizing the ecological importance of resource-rich areas.
Global demand for nickel is expected to double by 2050. Around Timmins, several mining projects are underway that would collectively extract much of Canada’s 2.2 million tonnes of nickel. That’s two per cent of the global reserve of nickel. In 2023, Ontario supplied nearly 60 per cent of the country’s entire nickel production, and other mines are planning all-season access roads farther north to tap into the region’s abundant deposits. But in Timmins and elsewhere, concerns abound about what this mining rush means for the land, as well as animals and people who rely on it.
About 40 kilometres north of Timmins, Canada Nickel has proposed the massive Crawford Nickel mine near several tributaries of the Mattagami River. If the project becomes a reality, it could be the second largest nickel mine in the world, alongside an on-site mill.
Canada Nickel CEO Mark Selby tells The Narwhal it will be production by 2028 — at which point, treated effluent will be discharged into two natural creeks that flow into the Mattagami.
Robichaud, a director of the Ontario Rivers Alliance, sits on an environmental committee that works directly with the Crawford mine and has sought answers for how that effluent will impact the river and the species within it, like the sturgeon, which he sees less and less nowadays.
“To me, we’re talking water, we’re talking watersheds,” Robichaud says.
As a board member with the Ontario Rivers Alliance, Laurent Robichaud is concerned about the “unavoidable” harm to fish habitat the Crawford nickel mine is expected to cause. Still, he wants to see the mine move forward. His town’s economy is “depending on” new mining developments, he says. Photo: Leah Borts-Kuperman / The Narwhal
According to Canada Nickel’s federal impact assessment filing, the mine is anticipated to “result in the unavoidable harmful alteration, disruption or destruction” of 147 hectares of fish habitat.
Canada’s Impact Assessment Agency provided nearly 25 pages of commentary from federal departments and experts on this assessment, including notes on the “substantial” amount of “seepage” that is predicted to bypass the mine’s drainage and water collection systems while the mine is in operation. This seepage, which Environment and Climate Change Canada expects to contain arsenic, chloride, uranium and other minerals that are risky at high levels, will be deposited in several rivers, creeks and eight lakes currently used by Indigenous communities where the agency noted “toxicity effects on aquatic life are likely.”
Beyond the water, the mine’s construction will remove an estimated 11,785 hectares of critical wildlife habitat for threatened woodland caribou and endangered northern long-eared bats.
Selby is pitching the Crawford project to media and investors as a major untapped resource, according to Northern Ontario Business, and the mine as emissions free. That’s due to its patent-pending system called “in-process tailings carbonation,” which proposes to store up to 1.5 million tonnes of carbon captured from the mine’s production in the mine waste. This experimental storage method has received more than $3 million in funding from the federal government.
In early September, the Crawford mine was listed on an internal draft of 32 projects prioritized for fast-tracked federal approval, leaked to the Globe and Mail. It did not make the top five list of projects for fast-tracking, released by the Prime Minister’s Office shortly after, but the critical minerals strategy was among a subsequent list of priority projects and strategies that are in earlier stages of development.
Selby says the project will create approximately 2,000 jobs during construction, which should break ground in 2026, and up to 1,300 jobs when the mine is built and operational about two years later. He wrote in an email to The Narwhal, “the project will also create spinoff opportunities for local businesses and suppliers, supporting a strong economic ecosystem for decades to come.”
Despite Robichaud’s concerns about impacts on local waterways, he really wants the Crawford Nickel mine to go through: “We don’t have much to offer as far as any new developments in Timmins,” Robichaud says. “Growth-wise, we’re depending on … all these new mining operations that could help our economy.”
A huge opportunity for Timmins, but not without caveats
Hillary Laughren, co-chair of the Timmins chapter of Women in Mining Canada, is also excited about the prospects of the massive Crawford Nickel project.
“Mining is in our blood,” Laughren says. Born and raised in the area, she is a supply chain manager at a mineral exploration company. “Timmins is the place to be for mining,” she says.
Canada Nickel’s project could operate for almost 45 years, producing up to 240,000 tonnes of nickel per day.
“There’s lots of opportunity for new jobs,” Laughren says. “It has potential for a really long mine-life and so, I think it could be really good for women in mining, it could be really good for the community of Timmins and other communities that surround us.”
With the Kidd Creek copper and zinc mine, which its owner says employs 800 workers and contractors, scheduled to close next year, Laughren says another mine is needed to fill that void.
Hillary Laughren, seen here at the Hollinger Open Pit Lookout in Timmins, says her community needs new mining developments to boost the economy as older mines in the region close. Photo: Leah Borts-Kuperman / The Narwhal
Timmins has a significantly higher unemployment rate and lower rate of food security than the Ontario average. A growing homeless population is visible in its small downtown, where it seems almost every other business is boarded up.
A decade ago, the city lost more than three per cent of its residents when the mining sector contracted, including the closure of Canada’s oldest gold mine. Statistics Canada listed Timmins among the 10 slowest growing communities in the country in 2016.
The boom and bust cycle is an attribute of resources-based economies, and Timmins is finally circling back toward a boom. Since the downturn of 2016, Timmins has grown by nearly five per cent to a population of just under 45,000, recovering to a size not seen in more than a decade. The Crawford mine could solidify that trajectory.
“The size of the project, it speaks for itself, it would be just a substantial benefit to the city,” Tom Faught Jr., former president of the Timmins Chamber of Commerce, says.
About a decade ago, Timmins, Ont., lost more than three per cent of its residents after a mining industry contraction. Now, the city is growing again, but social challenges such as unemployment, food insecurity and homelessness persist. Photo: Leah Borts-Kuperman / The Narwhal
Experts watching closely also see northern Ontario’s mines as necessary to Canada’s progress in a world that needs more critical minerals every year.
“[The next] generation is going to need a hell of a lot of copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, beryllium, rare earths,” says Graeme Spiers, an emeritus professor in environmental and earth sciences at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., who works with the Mining Innovation Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation.
Spiers tells The Narwhal he believes existing mining regulations are strict enough to curb negative environmental impacts. He’s seen these historic impacts firsthand around Sudbury, another mining hub in northern Ontario.
“Society and industry, years ago, wasn’t really worried about the impact on landscapes,” Spiers says, adding that people in communities like Sudbury and Timmins began to realize the effect of mining on their homes. “Suddenly, everybody, both sides of the border, were saying, ‘We want clean water.’ ”
Spiers says much of this public push for a cleaner environment drove the government to put regulations in place that better protect the environment, and require companies to remediate the land after the mine closes.
Canada Nickel has already submitted its closure plan for when the Crawford mine is tapped out, projected to be sometime in the 2070s. The proposal suggests “water quality would be expected to return to conditions close to baseline following decommissioning and closure,” and “habitat will continue to regenerate.”
What happens in between opening and closure isn’t quite as clear.
The human and wildlife costs of nickel mines
Around Timmins, public spaces are named after mines from decades past. The city itself was named after Noah Timmins, president of Hollinger Mines. Hollinger Park sits in place of a lake that was previously backfilled with mine tailings and then remediated.
Today, it’s green space with a splashpad and sports field, though one that has borne the traces of its industrial past: in 2016, the local public health unit had to issue a heavy metals warning for Hollinger Park due to “higher than normal” levels of lead, arsenic and antimony in the soil. The notice may have been reassuring for Timmins residents, though perhaps not so soothing for those in other mining towns: “While the levels found are above what would be found in most parks, they are well below those found in many similar communities in Ontario and Canada with metal smelters or past mining activities.”
I do think that we’re headed towards an area where we’re going to rip up the entire boreal shield.
Alexandra Bridges, program manager, Keepers of the Circle
Alexandra Bridges is a member of Mattagami First Nation, which has lived along the Mattagami River for centuries and is a signatory to Treaty 9, covering much of northern Ontario, including Timmins and the mineral rich Ring of Fire region, northwest of it. Bridges is a program manager at Keepers of the Circle, an organization for Indigenous women and families funded by the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada to support Indigenous women’s participation in impact assessments, like the one Canada Nickel undertook.
Infusions of mine money are helpful to communities that don’t have extra dollars to build public projects themselves, Bridges says, but do little to help a town weather the busts of an economy built on resource extraction alone. It’s also little recompense for scars left on the landscape.
“I don’t think people realize the scale and size of how big this nickel mine will be and the level of impact it will have,” Bridges says. “I do think that we’re headed towards an area where we’re going to rip up the entire boreal shield.”
Bridges researches methods to improve the regulatory process and Indigenous consultation. She’s looking for ways resource developers can lessen negative impacts on Indigenous communities, while increasing benefits of these massive operations.
As it stands, she doesn’t see mining’s legacy impacts being positive for northern communities.
“I live here, and I work here,” Bridges says. She points to rampant drug use, alcoholism, crime and human trafficking in northern communities, which research has linked to extractive industries forming “boom towns” in remote areas. “I want a healthy environment for my children, and I just don’t see that emerging,” she says.
Growing up in Sudbury, Timmins and Cochrane, Ont., during renewed mining exploration activities, as well as living and working in northern Alberta near the oilsands, Bridges has spent her life witnessing the impacts of resource development up close.
“There’s a lot of entities that come in, they take from the north and give nothing back,” Bridges says. “People are really changing their entire lives to accommodate an industry that is designed to extract resources as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
Watersheds near the proposed Crawford nickel mine are expected to experience adverse environmental impacts if the project goes ahead. “Toxicity effects on aquatic life are likely” in rivers, creeks and eight lakes used by Indigenous communities, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. Photo: Leah Borts-Kuperman / The Narwhal
Advocacy groups, including Keepers of the Circle and Robichaud’s Ontario Rivers Alliance, submitted comments for the federal impact assessment of the Crawford nickel mine and raised questions about a lack of details and transparency on its possible short and long-term effects.
The public comment period closed in February 2025, and the Impact Assessment Agency followed up with a summary of key issues raised about the developer’s plan. This includes concerns about effluent releases potentially increasing levels of methylmercury, a toxic, bioaccumulative form of mercury, in downstream rivers. It also noted potential for spills: “The scenario of a rail accident resulting in the release of nickel concentrate still needs to be addressed,” the federal government’s response reads.
For Bridges, the economic opportunity presents a lot of familiar risks.
“I’m intrigued, but I’m also very worried, because there already is a lot of historic and current mining operations in the area,” she says. “This project is going to have a cumulative effect on the area, on the surrounding waterways.”
A legacy and a new look for nickel
Known historically as “devil copper,” nickel has a long, tarnished past in northern Ontario. In 1928, Falconbridge Nickel Mine opened near Sudbury, in a farming community called Happy Valley. At its peak, Happy Valley was only home to about 100 people in 23 homes that ranged from shacks to stuccoed bungalows. About half of the families were directly employed by the mine.
In the early 1970s, residents started to notice extreme air pollution from the mine; trees were dying and residents could see clouds of pollution over the valley. After years of pressure to act, the Ontario government helped the entire community abandon their homes in Happy Valley and relocate to nearby towns and cities.
Happy Valley became what a Globe and Mail reporter in 1974 called the “first pollution ghost town.” Another Globe article from the time called it “the most misnamed place in the country.”
A 1975 study on the Whitefish Lake First Nation reserve, near Happy Valley, found concentrations of nickel in most lakes in the area at abnormally high levels, harmful to aquatic species. The study also found the rain in the region to be 15 to 30 times the natural acidity of average rainwater due to the sulphur released from multiple mines in the area. Much of these problems in the Sudbury area have since been remediated and transformed in the decades following, though there is remaining mine waste that has to be actively managed.
But it’s not always the mines taking on these challenges. A 2016 report by Ontario’s Auditor General report noted that, of 10 contaminated sites with the largest provincial rehabilitation cost, four are former mines. Taxpayers — by way of the government — have been left with a bill of $968 million to clean up contamination caused by just these four mines “because mining companies have failed to do so.”
Nowadays, mines have to provide financial security covering the estimated cost of closure and land reclamation, in cash, bonds or other less tangible way of proving the company is in good standing; in theory, this mitigates the risk of a miner going bankrupt, and project remediation costs falling to the government.
“Crawford represents a new generation of mining. Unlike older operations, closure and reclamation are built into our design from day one,” Canada Nickel’s Selby told The Narwhal in an email. “Our goal is that when the mining is complete, Crawford will leave a positive environmental legacy instead of the challenges of the past.”
He acknowledged, though, that Crawford is a “sizeable project with a large footprint,” which makes it hard to “avoid impacts” on fish and wildlife habitat.
Demand for critical minerals is booming, and experts say northern Ontario mines will be crucial for Canada’s ambition to supply the global market. Photos: Jimmy Jeong / The Narwhal
Nickel is naturally occurring, but mining can create harmful levels of exposure if operations contaminate water and soil, especially making it into dust and water runoff that spreads quickly.
When it’s inhaled, or comes in contact with skin for extended periods, nickel can cause health issues in humans like heart and kidney diseases, lung fibrosis, lung and even nasal cancer, according to a peer-reviewed study from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Nickel mining can also have detrimental impacts on wildlife when not managed properly. Animals exposed to nickel-contaminated soil and water through their fur, feathers or skin have stunted growth and poor survival rates, a peer-reviewed study from Environmental Reviews shows. The same study explains that for newly hatched mallard ducklings, chronic exposure to nickel through plants they eat and water they drink leads to neurological diseases and death.
New research conducted by the University of Edinburgh with data from hundreds of international nickel mines found the footprint of nickel mining could be 400 to 500 times greater than previously reported. This is from typically unaccounted emissions released into the atmosphere when forests are cleared for mines and their natural carbon storage capabilities are lost.
“Any project of this magnitude is going to create huge environmental liabilities, and those have to be very carefully managed over, in this case, decades of operation,” Jamie Kneen, Canada co-lead of advocacy group, MiningWatch says.
Federal and provincial oversight of these mines leaves much to be desired, Kneen says.
Who is keeping Ontario mines in check?
In Ontario, mineral claims can be staked online from anywhere in the world, and First Nations are given 30 days to respond — a challenging deadline when the frequency of claims is high, as it is in much of northern Ontario. Grassy Narrows First Nation, which is still dealing with a legacy of mercury pollution from a nearby pulp mill, took the province to court over the mineral-staking system, arguing it infringed upon Indigenous Rights. The case went as high as the Supreme Court, which ruled against the nation, affirming Ontario’s Mining Act.
“Canada’s and the province’s approach to regulation … is pretty laissez-faire,” Kneen says.
Under Ontario’s current mining laws, companies aren’t required to have a provincial environmental assessment. Depending on the scale of the project, many mines, like Crawford Nickel, are required to go through a federal impact assessment and to adhere to federal regulations around effluent releases, but critics say oversight stops there.
While the impact assessment process lays out certain conditions and recommendations to limit the negative impacts of a mine, there is no formal follow-up process that reviews how those are implemented, Kneen says: “It’s a major weakness of the whole system.”
In Ontario, companies do have to report spills, or instances where their emissions go above allowable levels, but in many cases, operators only voluntarily conduct tests per provincial regulations on impacts to the land, water and air on a regular basis. According to the Auditor General, companies do not usually volunteer to do so, and if they do, the cumulative effects of multiple ongoing projects are not being assessed.
Provincial and federal governments alike are moving to speed up approvals for projects that could boost the economy. Critics say they risk running roughshod over Indigenous Rights and environmental concerns. Photo: Leah Borts-Kuperman / The Narwhal
Meanwhile, some protections that did exist in the province are being peeled away even further.
The province passed the Building More Mines Act in 2023 as part of Ontario’s push to position itself as a leader in critical minerals, which put decisions on mine closure plans in the hands of the mining minister, rather than ministry staff.
In spring 2025, the Ontario government passed Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing Our Economy Act. The controversial legislation is aimed at accelerating resource development and reducing the burden of regulations for industries including mining — similar to the federal government’s Bill C-5, seeing its priority projects move ahead.
A key piece of the new law gives the province power to create “special economic zones” that don’t have to adhere to municipal or provincial laws. Premier Doug Ford suggested the Ring of Fire will be one of these.
“We’re having the critical mineral boom now, and it’s going to devastate northern Ontario, and the province is just ready to let that happen and [is] really taking away any barriers that would lead to more responsible development,” Bridges, from Keepers of the Circle, tells The Narwhal.
She points in particular to Bill 5 repealing the Endangered Species Act, limiting protections for those most at risk. “They’re trying to get rid of any ambiguity that would lead to more positive or cautious scientific decision-making, in my opinion, and it’s really worrisome.”
Canada Nickel CEO Selby told CBC that Bill 5 is “a big step forward” for the mining industry in the province, though he tells The Narwhal the bill hasn’t changed their approach: “Our focus is on building responsibly and transparently, with community and environmental stewardship at the core.”
Deputy Chief Derek Archibald, from the nearby Taykwa Tagamou Nation, sees both sides of the coin. He is supportive of the Crawford Nickel project, with his small nation of about 700 people investing $20-million for a 8.9-per cent stake and a seat on the board of directors. But when it comes to Bill 5 and its suite of changes, he sees the provincial government trying to “bulldoze” over rights and “fast-track these projects.” It’s counterproductive, he says, as First Nations are willing to work with developers when approached properly, in his experience.
“First Nations don’t need to be bypassed; we’re ready to lead and jump in … we’re building a partnership based on consent,” Archibald tells The Narwhal.
“We look at this investment as [a way] to build economic sovereignty … too often, First Nations are always viewed as anti-development,” Archibald says. “We literally flipped the script.”
In the past, he says though the nation and its traditional territories have been deeply impacted by mines, they missed out on benefits, or were only consulted “later on in the process, when everything’s been figured out.” This time, Archibald hopes the economic returns of Crawford Nickel will actually make it to his community; building generational wealth, improving social services and expanding trades programs for youth.
“By making this investment, we have the opportunity to sit at the table,” he says.
