Globally, there are a multitude of different answers (and even more non-answers) to the economic puzzle of how to account for and financially balance (aka pay for) negative environmental externalities. In Canada, the widely accepted answer to this issue is the polluter-pays principle, a core tenet so simple that a kindergartener could understand it, and indeed, could have written it.  Canada’s Globe and Mail explains it like this: “A central tenet of industrial development is the polluter-pays principle: Those who profit must pay for the mess generated by pulling resources from the ground or turning raw materials into goods. If you want to own the upside, you’ve got to own the downside.”

“The last thing Canadians should want are privatized profits, and socialized liabilities,” the Globe and Mail article asserts. Even in Canada, however, where the polluter pays principle is widely accepted and adopted, there were and are still many companies and projects that have managed to skirt the issue when it actually comes to payment. “There are many examples,” reports the Globe and Mail. “Take the Giant mine, near Yellowknife. It was one of Canada’s oldest gold mines, but after trading through various corporate hands numerous times, the last owner went bust and left behind 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide. Giant is part of a $2.2-billion taxpayer-funded cleanup of eight abandoned northern mines that will take 15 years.” CLICK for complete article