Harper Government: No Longer In Service

The Giant Gold Mine just outside Yellowknife is literally a nightmare without end, once the site of a violent strike that left nine people dead the mine has since been abandoned by it's owners leaving behind a toxic mess for the Canadian public to clean up. Once again we see the internalisation of profits and the externalisation of costs, I much prefer Mulcair's polluter pay model thank you.

Left behind when the mine was abandoned are 15 underground chambers containing  237,000 tons of arsenic trioxide dust, a water soluble compound easily absorbed by the digestive system plus 8 open pits, 4 tailing ponds, 325,000 m³ (11,500,000 cu ft) of contaminated soils, and some 100 buildings that are highly contaminated with arsenic and fibrous asbestos.

The Giant Mine Remediation Project a 400 million dollar taxpayer funded clean up project has been created to attempt to deal with the toxic mess left behind. It's main goal is to deal with all that arsenic trioxide. Get this though their plan to deal with the arsenic trioxide is to "freeze it for all time" I kid you not, yeah that outta ^ not work. Recently while performing a test run on one of the chambers approximately  385 kilograms of halocarbon,  the refrigerant to be used in the freezing for all time process leaked into the environment.

Now compared to the vast scale of the environmental disaster that is the Giant mine this seems insignificant however it is what happened when workers tried to report this leak that caught my eye. Following procedure the workers called Environment Canada's spill hotline only to receive a recorded message informing them that the number is no longer in service.

Now that sums up the Harper government perfectly in my books, no longer in service.