Federal Conservative leader questions Ottawa’s Sisson Mine process
CBC
Federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says New Brunswickers shouldn’t get their hopes up about progress on the Sisson Mine.
The proposed tungsten and molybdenum mine north of Fredericton, stalled for more than a decade, was one of the projects the Carney government sent to its Major Projects Office last week.
“Don't expect much,” Poilievre warned during a CBC News interview after a tour of Atlantic Modern Homes Ltd., a Fredericton homebuilder.
“The Liberals are saying the progress they've made is that they're taking the idea, putting it on a piece of paper and sending it to a new office for even more consideration.
“It's time for the federal government to do one thing: get out of the way, grant the permit and let the project go forward.”
The Conservative leader stopped short of predicting the mine would not happen.
“We’ll see,” he said, pointing out that Dominic LeBlanc, a federal cabinet minister and a New Brunswick MP, predicted in 2017 — when the mine won approval through a federal environmental impact assessment — that construction would start the following year.
LeBlanc did indeed say in June 2017 that “we’re confident that the construction will begin next spring.”
“We're once again seeing promises of things that might one day happen, promises that they've made for almost a decade and that they keep breaking,” Poilievre said Thursday.
In a statement, a spokesperson for LeBlanc said the Major Projects Office will help speed projects like the Sisson Mine to fruition.
Unions, private-sector executives and others recognize the office’s “transformational potential,” the statement said. “It’s unfortunate that the Conservative Party is too focused on its own internal turmoil and not able to put forward a positive vision for this country.”
That’s a reference to the defection of one of Poilievre’s MPs to the Liberals and the decision by another to leave federal politics in the new year.
The Sisson Mine already had a provincial environmental impact approval at the time of LeBlanc’s bullish comments in 2017.
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