Rally in Cape Breton for idled Donkin coal mine attracts about 150 people
CBC
More than 150 people attended a rally Tuesday in Glace Bay, N.S., in support of the idled underground coal mine in Donkin.
Nova Scotia's Department of Labour issued a stop-work order at the mine in July after two roof falls in one week.
Last week, after a third-party review of the mine operator's safety plans, provincial officials said the mine can reopen if the owner updates its hazard assessment and increases monitoring of roof movements.
Mine owner Kameron Coal has not said whether it intends to comply with the conditions, but those at the rally called on the provincial government — particularly Premier Tim Houston and area PC MLAs John White and Brian Comer — to get the miners back to work quickly.
"Hopefully, with everybody that turned out and [if] we get some of our local politicians involved with this, they will step forward and help us out," said AJ Hall, a labourer who worked underground in the Donkin mine until he was laid off this summer.
Hall said mine owner Kameron Coal provides good paying jobs and the operation is safe.
About 130 people worked full time at the site.
"Unfortunately, the government has the noose around the neck of the company and they're the ones that have got to let it go," he said.
Hall's father was one of 12 men killed following an underground explosion in 1979 in Glace Bay's Number 26 colliery.
Hall said if his father were still alive, he'd tell him to get back to work.
He said the conditions miners face today are not what they were when his father worked in the pit.
"They're definitely much more safer I would imagine than when he was underground," Hall said.
"I was only six. I don't know a whole lot of the stories of how he done his job, but from pictures and everything ... it is much more safer now than it ever was."
Several councillors and the mayor of Cape Breton Regional Municipality spoke at the rally, all of them urging the province to speed up the mine's return to work.
The Rachel Notley government's consumer carbon tax wound up becoming a weapon the UCP wielded to drum the Alberta NDP out of office. But that levy-and-repayment program, and the wide-ranging "climate leadership plan" around it, also stood as the NDP's boldest, provincial-reputation-altering move in their single-term tenure.