Just outside this northern capital, on a small hill within eyeshot of its skyline, sit 365 sea cans sealed off behind a high wire fence, the surrounding roads regularly watered to settle dust.
The cans contain remains of an old roaster building from the notorious Giant Mine, its every beam and timber steeped in poison from more than a half-century of separating gold from the arsenic that held it.
“It was one of the most contaminated buildings in Canada,” said Natalie Plato, deputy director of the Giant Mine Remediation Project.
She’s in charge of spending some $1 billion of taxpayers’ money on one of the largest cleanups the country has ever undertaken. It includes a plan to freeze 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide in underground chambers where they now sit. That toxic Popsicle just off the shores of Great Slave Lake will sit there forever—or until someone has a better idea….