Lowering selenium standards is denying science
By Lethbridge Herald on August 14, 2025.
Lorne Fitch
For the Herald
A friend of mine had failing grades in university. He said it wasn’t that his grades were poor, it was the impossibly high standards he was expected to meet. It would seem coal mining companies feel similarly aggrieved over water quality standards for selenium released by ripping mountains apart.
Selenium is one of those elements liberated when overburden is blasted and discarded into valleys. A little selenium is necessary to life but the tipping point to being a nasty, toxic pollutant is low. Exposure in aquatic biota at or near the bottom of the food chain, even at very low concentrations, has serious repercussions, especially in fish.
Current guidelines for selenium, based on the science of ecotoxicity, include a “warning” level at 1.0 microgram/liter (µg/l) that is supposed to trigger additional monitoring, and a biological limit at 2.0 µg/l that is required to protect aquatic life. However, the sole use of a water column guideline does not enable prediction of bioaccumulation or, ultimately toxicity. Simply assuming a single concentration offers a blanket of protection is deemed unwise by experts.
Imperfect as these guidelines might be, nowhere downstream of existing and legacy coal mines of BC and Alberta have selenium concentrations ever met the 2.0 µg/l standard. Instead they are consistently many times higher, including after wastewater treatment by coal companies to remove selenium.
The impacts of higher concentrations of selenium ripple through watersheds and through food chains. Trout impacted in the Elk River watershed in BC, the watersheds of the Crowsnest and McLeod rivers in Alberta provide mute testimony to the truth about coal mining and the consistent government and corporate inability or unwillingness to protect water quality and aquatic ecosystems.
The inability of industry to meet the current selenium guidelines has resulted in an intense lobbying effort to allow much higher concentrations than are safe to protect downstream water quality. Environment and Climate Change Canada has responded to industry with proposed coal mining effluent regulations. New end-of-pipe water quality standards for selenium of a maximum monthly mean of 10 µg/l and a maximum concentration of 20 µg/l for water samples are being actively considered by the federal government.
Independent experts have panned these new “standards,” saying they are licenses to pollute and are not about protecting aquatic life. Dr Bill Donahue, an environmental researcher and noted water quality expert, points out the proposed federal government changes have no basis or support in science and are “a capitulation to the coal industry.”
The concentrations are ones industry knows it can meet through passive technologies and a focus on end-of-pipe concentrations (but not at mine scales) that will save them money. The industry knows full well if they use active treatment to achieve lower concentrations it is more costly.
Industry and regulators also know that a regulatory focus on downstream environmental impacts is the worst-case scenario for coal mining —after all, these proposed regulations are a carve-out from existing legal restrictions on the release of substances into aquatic ecosystems that have deleterious environmental effects.
Make no mistake, the regulatory changes proposed are entirely one-sided, and involve sacrificing environmental protection to promote short-term economic development. This is the classical “tail wagging the dog.”
We are constantly besieged by industry, telling us it is too expensive to protect the environment. Industry tells government that high standards hamper economic growth through unnecessary rules and regulations, with onerous monitoring, mitigation, and occasional legal charges. For government, with a mandate for protection of the public good, to acquiesce to the demand for less protective water quality standards is unconscionable and a violation of public trust.
This is especially clear when the financial benefits of coal mining in Alberta are very limited, even illusionary compared to the environmental costs. In BC the environmental costs are ignored in favour of coal mining. There, the industry has written the rules for selenium discharge which are orders of magnitude higher than the accepted biological limits. These have been accepted without change by the BC government. Industry can’t capture enough selenium to meet meaningful standards but it has captured the provincial government.
Of course, selenium is but one of the many harmful compounds in coal mine tailings and runoff, which is loaded with heavy metals, nitrogen, and other elements that can have significant downstream effects, including on uses of water for things like agriculture.
If coal companies cannot make the grade for the protection of aquatic life (and ultimately downstream human uses) it is not incumbent or wise for the federal government to lower the standards. From a public perspective, an economic argument for reducing water quality standards for selenium does not make sense with the legacy of polluted water bodies, fish and wildlife losses, and the risk to human uses of water.
Regulators’ and governments’ lowering of standards for coal mining-generated selenium requires ignoring science, the ultimate arbiter of the validity of such decisions. Our federal laws preventing the release of deleterious substances into water bodies were designed to prevent harm to fisheries and are based on science. What we see now is a corruption of that process and aim, solely to enable coal mining and satisfy its shareholders.
We should not have to write an obituary on the use of science to protect us from corporate greed and government breach of trust.
Lorne Fitch is a professional biologist, a retired provincial Fish and Wildlife biologist, and a past adjunct professor with the University of Calgary. He is the author of Streams of Consequence, Travels Up the Creek, and Conservation Confidential.
19-18
Raising pollution levels to meet industry profit expectations makes good scientific sense.
As the sage wisely said: “what has the future ever done for us?!”
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