TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – The Cree First Nation on Thursday vowed to fight Quebec-focused uranium explorer Strateco Resources’ renewed effort to gain permission to proceed with the underground exploration phase at its flagship Matoush project, in the Otish mountains.

This comes as the company started new legal proceedings against Quebec Environment Minister Yves-François Blanchet on Thursday, seeking to nullify the Minister's recent refusal to issue an authorisation for the Matoush advanced uranium exploration project. The new proceedings also requested that the court force the Minister to grant an authorisation for the project.

Cree grand chief Dr Matthew Coon Come in a statement said that the Cree Nation would continue to take all necessary steps to protect its health and environment, and to ensure that its treaty rights were fully respected. “We will seek to participate fully in Strateco's latest proceedings,” he affirmed.

Strateco charged that the motion to invalidate the decision set out many facts that demonstrated the illegality of the [Minister’s] decision, as well as the excess of jurisdiction on the part of the Minister. “Strateco also exposes the various ways in which the Minister has violated the procedural safeguards that Strateco should have been able to rely on throughout the authorisation process,” it said.

The truculent company alleged that its treatment throughout the licensing process showed that the Minister no longer had the impartiality required to assess Strateco’s application for authorisation on the basis of its merits.

The certificate of authorisation sought by Strateco was the only approval still required to begin the advanced exploration phase of the Matoush project. All the other permits had already been obtained from the other agencies involved in the process, and the Quebec government itself had delivered more than 20 certificates and authorisations of various types allowing the project to be realised.

Strateco said that owing to its high uranium content, the Matoush project had “an extremely rare potential”. Quebec-based Strateco vowed to continue to vigorously defend the interests of its shareholders, who had invested more than $123-million in the project.

"The Cree Nation's position is clear: uranium mining and uranium waste are not welcome in Eeyou Istchee. We are not prepared to assume the grave risks that uranium mining presents, for hundreds of future generations," Mistissini First Nation chief Richard Shecapio said.

Located near the Cree community of Mistissini on Cree family hunting lands, the Matoush project is the most advanced uranium project to date in the Cree territory of Eeyou Istchee and in Quebec.

In August 2012, the Cree Nation declared a permanent moratorium on all uranium activities in its traditional territory of Eeyou Istchee. In March, the Quebec government declared a temporary moratorium on uranium mining throughout the province, while it held province-wide public hearings regarding the uranium sector.

"The social acceptability of development projects in Eeyou Istchee is a fundamental aspect of the successful nation-to-nation relationship between the Cree Nation and Quebec. The Minister's decision regarding the Matoush project recognises and reflects this important principle. We are confident that the Minister's decision will withstand Strateco's legal challenge,” Coon Come said.

Deloitte’s Americas mining leader, Glenn Ives, on Wednesday told Mining Weekly Online that in Canada, the US and Mexico, ‘Nimbyism’ (an acronym for “not in my backyard”) had become a significant constraint to developing mines.

Ives said that in Canada and Mexico, aboriginal groups had increasingly been causing a stir around issues relating to land ownership – and some First Nations often had ill-advised concepts of their ‘rights’ to land.

Deloitte’s report, ‘Tracking the trends 2014’, uncovered the pressing trends facing the mining industry in the year ahead and offered strategies that companies could employ to adapt to changing industry dynamics.

Sixth on its list of the top ten trends was the fact that local community demands were ramping up, increasingly constraining the pace at which new mines were being built and potentially adding to supply/demand imbalances in the future.