Connectivity at Remote Canadian Mine Sites

One federal Act, written for one river valley, carries two public registers and cannot agree with itself about where a person has to be standing to read one.

Section 68 of the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act requires a land and water board to keep its register at its main office, in whatever form the regulations prescribe, open to inspection by any person during the board's normal business hours, on payment of a prescribed fee. Every term in that sentence describes a counter. Section 142.1 sets up the register the Review Board keeps, repeats those terms nearly word for word, and then adds one subsection the earlier provision has no equivalent of: that register must also be made accessible to the public over the Internet.

Same statute, same ground, two answers to the question of how far somebody has to travel to see a file about a project near them.

The divergence is not a fossil left over from different decades of drafting either, which is the first thing anybody would guess. Read the citation lines printed under both provisions and one amending chapter appears in both: it amended the older section and it enacted the newer one. The same exercise touched the counter register and built the Internet register, and only one of the two came out of it with a network in the text.

Across the three statutes, though, age does predict the medium

Inside that one Act the split is not explained by age. Across the three federal regimes that reach the northern jurisdictions it is, and the Mackenzie Valley Act is the oldest of them, which is why it holds the counter register that started this.

The Yukon assessment Act, middle of the three by age and named in full in the list at the foot of this page, answers the access question with geography and with print. The federal minister names a community in each assessment district as the site of a designated office, so the assessment system is built as a set of places a person can walk into. Where the Board alters the boundary between districts, section 21 obliges it to publish notice in the Canada Gazette, in a periodical it considers to have a large circulation in the territory, and, where the affected districts touch Tetlit Gwich'in territory, in a periodical distributed in the Gwich'in Settlement Area. Reports are to be made available to the public, and the Act does not say by what means. It never once names a network.

The Impact Assessment Act, the newest of the three by a wide margin, answers it the opposite way. Section 104 constitutes the Canadian Impact Assessment Registry as an Internet site and a set of project files, and section 105 requires the Agency to establish and maintain that site and to keep specified material posted on it, including any public notice by which the Agency asks the public to take part in an assessment. The invitation to participate is a posting. There is a fallback, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is the whole of what the Act guarantees to a reader who cannot load the site: subsection 104(3) requires the Agency to ensure that a copy of a record in the Registry is provided in a timely manner on request. Somebody who cannot reach the site has to already know a record exists in order to ask for it.

Two smaller pieces of the same drafting are worth reading together. Several of the paragraphs in section 105 offer the Agency a choice between posting a document and posting a summary of it with an indication of how a copy may be obtained. That is a structure fitted to a reader who can fetch a light page and not a heavy one, whether or not anybody described it that way at the time. And the Agency decides, under the same section, when material may come off the site. What persists is the project file, which section 106 requires to contain everything that was posted.

The permitting page works through the periods and deadlines that newest Act runs on, several of which start from a posting event. This article makes a narrower point about the same provisions: the posting is not only where the clock starts, it is the medium of notice.

The boards went further than their statutes made them

Both territorial boards now run online registries, and neither statute compelled that.

The Yukon board describes its Online Registry as the official public record for all projects under assessment, and lists project proposals, assessment documents, public comment opportunities and status among what it holds. The Act it operates under obliges it to make things available to the public and leaves the medium to the Board's own rules. The Board's answer was a website.

The Mackenzie Valley board fronts its site with a public registry, an online review system, file uploads and an application route, none of which section 68 asks for. Section 68 asks for a counter, business hours and a fee.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable and it does not require a single figure to state. Participation in these regimes has migrated onto a network in exactly the three jurisdictions where a network is least safely assumed, and the statutory floor underneath that migration is an office in a named community, a copy on request, and a periodical.

What was observed here, and which layer it was observed at

This build asked three territorial governments for their own mining statutes and their own department pages. All three attempts failed, and the three failures were not the same failure.

Something answered on the Yukon side. What it answered was a refusal, and it answered the same way to a plain request, to a request carrying a full desktop browser header set, to one forced onto an older protocol version, and to a second, independent fetch tool aimed at the same addresses. A refusal is a decision. The connection worked; the policy on the far end declined it.

Nothing answered on the Northwest Territories side. The justice host is listed in the name service and has numeric addresses to show for it, and connections to those addresses aged out with nothing coming back. Two further machines on the same side, one serving the territory's general pages and one serving its legislature, behaved no better. No adjustment at the near end repairs that, because the near end is not the part that failed. It may be an outage. Retried on another day it may simply work.

Nunavut answered and sent back a puzzle instead of a page: a check that a person clears in a second and a script cannot clear at all. Those accounts are set out in full on the jurisdiction records for Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, each written from the perspective of the field it left empty.

Here is the part that matters, and it is the reason the observation is worth anything. Not one of those three is a measurement of a link. A refusal is policy applied to a class of requester. An expired connection is a transport fault that an outage explains as well as a wall does. A challenge page is an admission test. All three were seen from one place, through one set of tools, on a single day, and the strongest form the finding will carry is this: on that day, from there, the primary documents of two territories could not be fetched by machine. What a working mine can move off its own site is a different question and nothing above answers it.

A status code is not a delivery

One more failure mode belongs here, because it corrupts any attempt to measure the first three. The filing repository that public companies in this country report into replies to a script with the code that means success, then puts a bot check where the filing should be. A tool that decides on the code alone, without opening what arrived, will log a retrieval it never got and keep the challenge as though it were the document. The lithium page is where that pairing gets taken apart.

Nothing above is a coverage claim, and that is not modesty

No service, no bearer, no latency, no throughput and no coverage claim appears in this article, because no document behind the front page reports one. The technology section says the same thing about itself and gives its reasons.

The reason for the silence is worth stating rather than leaving to be read as caution. Almost everything published about connectivity at remote industrial sites is published by a party that would like to sell some, and a coverage claim from such a party is an assertion with a marketing department behind it rather than a measurement with a method behind it. A figure with no stated method of measurement, no stated date and no stated location is an adjective wearing a number's clothes. Reproducing one here would buy the appearance of substance at the cost of the only thing this desk has.

Four documents, and what each would close

The regulations that prescribe the form of a section 68 register. Those would say whether the office register the Act describes is required to be electronic at all, which decides whether the split inside that one statute is a drafting accident or a deliberate difference between two kinds of board.

Whatever the Agency has determined about the form of its Internet site and about when material comes off it. Retention policy is what separates a registry from a noticeboard, and no cached document states this one.

A second attempt at the unreachable hosts, from a different network on a different date. One client on one day is an observation. Two networks on two dates is the beginning of a pattern, and the difference between those two is the difference between a complaint and a finding.

And a service description for a named operation: what the site actually has, who measured it, when, and by what method. That is the document that would let this section publish a sentence about connectivity rather than a sentence about the record of it.

Until one of those exists in the cache, the useful thing to notice is the asymmetry itself. The regime that governs the largest projects in the country is the regime that assumes a working connection, and the ground it governs includes the places where that assumption is hardest to make. A posting begins a process whether or not the people nearest the project can load it.