From: on behalf of Panel Registry Subject: FW: TNG registration of ...

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Because grizzly bear populations are highly sensitive to human-caused mortality, habitat losses
and displacement critical threshold are reached that should not be exceeded if the population it to
be expected to survive or recover over the long term. As this has already happened in the
provincial “extirpated” grizzly bear zone over much of the Cariboo-Chilcotin plateau just 30 km
to the north of the proposed mine is a good indication that the surviving 100 or so grizzlies are
highly vulnerable to the same extinction process that has been expanding in this dryland
ecosystem for the past 40 or 50 years. The threatened status of the West Chilcotin grizzly
population, meaning they are already down to half of their original estimated numbers combined
with increasing encroachment of habitat fragmentation from logging and now mining into their
last wilderness enclaves suggests that these grizzly bears are already “on the edge” and at the
“extinction threshold” from which, if pressed further, they will continue to decline and go extinct.
Certainly the much lower numbers in similar habitats in the Lillooet area to the south of the
Taseko supports this.
It is my conclusion that the impacts of the proposed project, serious in their own right, will be
additive to the already existing layer of cumulative adverse effects to grizzly population and its
habitat and, because most of the negative effects cannot be mitigated, will push the grizzly
population over the extinction threshold. Once the mine is developed, impacts such as road
mortalities will not be reversible or adequately mitigated.
G. EFFECTS OF MINE DEVELOPMENT ON ECOLOGICAL INTEGRITY OF
ADJACENT PROTECTION AREAS AND CONSERVATION IMPLICATIONS
[To be done completed. April 16]