Nine years ago, when Al Kapty took on the job of chairing the Yukon Placer Implementation Review Committee, he was not optimistic. However, six months later the first set of regulations designed specifically for placer mining in the Yukon was in place.

"I would not have guessed we could have done that from the tenor of the first meeting," says Kapty. "I had no magic. There was nothing I put in their coffee. I think they decided, hey, we can't fight any longer. We'd better find the solution."

By October 1987, when the committee was formed, commissions and inquiries had been trying for a decade, without success, to resolve the conflict between placer mining and environmental interests.

The conflict developed in the 1970s, Kapty says, when a worldwide sense of concern about the environment focused public attention on the environmental effects of resource development. The movement coincided with a rise in the price of gold that led to a boom in placer mining in the Yukon.

By that time, placer mining had been going on in the territory for the better part of a century with very little regulation.

"There was a regulation about how to stake claims, but there was no regulation as to how you mine, how you protect fish and how you protect the water quality," says Kapty.

Governments tried to control the effects of placer mining through existing legislation, but the existing law was in two separate Acts, administered by two separate federal departments.

"From the miners' perspective, they faced a real jeopardy," Kapty explains. They were being inspected by two sets of officials, and an authorization issued by one department was no guarantee that they were in compliance with the law administered by the other department.

In October 1987, Yukon Placer Implementation Review Committee was given the job of coming up with a set of regulations that satisfied both acts, preferably in time for the next mining season. Al Kapty was the independent chair.

The four committee members, three from government and one from the placer industry, represented interests that had been in conflict for years, Kapty says, but this time there was a clear will to solve the problem.

"Once the ball got going, it was wonderful sitting around the table, drawing up this document," he says, holding up a copy of the April 1988 Yukon Fisheries Protection Authorization, the first set of regulations governing the Yukon placer industry.

Although the committee had succeeded in its first job, it had more work to do. A permanent and comprehensive system was required that would protect fish-bearing streams in the Yukon without shutting down the economically-important placer industry.

That job was completed in 1993 with the release of the Yukon Placer Authorization. Regulations under the YPA, phased in over a three-year period, were in full effect for the first time during the 1996 mining season.

The breakthrough that led to the YPA, says Kapty, was the concept of management by drainage basin. Besides controlling the effects of individual mines on individual streams, the regulations are designed to protect the network of streams and rivers that fish rely on.

"We're talking about these little salmon or freshwater fish looking for grounds to feed," says Kapty. "Only a certain number of tributaries of this basin would have mining allowed on them. Others would be kept clear so that the fish in that system still have excellent habitat."

He says the drainage basin approach was the key to a solution that satisfies all parties, including the Yukon Council of First Nations and the Yukon Conservation Society, added to the committee in 1993.

"I'd say that all around it's a win-win situation. Six people at the table and six winners," says Kapty. "But it took nine years. This is not something that happened overnight."

For more information about placer mining regulation in the Yukon, contact the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Whitehorse. For an overview of the industry's history and relationship to the environment, see the Yukon State of the Environment Report 1995, available from Environment Canada in Whitehorse.