Brokenhead Ojibway Nation holds referendum on Sio Silica partnership
Sand mining company plans to submit new environmental licence application within week, president says
Brokenhead Ojibway Nation is holding a referendum on a prospective partnership with Alberta mining company Sio Silica, which wants to drill thousands of wells in southeastern Manitoba to extract silica sand.
Brokenhead announced Thursday it will hold an online referendum on the prospective partnership from Aug. 1 to Aug. 8 as well as an in-person vote at Private Tom Chief Memorial Hall at the community northeast of Winnipeg on Aug. 8.
The partnership calls for Brokenhead to receive five per cent of the profits from Sio Silica's mining operations with Brokenhead, a share estimated at $20 million in annual revenue for the First Nation once the project reaches full capacity, according to a notice sent to band members from Brokenhead's chief and council.
The partnership may also result in jobs and training opportunities for Brokenhead members, company president Carla Devlin said Thursday.
A "yes" vote in the referendum would result in Brokenhead and Sio Silica working out a final agreement and setting up a joint oversight committee to consider the environmental impacts of Sio Silica's operations, according to the notice.
A "no" vote would result in a rejection of the profit-sharing offer, the notice states.
"However, should the Province of Manitoba approve the project, BON [Brokenhead Ojibway Nation] will still be tasked with negotiating an impact benefit agreement, though the terms — particularly the profit sharing — may differ from the final offer," the notice reads.
Brokenhead Chief Gordon Bluesky said Thursday in a statement that any proposal to extract resources from Brokenhead's territory has to come before the band's membership.
The First Nation has 2,307 members living on and off reserve.
"Historically, we have not benefited from any resource project or land use in our area, only impacted. This must end and our community and our members must be part of the decision-making process," Bluesky said.
While none of the wells Sio Silica proposes to drill are located on Brokenhead reserve land, the Ojibway community is the closest First Nation to the land where Sio Silica owns mineral rights, Devlin has said.
New licence application to come
Devlin said her company plans to submit a new environmental licence application to the province within one week.
The application, she said, is ready to be submitted. "We were respectfully waiting for [Brokenhead] leadership to hold their referendum," she said.
A spokesperson for Manitoba's NDP government declined to comment Thursday.
In 2024, the NDP government rejected an earlier Sio Silica application to extract up to 33 million tonnes of high-grade silica from below the surface of southeastern Manitoba over 24 years.
The province rejected the initial environmental licence application over concerns about the potential effects on water quality and the geological stability of the aquifer containing crystalline quartz, which can be used to produce solar panels, batteries and semiconductors.
The company proposed to drill up to 7,200 wells to the east and southeast of Winnipeg to extract the sought-after substance from about 50 metres below the surface.
The Clean Environment Commission, an arm's-length provincial body, raised concerns about the proposal in a 2023 report. The Commission advised the government only to approve it after applying conditions to the proposal and to insist it proceed in stages, with only a few mines drilled at first.
"As a general principle, full-scale production should only proceed if and when the body of scientific and engineering evidence confirms that the risks are adequately understood and manageable," the commission advised in its report.
Sio Silica CEO Feisal Somji told Brokenhead members in Winnipeg in early July his company has revised its proposal to drill more gradually, with 25 wells planned for its first year of operation followed by 75 wells the next year.
Somji also suggested the company erred in its earlier public relations efforts by describing its sand extraction process as utilizing new technology.
"One of the mistakes that we made in the past is we talked about it being a patent pending process and that was really just an element of advantage that we could have on our competitors," he said at the July meeting.
Sio Silica's president Devlin also serves as the mayor of East St. Paul, where Brokenhead owns 194 hectares of land, including a three-hectare reserve established two decades ago and another 25-hectare parcel that will become a new Brokenhead reserve.
The mining company is listed as a platinum sponsor of Brokenhead's Treaty Days, an annual community celebration which runs this year from Aug. 5 to 10.
Bluesky did not respond to a request to comment about Sio Silica's sponsorship coinciding with the Sio Silica partnership referendum.
Devlin said Sio Silica sponsored Treaty Days in 2024 and intends to do so again in 2026. She said the company will not make any effort to sway opinion in the community in the coming 10 days.
"We will not be lobbying in the time from when the vote opens [Friday] to the vote closes," Devlin said.
Sio Silica has also purchased airtime on Winnipeg radio stations, social media ads and advertisements at Richardson International Airport, all aimed at a general audience of Manitobans.
"This is the largest-known deposit of high purity quartz in the world and the demand for it is growing," Devlin said. "This demand is real. The buyers are lined up and we're ready to go and we want to put Manitobans to work."
Mining opponent decries short notice
Taylor Galvin, a Brokenhead member who lives on reserve and opposes the Sio Silica partnership, said Friday that the short notice for the referendum does not allow people in her community to inform themselves about the vote.
"Yesterday we got notified about the referendum, and the vote started today, so we got less than 24 hours," she said in an interview Friday from Sayisi Dene First Nation in northern Manitoba.
Galvin also called the vote biased because a Sio Silica promotional pamphlet was included in a package of referendum information sent to Brokenhead members.
She is also upset the referendum is taking place during Treaty Days.
"It's the one time of the year where our community is supposed to be coming together to celebrate," Galvin said. "I feel that it's a tactic, knowing that our community is not going to be focused on a vote, but rather on the festivities that are planned for the entire week."
Galvin said she has written to Brokenhead's chief and council, requesting a meeting and an extension to the referendum. She also started a petition to demand that extension.
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