Unearthing opportunity and angst

Drive east from Winnipeg’s Transcona neighbourhood, past the industrial tract, the barley mill and the Perimeter Highway. Follow the two-lane highway through open field after open field. You’ll pass through Dugald, Anola and Vivian, quiet farming towns of just a few thousand total residents. A handful of houses, cattle farms, grain elevators and dilapidated barns punctuate the otherwise uniform landscape.

For four generations, the Mustard family has called this region home. But with a new neighbour — mining company Sio Silica — threatening their once-peaceful way of life, Josh and Georgina Mustard, along with their eight kids, two Scandinavian shepherds and one black cat, have begun to ask themselves impossible questions: “Why should we stay here? And where would we go?”

The hamlet of Vivian in southeastern Manitoba has become ground zero in the fervent debate over the Prairie province’s place in a green economy. On one side: a Calgary-based junior mining company hoping to tap the region’s rare, pure silica sand resource — a key raw material for an increasingly green future, buried in an underground aquifer. On the other: an organized group of Manitobans who fear their drinking water — and their way of life — hang in the balance.

To read more of this story first reported by the Winnipeg Free Press, click here.

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