Welcome back to your weekly mining news recap. At the end of every week we’ll catch you up on the mining news from CIM Magazine and elsewhere that you might have missed. Among this week’s headlines: Michelle Ash is named GMSG’s new chair, Agnico Eagle gets the go-ahead from a federal minister for Whale Tail, and Vale extends the shutdown at Coleman.

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British Columbia’s government is appealing a National Energy Board decision that allows Kinder Morgan to bypass local construction regulations while it moves forward on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. The government said in a Saturday news release that it feels “the NEB erred by too broadly defining federal jurisdiction over interprovincial pipelines.”

Barrick’s chief innovation officer Michelle Ash was named the new chair of the Global Mining Standards and Guidelines Group (GMSG), we reported on Tuesday. Ash will replace the group’s current chair, Helius Guimaraes, Rio Tinto’s general manager of data strategy, in May, and until then will serve as GMSG’s vice-chair. GMSG aims to solve common industry problems by developing global standards and guidelines, and has a membership made up of mining companies, technology and equipment providers.

Mobile devices are changing the way people work, including miners. In our technology feature for the February issue, now online, we spoke to Takor Group, BME, MST Global, Commit Works and more about their mobile apps that are modernizing mapping, monitoring and mine management.

We also reported on Tuesday that Agnico Eagle had received the green light for its Whale Tail project in Nunavut from Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett. The prospective open-pit gold mine is part of the company’s efforts to prolong the life of its Meadowbank facility, and is expected to begin operations in the third quarter of 2019. Whale Tail will be connected to Meadowbank by a 65-kilometre road.

Speaking of the federal government, on Wednesday we reported it had named California-based Parsons the construction manager of the Giant mine remediation project. Parsons will provide up to $32 million in care and maintenance on the site for two years, and then following that will oversee the remediation plan’s implementation at a cost that has not yet been determined. The company was also the contractor for the removal of Giant’s arsenic-contaminated roaster complex, which was completed in 2014.

Vale has extended the shutdown at its Coleman mine again, the company told us in an email on Friday. The current plan is to recall all employees in mid-March and ramp back up to production then, Angie Robson, Vale’s manager of corporate and aboriginal affairs, said. The mine has been closed since November, when it was unexpectedly shut so Vale could make important mineshaft repairs.

This week we also posted the latest instalment in our year-long We Are Mining series. New Gold’s senior advisor of Indigenous relations, Martha Manuel, spoke with us about how the company’s “joint implementation committees” help maintain Indigenous workforce at New Afton at 23 per cent, the barriers to an inclusive industry, and the tightrope she walks between her cultural beliefs and the industry she works in.