Qualla: Adams Mine

Adams Mine: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jack Layton pressed play. The Toronto city councillor stood before his colleagues in the council chamber and let Homer Simpson make the argument for him. In the Simpsons episode "Trash of the Titans," the cartoon buffoon becomes sanitation commissioner and solves his garbage crisis by stuffing trash into a mine. The parallels were unmistakable. The year was 2000, and Toronto was seriously considering doing exactly that -- shipping millions of tonnes of municipal waste to an exhausted iron ore mine near Kirkland Lake, Ontario, some 600 kilometers to the north. The episode got laughs. The proposal did not die so easily.

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Adams Mine: Iron in the Shield

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Adams Mine began not as a political flashpoint but as a straightforward industrial operation on the Canadian Shield. Iron ore was first discovered at the site in 1906, but nobody cared much -- the Porcupine and Kirkland Lake gold rushes had drawn all the attention and investm...

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Adams Mine: Toronto's Garbage Problem Heads North

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Even before the last ore car rolled out, waste management planners in Metropolitan Toronto had their eyes on the abandoned pits. The city's Keele Valley Landfill in Vaughan was filling fast, and Toronto needed a new solution. The Adams Mine, with its massive excavated voids, look...

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Adams Mine: A Proposal That Would Not Stay Buried

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Adams Mine landfill fight played out like a political thriller spanning more than a decade. In 1995, Metro Toronto launched a formal environmental assessment, and the project passed every test. But in December 1996, councillor Jack Layton presented cumulative cost figures -- ...

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Adams Mine: The Final Blast

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Notre Development kept pushing through 2003, but the political ground was shifting. When Dalton McGuinty's Ontario Liberals won the provincial election, the new government moved decisively. On April 5, 2004, the province introduced legislation revoking every certificate and permi...

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