Diamonds in the rough

There’s more to the Northwest Territories’ Gahcho Kué diamond mine than precious gems

- MICHELA ROSANO

FLY 280 KILOMETRES NORTHEAST of Yellowknife, and the small lakes and stunted spruce of the taiga give way to a 1,292-hectare gravel field. In two open pits that step more than 20 storeys into the Earth like dusty coliseums, ancient bedrock is blasted and loaded onto trucks bound for a clump of nearby buildings. There the ore is crushed, sorted and processed to extract more than six million carats of Canadian diamonds each year.

The Gahcho Kué diamond mine, owned by De Beers and Mountain Province Diamonds Inc., began production in 2017 and is the newest of three operating diamond mines in the Northwest Territories. Since the first diamond mine in Canada opened just 22 years ago, the country (and the Northwest Territories, in particular) has been prolific — Canada is now the third-largest diamond producer by value and the second-largest by carat in the world. And while Gahcho Kué made headlines for a 95-carat, cherry-sized stone pulled from its deposits in 2018, there’s far more than just diamonds there.