says that if they do, the market value of the companies themselves will provide adequate collateral. There's no need for full-cost security deposits, implied David Sands, communications director for Alberta's Ministry of International & Intergovernmental Relations, in a response to Leach's blog post. "There's operators on second mines, fourth decade," he wrote. "They haven't run away." But as Leach responded, such an attitude "doesn't cut it in terms of risk analysis for a multi-billion dollar unfunded liability." Canada's history of assuming unsecured environmental debts of transitory corporations substantiates Leach's position. Hundreds of bankruptcies and abandonments have already left Canadians with a multi-billion dollar liability managed with tens of millions of tax dollars every year. Scott Vaughan, Canada's diligent federal commissioner of environment and sustainable development, recently audited the government's management of its Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory. The numbers are staggering: of the 22,000 sites, 14,500 continue to put Canadians' environmental health at risk. These don't include the Sydney tar ponds, the Marwell tar pit in the Yukon and the Gunnar uranium mine in Saskatchewan, which have cost tens of millions of dollars to clean up. One of the more infamous examples is the Faro Mine near Whitehorse. Once the world's largest open-pit lead/zinc mine, it became Canada's single biggest environmental albatross when Anvil Range Mining Corporation went bankrupt in 1998. This inconvenient insolvency left the federal government to clean up a sprawling open-pit mining complex covering 2,500 hectares, about 3.5 per cent the size of the area disturbed by oil