A B.C.-based mining company is hoping the third time is the charm for developing a major copper mine in the Cariboo.

Taseko Mines will begin test drilling on Tuesday at the New Prosperity site west of Williams Lake – an undeveloped copper and gold deposit.

Speaking on NL Newsday, vice president of corporate affairs Brian Battison says the company is spending $15 million to do the exploration.

“This is a big and important deposit for British Columbia and for Canada. It’s the largest undeveloped gold-copper deposit in the country, it’s easily in the top 15 in the world. So there’s a lot of economic horsepower wrapped up in this economic deposit,” Battison says.

“Certainly we’re determined, if nothing else… It’s a billion-and-a-half dollars worth of investment. It would be of a similar size to our Gibraltar Mine, which we operate in McLeese Lake just 125 kilometres away from where this New Prosperity deposit is. At Gibraltar, we spend about a million dollars a day, we employ 700 people. We enjoy a great deal of public support for the work that we do, and in fact there’s a lot of public support for New Prosperity. And in fact there’s a need for it at this time given what’s going on in the forest industry. People are really concerned about their work, and where work is going to be found.”

A permit for Taseko to build the mine was approved in 2010 by the province, but the Conservative federal government twice rejected it after that, based on concerns from First Nations.

Chief of the Yunesit’in Nation Russell Myers-Ross there is “no chance” Taseko can build the mine. He says concerns in the first two go-arounds were mainly the mine’s impacts on fish and grizzly habitat.

He says the mine could also infringe on First Nations land title rights.

“I’m really not sure what type of environmental assessment they would have to move through for that, but for us they’ve presented the best two proposals that they could offer and they’ve failed at both of them. So I would find it hard for government to put more public money into something that can’t be built,” Myers-Ross says.

Taseko says the copper and gold deposit is on Crown land, and says First Nations have no more of a say than any other stakeholders.

– with files from Brett Mineer