Black Brant IV rocket launched from the Churchill Rocket Range, c. 1960s. Photo courtesy the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada/Facebook.

In early 2025, the Manitoba government announced it would provide $17 million in loans and grants to the Winnipeg operations of Magellan Aerospace, a Mississauga-headquartered company that is majority owned and chaired by billionaire and oilsands baron N. Murray Edwards. The most immediate concern with this substantial corporate subsidy is that Magellan’s Winnipeg facilities are a major manufacturer of key parts for Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets, which are heavily used by Israel in its unrelenting assault on Gaza. Troubling as this is, however, there is a lesser-known reason to question this public handout.

In the early 1990s, Bristol Aerospace—then owned by Rolls Royce—was found to have poisoned an aquifer beneath its Rockwood Propellant Plant near Winnipeg with high concentrations of toxic and carcinogenic solvents, including one, trichloroethylene (TCE), that was recently banned by the US Environmental Protection Agency due to health risks such as “developmental toxicity, reproductive toxicity, liver toxicity, kidney toxicity, immunotoxicity, neurotoxicity, and cancer.” Only a few years later, in 1996–97, Edwards increased his investment in a languishing Ontario airplane manufacturer, renamed it Magellan, and bought up Bristol in an acquisition spree that helped establish the company as one of the largest aerospace producers in the country.

Since then, building on Bristol’s experience and reputation, Magellan’s operations in and near Winnipeg have cemented the company as a major player in the manufacturing of systems and parts for commercial airplanes, military jets and helicopters, satellites, and rockets. In 2024, Magellan reported almost $1 billion in company-wide sales and more than $35 million in profit, with facilities throughout North America, Europe, and India.

Yet decades after it was first discovered, the groundwater pollution caused by Bristol remains so extreme that more than 100 square kilometres of the region in and around Stony Mountain is now formally (and euphemistically) designated as the “Rockwood Sensitive Area,” where most uses of well-water are prohibited. Some private residences and agricultural producers continue to use it, including a Maple Leaf hog supplier and a Hutterite colony.

Remediation efforts in the years since—a process of “air stripping” that separates the toxic compounds from the water and releases them into the atmosphere—have significantly lowered contamination from the initially staggering levels. However, average concentrations still exceed recommended limits by more than tenfold (and surpass stricter guidelines by over 150 times). There are also several sites in the area where pollution is increasing, not decreasing, likely due to complex groundwater flows.

Neither Bristol nor Magellan have ever faced lawsuits or fines for the contamination. Today, the province appears to systematically avoid even naming the company in its limited information about the disaster, simply referring to it as “an industrial site (locally known as the Rockwood plant).” Now, the Manitoba government has handed the company that bought Bristol—including its environmental liabilities—even more public funding, as if this catastrophe never occurred.

Dr. Eva Pip, a retired full professor of biology and water quality expert at the University of Winnipeg who has followed the Rockwood pollution crisis since its beginning, shared her thoughts in an email interview with Canadian Dimension: “The passage of a great deal of time has eroded and erased this issue from public awareness—the current generation was not even born when this event happened—even though there has still been no final resolution or closure, despite........

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