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Cliffs Natural Resources said Friday it still plans to open a chromite mine and plant by 2015, despite claims by a Conser vative MPP that development of the so-called Ring of Fire area has been pushed back to 2016.
“There has been no changes for the Ring of Fire chromite project timeline established by Cliffs,” said Patricia Persico, a Cliffs Natural Resources spokeswoman, when contacted by The Star.
Earlier Friday, Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli accused the McGuinty government of mismanaging the Ring of Fire, a huge, mineral-rich tract of land in Northern Ontario.
Fedeli said development of the Ring of fire has been delayed to 2016 from 2015, and he blamed the provincial government and its Ring of Fire coordinator, Christine Kaszycki.
In a release, Fedeli said Kaszycki told her at a North Bay conference she has never visited the Ring of Fire site.
“I was shocked to learn that she has never set foot in the Ring of Fire,” he said. “No wonder this project is stalled.
“The government says one thing, but doesn’t actually do anything. All they’ve done is hire people, built a bureaucracy and not actually done any work. That’s why the
projects are delayed another year.”
Fedeli, who toured the site himself last summer, said he is working to arrange a sales trip for North Bay firms this spring. He said the Ring of Fire may prove to be the largest mining discovery of the last 100 years.
Analysts have said the massive deposit of chromite and other minerals located west of James Bay could create thousands of jobs.
Cliffs, just one of the companies working the Ring of Fire area, has said it wants to open an open pit mine and concentrating plant at its Black Thor property, as well as a ferrochrome processing plant, by 2015. The Cleveland-based company identified a site near Capreol as possible location for the ferrochrome plant, which would create as many as 500 jobs.
Chromite is used to harden stainless steel.
Cliffs said earlier this month it would cost more than $3 billion to build the mine, concentrator, ferrochrome processing plant, an all-weather road and other facilities to allow production to begin.
Fedeli was not the only Conservative MPP to attack the Liberals about their handling of the Ring of Fire.
“This dithering is unacceptable at a time when we’re desperate for good-paying privatesector jobs in Ontario and need to create prosperity to dig ourselves out from the $16-billion deficit hole Dalton McGuinty has dug for us,” Parry Sound-Muskoka MPP Norm Miller, the Conservative critic for the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines, said in a statement.
“It’s time for real leadership on this issue.”
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