The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry.
In a rare turn, mining has emerged as an issue in a provincial election campaign in Ontario: the ruling Liberal party is promising to unilaterally pump up to $1 billion into infrastructure development in the remote Ring of Fire chromite camp in northern Ontario. It’s part of Premier Kathleen Wynne’s multi-billion dollar plan to ramp up infrastructure spending in the province if her party returns to power on June 12.
This Ring of Fire spending would mainly be earmarked for building a transportation corridor into the region — situated 535 km northeast of Thunder Bay — and it would represent at least half of what is probably needed to open the area up to mining. The $1-billion pledge was first put into the May 1 provincial budget, which failed to pass. However, that funding was contingent on matching dollars from the federal government.
With the federal government showing little interest in the Ring of Fire, Wynne stepped up the rhetoric at the unveiling of the party’s election platform in Thunder Bay on May 25, saying: “we have determined that this is such an important project that we need to go ahead with that investment of a billion dollars, with or without the federal government.”
The next day at the Northern Leaders’ debate in Thunder Bay, Wynne echoed the hyperbole of previous premier Dalton McGuinty by describing the Ring of Fire as “a national project, at least as important as the oilsands in Alberta.”
Even though Cliffs Natural Resources put the camp’s centrepiece project — its $3.3-billion Chromite open-pit chrome mine — on ice last November after having sunk $500 million into it, the provincial government says it’s still developing the Ring of Fire in a “smart, sustainable and collaborative way.”
Most notably, the provincial government and all nine Matawa-member First Nations communities in the area signed a regional framework agreement in March that the government calls “a first step in a historic, community based negotiation process that ensures Ontario and impacted First Nations can work together to advance Ring of Fire opportunities.”
The government has also hired consultants Deloitte to help establish a development corporation that would oversee Ring of Fire infrastructure, and be comprised of mining companies, provincial and federal governments, and First Nations. Here, Wynne has similarly stepped up the rhetoric a bit, and is newly promising to have the corporation in place within 60 days of getting re-elected.
While Cliffs’ Chromite is the dead elephant in the room, the two juniors Noront Resources and KWG Resources continue to advance their much smaller-scale base metals projects.
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