NDP policies sparked a decade-long exodus of mining and exploration dollars from the province; industry-friendly Liberals brought them back
July 1993 was a watershed time for mining in B.C. Mike Harcourt’s NDP government had announced the creation of Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Wilderness Park in the furthest northwest corner of B.C. on the border of the Yukon and Alaska Panhandle.
It killed the Windy Craggy copper mine project – one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits in the world – which Geddes Resources estimated to be worth $8.5 billion and had spent $50 million trying to develop.
“The killing of the Windy Craggy mine will have repercussions for a mining industry now under siege in our province,” Business in Vancouver columnist David Mitchell predicted in the July 13-19, 1993, issue of BIV.
Those repercussions were felt for a decade. In addition to killing the Windy Craggy project, the NDP announced plans to raise the share of parks and protected areas in B.C. from 5% of the provincial land base to 15%.
An exploration frenzy in the “Golden Triangle” of Northwest B.C. that had started in 1989 with the discovery of the Eskay Creek deposit came to a halt.
In 1997, Imperial Metals (TSX:III) opened two new mines – Huckleberry and Mount Polley. Otherwise, there was little exploration or new mine development in B.C. throughout the 1990s.
“It was horrendous. It was a lost decade for the mining industry in this province,” said Donald McInnes, who founded several publicly traded mining companies in B.C. “You all of a sudden had a complete mass exodus of people and capital resources.”
“Mineral exploration investment in British Columbia during that era of the Windy Craggy-NDP hit an all-time low in the last five decades,” said Dan Jepsen, who served as CEO of the Association for Mineral Exploration BC from 2002 to 2008.
In the 1990s, B.C. accounted for only 6% of the total expenditures on mineral exploration in Canada, Jepsen said. It’s now 20%.
“There were two countries that had active wars that were considered better places to invest exploration dollars,” Jepsen said.
Thanks to B.C.’s mineral-rich geology, a mining history dating back to the gold rush days, a world-class geology department at the University of British Columbia that fostered a lot of technical talent, and the Vancouver Stock Exchange, which helped junior exploration companies raise capital, Vancouver had developed into a major mining hub.
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