https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/
Study finds coal mine contaminants in snowpack
Cancer-causing chemicals are being blown downwind from coal mines in southern British Columbia in concentrations that rival those next to oilsand mines, newly published research has concluded.
“Our results reveal, for the first time, clear evidence that coal mining contaminants are spread far downwind from their sources,” says the paper, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
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Nevada Copper Corp. shareholders are poised to lose their entire investment, with the struggling Canadian miner seeking bankruptcy protection, and hoping to secure emergency financing from U.S. hedge fund Elliott Investment Management.
The Vancouver-based company has struggled for years to ramp up production at its Pumpkin Hollow copper mine in Nevada. Earlier this year, the company told investors it was a going-concern risk and was running a dangerously high debt load against a dwindling cash position. As of the end of March, Nevada Copper held only US$300,000 in cash, had a working-capital deficit of US$115.4-million, and total debt of approximately US$262-million.
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The Canadian mining industry is optimistic that Ottawa will carve out an exception for the sector around coming changes to the capital-gains tax that it hopes will pre-empt a large drop in financings.
As of June 25, capital gains made by Canadian investors are set to be taxed at two thirds, up from one half, for gains above $250,000. Owing to a tax quirk associated when selling flow-through shares, the pending changes will deter high-net-worth individuals from investing in the mining sector, according to Pierre Gratton, president of the Mining Association of Canada.
Founder & CEO of Alp Bora & Co., Alp Bora talks about mining, sustainability and corporate culture.
“Who earned it? Eh? I thought so. Your father. You stand on dead men’s legs. You’ve never had any of your own.” —The Sea-Wolf, Jack London
Canada’s mining industry is walking on dead men’s legs. The country inherited a mining legacy and set modern standards, but evidence suggests action is needed to renew it. Metal production in Canada has become irregular due to the depletion of reserves and more dependence on imports, and production of Canadian refined metals such as nickel, zinc, lead, and copper has fallen since 2005.
A Chinese saying goes “wealth does not last beyond three generations.” It was a generation ago that China made their policy to dominate metals and refining. Meanwhile, Canada has rested on its legacy and sold some of its more profitable companies. I believe this has endangered the country’s mining future and economy.
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What do phony gold, a Russian godfather and a crypto scam have in common? They all illustrate how The Globe plays an important role in exposing corporate malfeasance
It was surely one of the clumsiest attempts ever to rewrite history. In 1996, Calgary-based Bre-X Minerals Ltd. spent months assuring investors it owned most of Busang, a mammoth gold deposit in Indonesia. But the following February, CEO David Walsh flipped the script.
“Some have mistakenly thought that we somehow owned 90 per cent of this property,” Walsh said at the time. “This was never the practical reality, nor was it ever a basis for the valuation of Bre-X stock.”
New podcast digs into the history of Bre-X Minerals’s claims of gold deep in the Indonesian jungle
On the morning of March 19, 1997, Michael de Guzman, chief geologist at Canadian mining company Bre-X Minerals, boarded a helicopter flight to travel to a remote jungle site in Indonesia. It was a journey he had made many times before, to a place where he had reported finding huge deposits of gold.
But this time, de Guzman never arrived. Twenty minutes into the journey, a rear door on the left-hand side of the helicopter opened and de Guzman plummeted to his death into the dense foliage below.
https://www.northernminer.com/
Applications to drill for metallurgical coal in southwestern Alberta are pitting ranchers against an exploration company backed by Australian mining billionaire Gina Rinehart.
Calgary-based Northback Holdings, a subsidiary of Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, submitted applications last year to the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) for permits to drill at its Grassy Mountain project in the Crowsnest Pass region.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/
The project has previously been denied by federal and provincial environmental reviews
An Alberta ranching community is fighting a planned hearing on proposed coal exploration in the Rocky Mountains, saying the province’s arm’s-length energy regulator shouldn’t have heeded a letter from its energy minister suggesting an application from Northback Holdings be accepted.
The information is contained in documents released last week by the Alberta Energy Regulator. They outline the Municipal District of Ranchland’s request to appeal the regulator’s ruling that Northback’s plans for Grassy Mountain in southwest Alberta are exempt from an order blocking such development.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
David Morrison is the chief executive of Eight Capital, one of the largest independent investment banks in Canada.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate passed legislation to ban Russian uranium imports, and President Joe Biden signed off on it. The ban involves a phase-in period, until the end of 2027, to allow domestic production and supplies from allies to ramp up. Given that Russia supplied the U.S. with roughly a quarter of its uranium needs in 2022, this is no small task.
According to U.S. officials, Washington is counting on Canada to step up and fill the gap. We have just three years to prepare – less if the Russians retaliate by pre-emptively restricting their exports. Our usual glacial pace will not cut it.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/
The Pentagon fears global unrest, a shortage of raw materials, and seeks to kickstart projects here
The United States was growing desperate, months before its entry into the Second World War. It was gravely short of aluminum, and scrambling for suppliers. Its solution: turn north to Canada.
American public money flooded into Quebec, building the aluminum industry that supplied raw materials for Allied planes and tanks. “I would be willing to buy aluminum from anybody,” said Harry Truman, then still a U.S. senator, in 1941 hearings on the topic.
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Canadian critical minerals company Solaris Resources Inc. has called off its financing deal with China’s Zijin Mining Group Co. Ltd. after failing to receive regulatory approval from Ottawa, which had been vetting the transaction on national security grounds. Vancouver-based Solaris in January said that Zijin intended to pay $130-million for a 15-per-cent equity stake in the company.
Solaris had planned to use the funds to advance its early-stage Warintza copper project in Ecuador. If the deal had been approved, Zijin would have been entitled to a seat on Solaris’s board, giving it influence over the strategic direction of the company. Copper, along with nickel, lithium and graphite, is used in electric-vehicle batteries and other low-carbon energy sources.
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George Salamis, Lieutenant-Colonel (Hon) of the Royal Westminster Regiment, is executive chair of Integra Resources, a Canadian-based mining company that develops gold and silver mines in Canada and the U.S. Mike St-Pierre is a Lieutenant Commander in the Royal Canadian Navy.
A global race is under way to secure critical minerals essential to power the next generation of civilian and military technology and to electrify the future. Control of global supply chains has become the new strategic centre of gravity, where access to minerals and metals are strategic weapons. The West is losing the resource war that targets our core social and political values. At stake is the national security of the West.
China still boasts the largest EV ecosystem. But like other EV contenders including India and Indonesia, it is reliant on fossil fuels for power, David Olive writes.
Two months before Honda Motor Co. announced in April that it will build $15-billion worth of electric vehicle (EV) factories in Ontario, Canada had already eclipsed China as the country with the greatest potential to build a leading “global lithium-ion battery supply” chain.
That’s the finding of BloombergNEF (BNEF), a leader in monitoring global EV initiatives. It’s worth quoting at length why BNEF says Canada, among the 30 countries it surveys, is at the front of the pack in the race to create EV ecosystems.
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Robert Muggah is a co-founder of the Igarapé Institute and the SecDev Group and a senior adviser to the United Nations. Misha Glenny is a British journalist and currently serves as rector of the Institute for Human Sciences.
The rise in doomscrolling is a morbid sign of the times. The obsessive consumption of negative news isn’t just bad for physical and mental health, but our very survival. Recent studies confirm that overexposure to social media short-circuits the brain’s natural self-defences, leaving us disoriented and depressed. It turns out that optimism is good for us. People fortified by an optimist mindset are less prone to conspiracy theories and are generally happier, healthier and live longer.
Yet there are reasons why optimism is in short supply. Widespread screen addiction is partly to blame for headline anxiety, especially among young people. Another reason the algorithms are winning is because the world is objectively more volatile today than at any time since the Second World War.
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Ottawa and Washington have teamed up for the first time to invest in two Canadian mining exploration companies, as both governments attempt to bolster the North American critical-minerals supply chain in the face of an escalating trade war with China.
Ontario cobalt developer Fortune Minerals Ltd. and Quebec graphite exploration company Lomiko Metals Inc. have been awarded about $32.4-million in combined funding, the U.S. and Canada said in a joint statement Thursday. The Canadian contribution is part of the $3.8-billion in funding for the critical-minerals sector that was unveiled in the 2023 federal budget and is coming from Natural Resources Canada.
