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Canadian/International Media Resource Articles

Clement’s Takeover Hangover [Vale, Inco, Sudbury]-by Andy Hoffman and Jacquie McNish (July 22, 2009)

The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media. Originally published July 22, 2009

“There was going to be no buyer, [for Inco] there were going to be no jobs, [Sudbury] there weren’t going to be any capital investments, there was going to be no employer.” — Industry Minister Tony Clement

“He’s either sadly misinformed or he’s ignoring the facts because back in 2006 we were a very successful company. There were lots of companies trying to buy us, not just [Vale].”— Scott Hand, Inco’s former CEO

The wave of foreign takeovers that cut a swath through Canada’s resource sector in 2006 and 2007 has become a critical problem for Industry Minister Tony Clement as the new owners break their acquisition promises not to slash jobs and production.

Mr. Clement is under fire for ill-informed comments regarding the sale of nickel producer Inco to a Brazilian mining giant, and for taking an inconsistent approach to enforcing the commitments the foreign companies made in order to win Ottawa’s consent for the controversial deals.

Last week, the government took the extraordinary step of going to court to demand United States Steel Corp. meet job and production pledges that were part of its acquisition of Stelco Inc. in 2007. The move, a first in Canada, has shocked industry and legal observers who say that Industry Canada has been much more flexible with other foreign buyers.

But Mr. Clement then portrayed Inco’s acquirer, Brazil’s Vale SA, as a local saviour – even though Vale, too, is cutting jobs earlier than promised, closing operations and grappling with a strike. Mr. Clement said Sudbury, the site of Inco’s flagship nickel operations, would have become a “Valley of Death” if the Brazilians hadn’t bought the company for $19-billion.

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Mining Has Become the World’s Most Popular Profession – by Russell Noble

Russell Noble is the editor of the Canadian Mining Journal, Canada’s first mining publication. This editorial is from the December, 2010 issue.

Thanks to a cave-in, mining is now the world’s most popular profession.

Forget about doctors and firefighters for a moment because, to paraphrase, the word popular means: “known to the general masses of people,” and with that, who can argue that the recently televised rescue of 33 miners in Chile didn’t make mining popular?

No other event in the history of the industry has brought more attention to the profession than the rescue of those miners. That single event taught more than a billion people around the world just what mining is all about.

They learned about the earth and where minerals are found, they learned about the research and engineering that’s involved with getting at those minerals and, most importantly, they learned about the people who risk their lives to retrieve those minerals.

In all, no other profession has been so vividly showcased before the eyes of the world.

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Breakaway Country [Northwestern Ontario] – by Livio Di Matteo

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. This article was originally published in the Financial Post on September 06, 2006.

Livio Di Matteo is professor of economics at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and a co-author of a recent paper in Canadian Public Policy dealing with “Mantario.”

How can we empower people in these regions to help solve their own problems rather than wait for a supplicated solution from a pharaoh in a distant capital? In an act of supreme neglect, the Canadian federation has allowed its vital “zone of transit” [Northwestern Ontario] to decline to the point where an errant moose could choke the lifeblood of the nation. – Livio Di Matteo (Sept/06)

The isolated residents of northwestern Ontario are tired of life as a resource extraction colony. One option would be to create a new province – Mantario

The northwestern portion of Ontario, comprising the Districts of Thunder Bay, Kenora and Rainy River, represents 60% of Ontario’s land and an area the size of France. It was an imperial acquisition of the 19th-century when the province viewed itself as “Empire Ontario.”

It is a region rich in natural resources but sparse in population, and yet it is vital to the Canadian federation as an east-west transport corridor for road, ship and rail. Indeed, one can only imagine how different Canadian history might have been had northwestern Ontario become part of Minnesota. While alienation from Southern Ontario has affected all of Northern Ontario, sparking periodic calls to separate, the feeling has become particularly acute in the region stretching from White River to Kenora.

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Business News Network Reporter Andrew Bell Interviews Barrick CEO Aaron Regent – (December 14, 2010)

Toronto-based Business News Network (BNN) is a Canadian cable television specialty channel owned by CTVglobalmedia. BNN airs business and financial programming and analysis. BNN reporter Andrew Bell hosts the Commodities program. From aluminum to zinc and everything in between, every Tuesday through Thursday, BNN highlights the hot world of commodities and the companies that produce …

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Why Sudbury is An Unlikely Magnet for Global Education – by Globe and Mail Columnist Adam Radwanski (Originally Published August 21, 2010)

Adam Radwanski is the Queen’s Park columnist for the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media. This article was orginally published August 21, 2010.

International students are increasingly attracted to the Big Nickel to study, but the real problem is getting them to stay after graduation

Peter Luk admits it’s not an easy sell.

Twice a year, the dean of Laurentian University’s management program travels to China in an attempt to persuade students and their families that Sudbury is the place for them. For most, Canada ranks below several other countries as their choice of where to study abroad. A small northern Ontario city known for nickel mining isn’t even on the radar.

And yet, with students drawn by everything from smaller class sizes to the prospect of a more “Canadian” experience than they’d get in a multicultural metropolis such as Toronto, Mr. Luk is finding takers. In 2008, his first year at Laurentian after nearly three decades at Toronto’s Ryerson University, he recruited four Chinese students. The next year, it was eight. This year, it was 25.

The trend is reflected across campus. With an aggressive recruitment strategy driven by an ambitious new administration, Laurentian reports that it received 952 international applications in 2010, more than double the total from three years earlier.

All this should warm the heart of Dalton McGuinty, who has said he wants to increase international enrolment at the province’s universities by 50 per cent. But it will also test just what the Ontario Premier’s push for foreign students really means, and what its legacy will be.

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The Northern Miner 2010 “Mining Persons of the Year” Shawn Ryan and Cathy Wood Renew Yukon Gold Rush – by Gwen Preston (December 16, 2010)

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry. This article is reproduced with permission of The Northern Miner and was first posted on their website on December 16, 2010.

Fourteen years ago Shawn Ryan and Cathy Wood were tromping around British Columbia, picking wild mushrooms. They loved the lifestyle, in large part because of its gold rush-style mentality: “You’d have a thousand people in the bush and half of them would migrate, overnight, on a rumour of a sweet spot,” says Ryan.

But the couple were expecting their first child. Ryan tried to make the line of work more stable by convincing the Yukon government to endorse mushroom picking as an agricultural program, but was turned down. Devastated, he turned back to an old skill – staking mineral claims in Ontario – and he made $10,000 in a week.

“So I said to Cathy, ‘Let’s go back into exploration,'” Ryan recalls. They decided to focus on the Yukon.

Ten years later, the couple optioned a piece of ground in the Dawson Range to Underworld Resources. Two years after that, Kinross Gold swept in and bought Underworld for $138 million. The deal triggered a staking rush around the White Gold gold project that is still going strong.

Ryan and Wood are most famous for the Underworld discovery but their prospecting efforts and successes in the Yukon go far beyond one deal.

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Copper’s big comeback [Quadra FNX Derek White Interview] by Toronto Star Business Reporter Lisa Wright (Originally published December 19, 2010)

Lisa Wright is a business reporter with the Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. This article was originally published December 19, 2010.

 “Underneath the nickel contact zone [in Sudbury] are these amazing copper deposits. And
when I say amazing, I mean three times the grade of the Congo. These are high, high grades.
Generally speaking in copper mining, a big open pit mine with 1 per cent would be a world
class, great type of deposit. We’re mining on average 9 per cent but sometimes up
to 20 per cent.” (Quadra FNX Derek White – Dec/19/10)

With prices soaring, Canadian miners like Quadra FNX are back on the radar

There’s an old saw that over every bull market is a copper roof – and beneath every bear market is a copper trough.

In other words, the price of copper is a reliable barometer of market strength.

The industrial metal is considered one of the best signals of economic activity since it’s the bloodline of electrical conductivity and a key component in all construction.

Copper is soaring to the rooftop again with the red-hot base metal hitting a record $4.18 (U.S.) a pound in New York last week. The last time it came this close to a record high was just before the economy hit the skids in 2008, which then promptly dragged it down to a lowly $1 a pound.

The high price is not great news for big buyers like China. Nor is it nice for churches, cemeteries and cars, which have become targets lately for their scrap copper content, which thieves sell on the Asian black market as a substitute for the expensive stuff.

But it bodes well for copper mining companies like Quadra FNX Mining Ltd., which formed after the merger of Vancouver’s Quadra and Toronto’s FNX last May to become a leading producer of the rusty red metal.

The Toronto miner hopes to capitalize on continuing high copper prices with its coveted Sierra Gorda site in northern Chile, which will cost an estimated $2.5 billion to build into a mine. The growing firm has many suitors knocking on its door to get a piece of this potentially large copper development, which could be up and running by early 2014.

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[Ontario Mining] Losing Ground – Karen Mazurkewich (Originally published in Financial Post Magazine, April 2010 issue)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. article was originally published in the Financial Post Magazine’s April, 2010 issue.

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, who stated in a February news conference that “we are not going to succeed in Ontario by pulling stuff out of the ground,” has changed his tune. “There is a tremendous amount of excitement over the economic potential of the Ring of Fire,” says Michael Gravelle, Ontario’s Minister of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry.

In Bygone Days, Good Bush Gear And Decent Maps Were A Mining Firm’s Greatest Assets. Today, Regulation And Bureaucracy Rule The Industry. Is Canada Paying The Price?

Don McKinnon, a grizzled prospector from Timmins, Ont., sports a whopping gold nugget on his finger — proof of his prodigious finds. The 80-year-old owns a stake in the nearby Hemlo gold mine and is still very much a player in the Canadian mining industry. He remembers when the staking was hard and the regulations were easy. To get a leg up on the competition, the hoary miner wasn’t above “dirty tricks” like buying up all the mine ministry maps in town. McKinnon still displays the 40 pairs of snowshoes he bought in the winter of ’79 to thwart competing prospectors during the Hemlo staking rush, and tells tales of being stalked by polar bears in the Far North.

But ask him his thoughts on the industry today, and he simply growls: “it’s tougher.” These days, McKinnon leaves the finer points of the mining business to his 27-year-old son, Gordon, president of Canadian Orebodies Inc., which has large claims in the James Bay Lowlands. The younger McKinnon doesn’t spend nights in the bush with a pick-axe. To be a player, junior miners need ample knowledge of stock market and the ability to negotiate impact benefit agreements with First Nations. In Gordon’s case, the list also includes overseeing an survey on caribou migratory patterns — a project he funded as part of an exploration deal in northern Ontario.

While his father still relies on his massive collection of topographical maps, Gordon eagerly awaits Ontario’s new regulations that permit online mapping. It’s staking made simple, but at a price: more bureaucracy. He processes more paper in a week than his father did in a year. “Before, the government saw a new mine as a new revenue stream; now they put us through hoops,” says the younger McKinnon.

Mining was the early economic engine of this nation, and swaths of Bay Street’s wealth can be traced back to prior generations of wheeler-dealers.

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Double-talk Dalton McGuinty [About Ontario Mining]- by Toronto Sun Columnist Christina Blizzard (Originally Published March 09, 2010)

Christina Blizzard is the Queen’s Park columnist for the Toronto Sun, the city’s daily tabloid newspaper.

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

“In a highly competitive, knowledge-based global economy, we are not going succeed in
Ontario by pulling stuff out of the ground.” – Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, Feb/11/2010

Premier Dalton McGuinty just pulled off the fastest head spin since Linda Blair grossed us all out in The Exorcist.

One minute the premier thought mining was a dying industry. The next, it’s alive and saving the economy.

In a news conference Feb. 11, McGuinty had this to say: “In a highly competitive, knowledge-based global economy, we are not going succeed in Ontario by pulling stuff out of the ground.

“Our natural resource sector is very important to us but we know that future growth will come on the basis of the development of our imaginations in innovative capacities.”

By Monday’s throne speech, McGuinty had put his imagination to good use — and changed his mind.

His message was mining will save the beleaguered northern economy.

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Will Ring Of Fire Ever Burn? – by Terence Corcoran, Financial Post Editor (April/2010)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. Terence Corcoran’s editorial opinion was originally published in the Financial Post Magazine’s April, 2010 issue.

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

Canada’s mining history is full of characters. But a modern award for promotional ingenuity goes to Richard Nemis, the veteran prospecting whiz who came up with “Ring of Fire” as the name for the latest Ontario mining rush. (Terence Corcoran – April, 2010)

Through the summer of 1967, while my hometown, Montreal, hosted Expo ’67, I was elsewhere. Most of the time I was 4,200 feet underground working as an “apprentice miner” at the famed Kerr Addison gold mine in Northern Ontario. Even at that time, the Kerr Addison, while a legendary gold producer, was considered a has-been. Located in Virginiatown, about 50 kilometres east of the great gold centre at Kirkland Lake, the Kerr Addison was a hard-rock stope operation. We would board the cage at ground level for the long and rickety descent, then take a battery-powered ore mover through black tunnels to our stopes where, lit only by our head lamps, we drilled and blasted grey-green rock faces. The next shift we’d return to muck the rock away and drag in heavy six-foot timbers to build supports and prevent cave-ins. Then we’d drill and blast again.

I wasn’t much of miner, but I could lift and move stuff around, which is what apprentice miners do. The first gold was mined at Kerr Addison in 1913, and over its spectacular life it produced 11 million ounces. Since the first gold rush in 1906, the Kirkland Lake gold mining area — of which Kerr Addison was part — produced almost 37-million ounces of gold, worth more than $37 billion at today’s prices.

Will Ontario, or any part of Canada, ever see such mining-sector productivity and wealth creation again? The test will be the Ring of Fire.

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Northern Miner Editorial: New Zealand in Mourning – by John Cumming

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry. Editor John Cumming MSc (Geol) is one of the country’s most well respected mining journalists. jcumming@northernminer.com This editorial is reproduced with permission of The Northern Miner and is from the November 29- December 5, 2010 issue.

Tragedy has descended on the normally idyllic West Coast region of New Zealand’s South Island, where an underground explosion has killed 29 miners at the Pike River coking coal mine, located halfway between Greymouth and Reefton.

The first of two explosions happened on Nov. 19 at 3:50 pm local time. It trapped 29 miners underground at least 2.5 km from the portal, but still allowed two dazed men working in a different area from the others to escape to surface.

There was no contact from the trapped miners after 4:15 pm that day, and the blast had disabled the mine’s electrical-power and ventilation systems.

Surface crews soon started drilling a 15-cm-wide hole that intercepted the mine workings 150 metres below surface several days later, and allowed for a sampling of the air quality, which was very poor.

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Northern Miner Editorial – BHP Blows US$800M on Failed Transactions – by John Cumming

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry. Editor John Cumming MSc (Geol) is one of the country’s most well respected mining journalists. jcumming@northernminer.com This editorial is reproduced with permission of The Northern Miner and is from the November 22-28, 2010 issue.

BHP Billiton formally withdrew its hostile, US$40-billion cash offer for Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan on Monday after the Canadian government had rejected it two weeks earlier on the grounds that it did not provide a “net benefit” to Canadians, heeding the loud protestations of Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall and a groundswell of opposition in the province.

Of paramount concern to the provincial government was BHP Billiton’s indifference to the long-established Canpotex export-sales cartel, and the company’s willingness to drive down potash prices as it maximized mine output.

The federal government had left open for BHP a 30-day window to improve its bid, but that was just a formality, as BHP had already made many substantive concessions relating to increased taxes, vows to maintain employment levels, and commitments to remain in Canpotex for five years, and to centre its potash business in Saskatchewan.

Clearly, BHP Billiton execs spent too much time with their noses in their spreadsheets and were unable to grasp the enduring strength of Prairie populism in Canada. And BHP paid a full price for its lesson, tallying US$350 million in transaction costs for the failed bid, of which US$250 million will be recognized in the half year ending Dec. 31.

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Analysis of Vale’s $10 Billion Canadian Investment – Liezel Hill (Mining Weekly North American Deputy Editor)

Mining Weekly is South Africa’s premier source of weekly news on mining developments in Africa’s most important industry. Mining Weekly provides in-depth coverage of mining projects and the personalities reshaping the mining industry. In order to advance Mining Weekly’s objective of positioning itself as a leading global provider of mining news, a full-time correspondent is based …

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Northern Miner Editorial: Bill C-300’s Defeat

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry. This editorial is reproduced with permission of The Northern Miner and is from the November 8-14, 2010 issue.

The last week of October was a satisfying one for Canadian miners, with Canada’s parliament voting to defeat the anti-mining Bill C-300 by an unsettlingly close 140-to-134 margin.

As Canadian miners are well aware, Bill C-300 was a private member’s bill sponsored by backbench Liberal Member of Parliament John McKay, representing Toronto’s suburban Scarborough riding.

Superficially innocuous, Bill C-300, had it become law, would have given the federal ministers of foreign affairs and international trade new responsibility to hold Canadian resource companies accountable for their corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in developing countries by submitting annual reports to the House of Commons and Senate for review.

The ministries could then sanction delinquent companies by keeping money from lending arms such as the Export Development Canada and the Canada Pension Plan.

However, the bill was so naively constructed that, as law, it would have led to a flood of frivolous, obstructionist and defamatory complaints coming in from all corners of the world from anti-capitalist agitators, shakedown artists and covert foreign mining competitors.

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Northern Miner Editorial – Political Power Play Over PotashCorp

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry. This editorial is reproduced with permission of The Northern Miner and is from the November 1-7, 2010 issue.

BHP Billiton’s $40-billion hostile bid for Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan entered a critical period in late October, as the broadly free market-friendly Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall and his government set aside years of “Saskatchewan-is-open-for-business” talk and came out strongly against the deal.

Wall said the deal fails to provide a “net benefit” to the people of Saskatchewan and Canada in three key areas: jobs and investment, Canadian control of an important Canadian resource, and provincial revenues. He also voiced concern over the fate of the Canpotex potash-export marketing arrangement if BHP succeeds in its bid.

“Do we want to add PotashCorp to that list of once-proud Canadian companies that are now under foreign control?” asked Wall, who cast doubt on the ability of federal authorities to enforce restrictions should approval be granted with specific conditions.

“In the past decade, promises about maintaining jobs, corporate headquarters and future investment have all been broken,” said Wall. “We simply cannot take that risk with this valuable resource that belongs to the people of Saskatchewan.”

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