Twitter

Canadian/International Media Resource Articles

McGuinty Headed for a Northern [Ontario] Showdown – by Christina Blizzard (Toronto Sun-September 16, 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

The Liberals’ Far North Act will kill the ‘economic equivalent of another Sudbury’

When mayors, chambers of commerce and aboriginal groups from across the north all converge on Queen’s Park, you know there’s trouble brewing.

That happened Wednesday, as anger over the government’s Far North Act boiled over from the wide landscapes of the north, its boreal forests and mines to the manicured southern lawns of Queen’s Park.

New Democrat Gilles Bisson stormed out of a committee hearing on Bill 191, calling the process a “sham.” He’d asked that the bill not be called for third reading and the government go back to the drawing board.

Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Stan Beardy, usually a moderate, angrily declared aboriginal people will take “direct action” to protect their rights.

“We will do whatever is necessary to protect our interests, and if that calls for direct action, that’s what’s going to take place,” Beardy said.

Read more

Liberals should rethink the [Ontario’s] Far North Act – by Christina Blizzard (Toronto Sun-August 19, 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

Northerners don’t expect government hand-outs, or intrusive legislation from a remote provincial government in the south

The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. Similarly, it seems the highway to God’s country ends in a dead-end created by well-meaning but wrong-headed do-gooders.

Northern Ontario has spectacular landscapes, vast mineral riches, untold tourism potential and resilient, self-reliant folk.

While northerners don’t expect government hand-outs, they also don’t expect intrusive legislation from a remote provincial government in the south.

Yet that’s what’s happening with the Far North Act, which would put half the land north of the 51st parallel out of bounds for development. Worse, the government hasn’t said which 50% of land is off the table.
That uncertainty means mining companies are thinking twice before they invest in the north.

Read more

Canada’s Business News Network (BNN) Profiles the World-Class Sudbury Mining Basin – Stan Sudol

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant, who writes extensively about mining issues.(stan.sudol@republicofmining.com) Toronto-based Business News Network (BNN) is a Canadian cable television specialty channel owned by CTVglobalmedia. BNN airs business and financial programming and analysis. You can’t go anywhere in Toronto’s financial district without seeing BNN broadcasting on television screens. On September 17, 2010, …

Read more

Elliot Lake Uranium Mining History – Our Wild Atomic City – by Alan Phillips (Originally Published in Maclean’s Magazine – May 25, 1957)

Denison Mine was the largest uranium deposit in Elliot Lake, Ontario.

Here’s a Graphic Picture of Ontario’s Elliot Lake

A billion-dollar order for uranium
A $300-million spending spree to fill it
A lawless horde of transients
A Communist struggle to control mine workers
A serious outbreak of disease

Just off the Trans-Canada Highway skirting Lake Huron’s north shore, a buried vein of ore snakes north through the Algoma Basin in the shape of an upside-down S. It curves for ninety miles beneath the pineclad granite knolls, a mother lode that is spawning eleven giant uranium mines in the greatest eruption of growth since gold gave birth to Dawson City.

The hub of these mines is a chaotic city-to-be called Elliot Lake. Twenty-two months ago it was just a stand of timber dividing two lakes, so wild that a bulldozer leveling brush ran over a large black bear. Today it’s a prime example of a boom town, familiar symbol of dynamic growth – and trouble.

For a couple of months this spring Elliot Lake made headlines that had nothing to do with uranium. An outbreak of jaundice packed ninety victims into nearby Blind River’s 59-bed hospital. About three hundred cases were reported before the disease began to wane early last month. Provincial health officials insisted that the outbreak did not rate as an epidemic while union officials were demanding the mines shut down until the sewage system was improved.

Infectious disease is an age-old bugbear of the boom town, which has its other ageless features. It is the nation in miniature with its time span speeded up as in a silent movie.

Read more

The Political Storm Watch on Fish Lake [Taseko Mines Tailings]- by Wendy Stueck (Globe and Mail-September 11, 2010)

Wendy Stueck is a reporter 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.

Aboriginals and pro-development groups are on a collision course as they await decision on $800-million B.C. mining project

On the surface, Fish Lake looks serene – a sun-dappled body of water where fish jump in the shadows of snow-capped mountains.

But this lake, about 125 kilometres southwest of Williams Lake in British Columbia’s rugged Chilcotin Territory, is the heart of a battle that has put the federal and provincial governments on a collision course, pitted predominantly aboriginal concerns about the environment against the prospect of jobs and investment in a hard-pressed region, and raised fears of violent confrontations if a proposed mine goes ahead.

The federal government  is to make a final decision on the proposed Prosperity copper-gold mine, which the B.C. government has already approved, as early as this month.

Read more

Vale Targets Pristine Lake for [Mine] Tailings – by Linda Diebel (Toronto Star-September 11, 2010)

Linda Diebel is a National Writer for 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 on Saturday, September 11, 2010.

A coalition of environmental groups is fighting to set a national precedent by stopping Brazilian mining giant Vale from dumping 400,000 tonnes a year of toxic tailings into a Newfoundland lake known for its prize-winning trout.

“Sandy Pond is a wonderful, beautiful lake and all aquatic life is going to be annihilated,” said Meera Karunananthan, national water campaigner for the Council of Canadians and a member of the newly-created Sandy Pond Alliance. “The authorities are allowing the company to use our pristine water as one big garbage dump.”

Vale plans to use the lake for waste from a nickel processing plant, set to open in 2013. It’s located near Long Harbour on the Avalon Peninsula in southeastern Newfoundland, about an hour’s drive from St. John’s.

The environmental alliance recently filed a legal challenge in federal court to what they see as a loophole in the Fisheries Act. It allows Canadian lakes to be reclassified as “tailings impoundment areas.”

Read more

SAVE THE OIL SANDS! – by Carrie Tait (National Post-August 21, 2010)

Carrie Tait is a reporter for the  National Post, Canada’s second largest national paper. This article was originally published on August 21, 2010.

Alberta’s oil sands are twice the size of England. Alberta’s oil sands tailings ponds are, collectively, the size of Washington State. Alberta’s oil sands help subsidize continued wars of aggression against other oil-producing nations such as Iraq, Venezuela and Iran.

These three statements all make Janet Annesley’s Top 10 list, a David Letterman-inspired collection of the most egregious falsehoods against the oil sands. As the vice-president of communications for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), she is on the front lines of a he said/she said public relations war.

The oil-sands industry, she concedes, has been getting creamed.

“We were caught flat-footed,” she said. “The oil-and-gas industry was not being effective in engaging Canadians because it didn’t have the ability to connect with them emotionally.”

Indeed, organizations have been taking pot shots — as well as making reasonable and fair critiques — at the oil-sands industry for years. They reached out to citizens on an emotional level. But the industry’s wonky technical rebuttals went ignored.

Now, after two years of revamping its PR strategy, CAPP hopes it can trump, even pre-empt, its critics’ charges.

Read more

National Post’s Diane Francis Highlights the Global Succes of Canada’s Mining Sector

This article was provided by the Ontario Mining Association (OMA), an organization that was established in 1920 to represent the mining industry of the province.

Business commentator and author Diane Francis presented her views on mining as Canada’s hidden success story in her keynote address at a recent Ontario Mining Association conference. The National Post editor at large helped to kick off the OMA “The future of mining in Ontario: Is it golden?” conference June 14 in North Bay.

“Mining built Canada and mining still runs Canada,” said the Ms Francis, who has been a media fellow at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the Kennedy School of Government in the United States. “It should not be politically incorrect in Canada to support mining. We have nothing to be ashamed of. The only industry that is truly wealth creating is mining and in this country one in 10 First Nations people are employed in mining.”

“Mining is what Canada is all about and we in this country are riding a commodities rocket ship,” she said. “Four hundred million people are going to be born in the next decade providing a demographics of demand.”

Read more

The Arrogance of Inco – by Val Ross (Originally Published in May 1979 – Part 4 of 4)

“The Arrogance of Inco” was originally published as the cover story in the May, 1979 issue of Canadian Business. Reporter Val Ross, who died in 2008, spent two and a half months researching and writing this lengthy expose of the then Inco Limited. It has become a “classic must read” for anyone wishing to understand the often bitter history between Sudbury and the company that defined the Canadian mining industry.

4-Troubles in the Province of Ontario

Nineteen hundred and fifteen was a rather wet year in the Sudbury district. The sulphur dioxide fumes from the open-air roasting heaps hung in sickening mists and low clouds over the region. In increasing numbers the local farmers brought damage suits against the nickel producers, Mond and International Nickel. In desperation the nickel companies turned to the Ontario Ministry of Lands, Forests and Mines for protection. They begged the government to remember nickel’s contribution to the defence of the Empire (this was the year before the Deutschland’s two trips to pick up nickel supplies for Germany).

Charging opportunism, they protested, “Lands are being taken up and a pretence of farming made…in the hope and the expectation that the same may be damaged or appear to be damaged so that a claim against the company may be made.”

The Ontario government agreed with the nickel men’s interpretation of events and dealt with the “smoke farmers,” as Inco dubbed the victims, accordingly. Whole townships near Copper Cliff and Sudbury were withdrawn from sale to settlers. When the remaining lots changed hands, “smoke easement clauses” were written in which denied the buyers the right to sue mining companies. These clauses, reviewed in 1942 during another spate of farmers’ and residents’ complaints, have been retained. To this day, no owner of Sudbury real estate has the right to sue mining companies for property damage.

There were, and remain, variants on the sulphur dioxide pollution problems in the Sudbury area.

Read more

The Arrogance of Inco – by Val Ross (Originally Published in May 1979 – Part 3 of 4)

“The Arrogance of Inco” was originally published as the cover story in the May, 1979 issue of Canadian Business. Reporter Val Ross, who died in 2008, spent two and a half months researching and writing this lengthy expose of the then Inco Limited. It has become a “classic must read” for anyone wishing to understand the often bitter history between Sudbury and the company that defined the Canadian mining industry.

3-Foreign Wars, Foreign Conquests

World War One boosted International Nickel up fortune’s wheel. The demands of World War Two and the Cold War arms race would put the company over the top – and heading down.

In the second half of the century Inco reaped the consequences of what it had sowed in the first the demand it had created for nickel ultimately exceeded its capacity to produce it – and left a vacuum for new producers to fill. Its booming good health attracted envy from customers, who might, had Inco been less arrogant, have felt more loyalty to the company when the chips were down; and it also attracted the critical attention of governments, consumer groups and environmentalists.

No one foresaw this, of course. The company’s chairman and president during World War Two, Robert Crooks Stanley, the man who’d spent four decades of his life convincing the world of nickel’s place in civilian life, made the necessary adjustments to war in a spirit of confident responsibility. “The first obligation of every corporation,” he noted serenely, “is to give the utmost support to his [sic] government in the prosecution of the war.” He plowed $38.5 million of the company’s money into boosting production by 20% and expanding the Huntington rolling mill facilities. Just as in World War One, the company nearly doubled its nickel output. But to do so it sacrificed costs, efficiency and profits, which dropped from $37 million in 1939 to $25 million in 1945.

Meanwhile, Stanley’s friend and fellow board member, John Foster Dulles, was creating a niche for himself in the postwar world. Dulles chaired the corporate heavyweight Committee for a Just and Durable Peace sponsored by the National Council of Churches of Christ in America; advised the American delegation at the United Nations conference, and made more and more friends with the Republican party establishment. It must have seemed to the board of directors that the company’s postwar position would surely be enhanced by friends with such political power.

They were wrong.

Read more

The Arrogance of Inco – by Val Ross (Originally Published in May 1979 – Part 2 of 4)

“The Arrogance of Inco” was originally published as the cover story in the May, 1979 issue of Canadian Business. Reporter Val Ross, who died in 2008, spent two and a half months researching and writing this lengthy expose of the then Inco Limited. It has become a “classic must read” for anyone wishing to understand the often bitter history between Sudbury and the company that defined the Canadian mining industry.

2-The Monopoly Years

Whether the 20th century would belong to Canada, as Laurier had promised, was anybody’s guess, but it was clear from the start that it would have a place for the nickel from Canada.

No one was under the illusion that its control wasn’t solidly in American hands. The International Nickel Company’s chief executives were American, its refining operations were located in America, and so were its marketing policymakers.

When, in 1890, US Navy tests demonstrated that nickel-steel plate was impervious to shells fired at a velocity of 1,700 feet per second, the Glasgow Herald prophesized the dawn of a new age. “When irresistible nickel-plated breach loader confronts the impenetrable nickel-plated ironclad [vehicle], then…war as a fine art will have come to an end.”

On the contrary, nickel flourished in war-making and war-making flourished with the help of nickel. The Spanish-American War of 1898 demonstrated the invincibility of US nickel-steel-plated ships. Soon nickel was almost entirely a military material. Demand for it quickened in the dreadnought-building races between the Great Powers. Then, in 1914, the guns of war sounded, and nickel boomed. Between 1914 and 1918, the output of the Sudbury area mines more than doubled.

How awkward when it was learned in the middle of the war that some of this product was destined for German guns!

Read more

Some in Canada Say Strike Shows Risk of Foreign Control (The Sudbury Vale Inco Strike) – by New York Times’ Ian Austen (Originally Published January 14, 2010)

The New York Times has the third highest weekday circulation in the United States (after USA Today and the Wall Street Journal) and is one of the country’s most influential newspapers.

SUDBURY, Ontario — Last July, the 3,300 unionized workers who normally work deep below this city in the vast nickel mines owned by Vale Inco did something unusual: they went on strike even though they had already been laid off temporarily.

 Even by the standards of a mining city with a long and often bitter history of labor strife, the nearly six-month walkout by the Canadian arm of the United Steelworkers of America is exceptional, and not just because of its length. To many in Canada, particularly those in the labor movement, the strike has become a symbol of the pitfalls of allowing large corporations to fall under foreign control.

Even before Vale, an iron ore miner based in Brazil that was once state-controlled, completed its acquisition of Inco in 2006, there was a widespread debate in Canada about the “hollowing out” of the country’s corporate sector. Inco had tried to create a Canadian mining giant by offering to buy Falconbridge, a rival that also has extensive operations in Sudbury. But the unsuccessful effort touched off a series of maneuvers that resulted in Inco, one of Canada’s most prominent corporations, being owned by a Brazilian company few Canadians knew and many distrusted.

For Inco’s unions and their supporters, the unusually protracted strike is confirmation of those suspicions.

Read more

Ontario’s Mason-Dixon Line: It all boils down to whether you can live with bears or not – by Roy MacGregor

The Globe and Mail is 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 originally published by Globe and Mail Columnist Roy MacGregor on Friday, September 12, 2003

BIRCH LAKE, ONT. — ‘Maybe I should change my boots,” the owner of Black Bear Lodge says as the reporter hauls a camera out of the trunk of his car.  “I got blood on them — wouldn’t want anyone calling me a murderer, would I?”

It has happened before. A few years ago, Bob Lowe was invited to his daughter Sandra’s high school in Sudbury to explain what he does for a living.  When he arrived, hand-painted signs were taped to the walls.

“Killer.”

“Murderer.”

For the past dozen years, Bob and Vicki Lowe have run a hunting and fishing operation 15 kilometres up a twisting logging road from the tiny village of Webbwood.  Until four years ago, their life was quiet, unnoticed and modestly profitable, right up until the Ontario government banned the spring bear hunt.

And nothing, absolutely nothing, defines the difference between Northern and Southern Ontario better than the spring bear hunt.

This mammoth province, in fact, can be split by the French and Mattawa Rivers, one running west into Lake Huron, the other east to the Ottawa River.  They serve as a watery Mason-Dixon line to cut the north off from the south, both physically and psychologically.

Read more

Coal Mining Ravages Appalachia Mountains – by Catherine Porter (Toronto Star-February 23, 2008)

Catherine Porter is a columnist for 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 on Saturday, February 23, 2008.

They’re ripping the tops off mountains in West Virginia coal country to feed our insatiable appetite for power. It’s cheaper that way. And the trees and the animals and the flooding? It may not be pretty, but we’ve got all those dishwashers to run

CHARLESTON, WEST VIRGINIA–When you flick on the lights this evening, think of Kayford Mountain. Or what was Kayford Mountain, but now is a sprawling, muddy, trembling construction site 100 metres below Larry Gibson’s home.

Three years ago, Gibson hunted wild boar here, picked gooseberries and peaches, and sat under the shade of white oaks and hickories so thick he couldn’t see the sky.
“Now, you can see the sky below your feet,” Gibson says.

The boars have long scurried away. The trees have been reduced to a heap of pulp. The gooseberries have been bulldozed, replaced by rows of explosives. Just past the “Do Not Enter” sign, the mountain has been brought to its knees – cut down like a giant tree. Instead of gazing 200 metres up to its peak, as Gibson once did, you peer down at its rubbly remains, clawed at by giant shovels and trundled off by bucking yellow dump trucks.

There are no birdsong or rustling leaves – just beeping and grinding, and sounds like a 747 taking off.

A small sliver of the former mountain slumps to one side of the construction, like the last piece of Black Forest cake left amid the deflated balloons and streamers. On top are the trees and soil, then sandstone and shale, and at the bottom, a thick chocolate layer – coal.

“They say they can make the land better than it originally was,” says Chuck Nelson, gazing down sorrowfully from his friend’s property, hands in his pockets. “Who can do a better job than God? This land will never be no good for nothing.”

Read more

‘Kill the Avatar Bill!’ (Canada’s Anti-Mining Bill C-300) – by National Post Editor Peter Foster

This opinion piece was published in the National Post, Canada’s second largest national paper on March 09, 2010,

If passed, Bill C-300 would open up Canadian companies to attacks by those who believe mining should stop

“Kill the Avatar bill!”

That’s the cry at this week’s annual meeting of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada in Toronto. Not quite in those words, mind you, but the private member’s bill in question, C-300, is based on the same lurid anti-capitalist, anti-mining fantasies that provided the psychic substructure for James Cameron’s mega-grossing but Oscar-short movie.

Activists last week bought an ad in Hollywood organ Variety to suggest analogies between oilsands development and the sci-fi epic’s tale of interplanetary resource rape and alien cultural genocide. So far, C-300’s supporters don’t seem to have followed that tack, but then perhaps that’s because they include the Catholic Church, which has condemned Avatar for its mystic eco-mumbo jumbo (I know. Pot. Kettle. Etc.)

This week, the PDAC opened a campaign to bombard MPs with letters opposing this potentially disastrous piece of legislation. The real wonder is that the bill, which was proposed by Liberal MP and NGO stooge John McKay, is still alive. In fact, having survived prorogation, it seems to stand little chance of passing a third reading, but then it was never expected to pass a second reading.

Read more