Historic vase made from metals mined in B.C. goes on display in Whistler museum – by Kevin Griffin (Vancouver Sun – May 17, 2016)

http://vancouversun.com/

A metal vase with a mysterious past and a connection to the mining wealth of B.C. is being exhibited for the first time in this province at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler. Called the Ptarmigan vase, it’s a kind of homecoming for the expertly crafted luxury item made out of metals mined in B.C. by silversmiths who worked for Tiffany & Co in New York.

In 1901, about one ton of copper, silver and gold was mined from Tunnel 3 of the Ptarmigan Mine in the Selkirk Mountains in southeastern B.C. A year later, the ore was shipped and refined in New Jersey into seven bricks of copper, 3½ bricks of silver and one button-sized piece of gold.

The Ptarmigan vase is made from 18 thin layers of copper and silver refined from that shipment. The mixed metal laminate vase was created by a technique called mokume, a Japanese metalworking procedure that creates surfaces which resemble wood grain.

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Fort McMurray fire sweeps east through northern oilsands sites – by Marion Warnica (CBC News Edmonton – May 17, 2016)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/

The Fort McMurray wildfire has destroyed one of the oilsands camps north of the city and is roaring eastward toward others in its path.

The fire destroyed all 665 units at Blacksand Executive Lodge, which provided temporary housing for workers in nearby oil facilities, on Tuesday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, flames were at the edges of the Noralta Lodge camp, just a few kilometres east of Blacksand.

CBC News also obtained photos of flames at the edges of an AFD Petroleum facility, about five kilometres northwest of Noralta. Officials said the fire was expected to move east on Tuesday and would likely jump Highway 63 south of Noralta Lodge. Businesses in the area have been alerted. “We have an evacuation plan and we’re ready to use it,” said Dave Harman, a director for the Northlands Sawmill.

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Kyrgyzstan denounces Centerra directors, withholds votes again – by Peter Koven (Financial Post – May 18, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

TORONTO — One of Centerra Gold Inc.’s Kyrgyz directors denounced the company at its annual meeting on Tuesday, saying there is “urgent need” for change at the management and board level.

“There are fundamental breaches of trust between Centerra and the government of the Kyrgyz Republic, which has led to instability of the Kumtor project,” Bektur Sagynov, deputy chairman at Kyrgyzaltyn JSC, told shareholders at the meeting in Toronto.

State-owned Kyrgyzaltyn, which controls 32 per cent of Centerra shares, also withheld votes for all of the gold miner’s non-Kyrgyz directors for the second straight year. It withheld votes on some directors in prior years.

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Climate crazy Ontari-ari-ario’s no place to grow, but to get the hell out of – by Ross McKitrick (Financial Post – May 18, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

“Ontario is responsible for such a tiny fraction of global
emissions.[About 0.5%] The Wynne government repeatedly defends
its bungling of the electricity sector on the grounds that at
least it closed two coal-fired power plants. Meanwhile, in
2015 alone, China approved construction of 155 new coal-fired
power plants. … The climate file has pushed deranged
extremism into mainstream policy planning.”

The latest news out of Queen’s Park is that Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals plan to deindustrialize Ontario. Of course they don’t call it that; they prefer the term “decarbonize.” But for an industrial economy, the government’s new climate action plan, leaked to reporters this week, amounts to the same thing.

The proposed scheme beggars belief. Having phased out coal-fired power, the province now plans to phase out natural gas, the only reliable alternative for non-baseload generation. Despite electric cars being extremely costly and unpopular, more than one in 10 new car sales will need to be electric, and every two-car household will have to own at least one electric car.

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David Rosenberg says there’s a big problem with Canada’s ‘face-ripping rally’ in material stocks – by Eric Lam (Financial Post – May 18, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Bloomberg News – Canadian raw materials stocks are having their best start to the year in at least three decades. Some analysts say the rally is missing a fundamental underpinning — economic growth.

A gauge of the country’s largest raw-materials companies including gold, copper, lumber, and fertilizer producers soared 41 per cent through May 16, the best year-to-date performance since at least 1988, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The rebound comes after materials stocks slumped 23 per cent in 2015, capping a record five-year decline in which the gauge lost 63 per cent of its value.

“I’ve got three words for you: Dead. Cat. Bounce,” said David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff & Associates Inc. in Toronto. His firm manages about $8.2 billion.

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Billionaire George Soros buys US$263.7 million stake in Barrick Gold – by John Shmuel (Financial Post – May 17, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Soros Fund Management made a big bet on Barrick Gold Corp. in the first quarter, scooping up a US$263.7 million stake in the miner. The fund, chaired by billionaire investor George Soros, disclosed that it now owns 19.4 million shares in Barrick, making it Soros’ largest U.S.-listed holdings and giving him a 1.7 per cent stake in the miner.

The bet on gold and Barrick has certainly been profitable. Barrick’s stock is up 138 per cent this year, making it one of the best performers on the TSX.

Barry Allan, senior mining analyst at Mackie Research Capital Corporation, said that the acquisition is part of the big move back into gold miners that has become one of the hottest rallies of the year. Many managers on Bay Street had emptied out of Barrick and other gold names over the past couple of years, leaving the companies heavily undervalued.

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Rio Tinto reaches 100 million carats milestone at the Diavik diamond mine (Mining.com – May 17, 2016)

http://www.mining.com/

Rio Tinto, the operator of the Diavik diamond mine in Canada, has announced a major milestone of producing 100 million carats of rough diamonds since the mine commenced in 2003.

Rio Tinto Diamonds, Salt & Uranium managing director Simon Trott said “We are delighted to reach this milestone and I am enormously proud of the teams who have helped make this happen safely and responsibly in some of the harshest operating conditions in the world.”

The Diavik diamond mine, located on an island in a remote sub-arctic lake, is Canada’s largest diamond mine. The mine produces predominantly gem quality diamonds destined for high end jewellery in all major consumer markets around the world.

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Cobalt: The Bass Player in the Tesla Band – by Peter Clausi (InvestorIntel.com – May 16, 2016)

http://investorintel.com/

Numbers are numbers and facts are facts: we make serious money when we figure out how those statistics could affect the future. For the past year, we’ve been haranguing about the global shortage of cobalt. We’re not alone in this. See John Petersen‘s series of beautifully analytical data-driven articles and Chris Ecclestone‘s thesis. The key facts you need to know:

1. roughly 97% of the world’s supply of cobalt is produced as a by-product of nickel or copper production. Fact;

2. the spot prices for copper and nickel have plummeted to and have stayed at levels that make many deposits uneconomic. Fact;

3. as a result of these economics, the owners of some of those copper and nickel mines are closing the mines, putting those mines on care and maintenance in a Hail Mary that someday the commodity price will recover enough to someday make these mines economic. Fact;

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Moody’s downgrades rail sector outlook as coal shipments drop – by Eric Atkins (Globe and Mail – May 17, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

A plunge in the amount of freight moving on North American railways has spurred Moody’s Investors Service to downgrade the outlook for the sector to negative.

An “unprecedented” 37-per-cent year-over-year drop in coal shipments in April will help drive down overall freight volumes down by about 4 per cent this year and send revenues down by as much as 2 per cent for the major carriers, said Rene Lipsch, a Moody’s analyst.

“North American railroads face deeper and longer-lasting declines in freight volumes than we had previously anticipated,” Mr. Lipsch said in a note to clients on Monday. Coal carloads, which account for almost 30 per cent of the rail traffic in North America, have fallen by 33 per cent this year, according to the Association of American Railroads.

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Trudeau’s reliance on West to meet hefty greenhouse gas emission reductions could backfire – by Claudia Cattaneo (Financial Post – May 17, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made ambitious commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Paris last December — and now he will lean heavily on Canada’s western provinces to ensure he meets them.

That’s the unsettling conclusion of a report by the Canada West Foundation (CWF), appropriately titled “Look Out,” which urges Western provinces to “bury the hatchet” after years of bickering over pipelines and form a common front to protect their resource-based economies from Ottawa’s coming power grab.

The report by the Calgary-based think-tank, released Monday, also urges Western provinces to develop a common carbon price and design climate change policies appropriate for their economies, such as building a Western electricity grid that uses hydro produced in British Columbia and Manitoba to help Alberta and Saskatchewan get off coal and natural gas.

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Eldorado Gold Corp to exit China in US$600 million deal with Yintai Group affiliate – by Peter Koven (Financial Post – May 17, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Eldorado Gold Corp. is finally making its long-awaited exit from China.

The Vancouver-based miner unveiled a deal Monday to sell its White Mountain, Tanjianshan and Eastern Dragon operations in China for US$600 million in cash. The buyer is an affiliate of the Yintai Group, a large Chinese conglomerate involved in many different industries.

Just three weeks ago, Eldorado agreed to sell its Jinfeng mine to China National Gold Group for US$300 million. The result of these two transactions is that Eldorado gets completely out of China for US$900 million. Eldorado was also studying an initial public offering of its Chinese assets, but these two sales make for a quicker and cleaner exit.

Eldorado has been trying to divest its Chinese business since 2014. The mines are smaller than its core projects in Turkey and Greece, and the company is facing a challenging political environment in Greece that requires management’s full attention.

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Energy, auto sectors raise red flags over Ontario climate plan – by Adrian Morrow and Greg Keenan (Globe and Mail – May 17, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

TORONTO – Ontario’s energy and auto industries say they were surprised by the province’s ambitious plan to slash greenhouse gases, warning that it will drive up home heating costs by as much as $3,000 for homeowners, and that auto makers will not produce enough electric cars to meet its targets.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, say the blueprint puts the province in the vanguard of the battle against climate change, outpacing every other province but Quebec.

The Liberal government’s $7-billion Climate Change Action Plan, scheduled for release in June but obtained this week by The Globe and Mail, promises to start phasing out natural gas for home heating. This will be done partly through incentives for owners of homes and buildings to install geothermal and solar heating, and partly by changes to the building code mandating that, by 2030, all new houses and small buildings be heated by something other than fossil fuels. Natural gas currently provides 76 per cent of the province’s heat.

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Ontario’s big, green assisted economic suicide plan – by Kevin Libin (Financial Post – May 17, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

“In assessing “investment changes in key economic sectors” resulting
from carbon pricing, the roundtable bluntly projected that spending
in the mineral and freight transport sector would virtually dry up due
to “reduced output” (refining, too, although that’s meant as a feature,
not a bug). Investment would also shrink in those “value-added”
industries that provincial governments love — from cars and paper
mills, to chemicals, metals, and building construction.”

To get an idea of what Ontario could look like a couple of decades out under Liberal energy minister Glen Murray’s “climate action plan” — which was revealed in detail in Monday’s Globe and Mail — who better to rely on than the man himself, Glen Murray?

Back in 2008, when he chaired the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, Murray — along with his acting CEO, Alex Wood, now executive director of the Ontario Climate Change Directorate — offered up a plan that looked remarkably similar to the new Liberal cabinet document. In fairness, the NRTEE document hardly offered the perniciously micro-managed prescriptions for people and businesses that Murray has graduated to now.

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Alaska asks John Kerry to raise B.C. mine pollution concerns with Canada – by Mark Hume (Globe and Mail – May 15, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

VANCOUVER — British Columbia’s downstream neighbours in Alaska have long been concerned about mining pollution flowing across the border. Now that B.C.’s Auditor-General has confirmed that those fears are well founded, issuing an audit recently that found the province is doing a poor job of regulating its mines, three Alaskan politicians have elevated the issue in Washington.

In a letter sent on Thursday, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, and Congressman Don Young, urged U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to talk about it with the Canadian government.

“We write to express our continuing concerns about the development of several hardrock mines in British Columbia and their potential effects on water quality in the transboundary rivers that flow from Canada into southeast Alaska,” the letter states.

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Ontario to spend $7-billion on sweeping climate change plan – by Adrian Morrow and Greg Keenan (Globe and Mail – May 16, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

TORONTO — The Ontario government will spend more than $7-billion over four years on a sweeping climate change plan that will affect every aspect of life – from what people drive to how they heat their homes and workplaces – in a bid to slash the province’s carbon footprint.

Ontario will begin phasing out natural gas for heating, provide incentives to retrofit buildings and give rebates to drivers who buy electric vehicles. It will also require that gasoline sold in the province contain less carbon, bring in building code rules requiring all new homes by 2030 to be heated with electricity or geothermal systems, and set a target for 12 per cent of all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2025.

While such policies are likely to be popular with ecoconscious voters, who will now receive government help to green their lives, they are certain to cause mass disruption for the province’s automotive and energy sectors, which will have to make significant changes to the way they do business. And they have already created tension within the government between Environment Minister Glen Murray and some of his fellow ministers who worry he is going too far.

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