Twitter
Boston-Bay-Mines-Announcement

Canadian Media Resource Articles

Where’s the logic in Ontario’s power play? – by Konrad Yakabuski (Globe and Mail – March 16, 2015)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

The mandate Ontario’s Liberal government handed former TD Bank chief Ed Clark was flawed from the outset. Selling off prized electricity assets to pay for transit projects smacked more of a cash grab than a considered approach to maximizing value and making sound energy policy.

In the end, Mr. Clark’s panel recommended last fall that Ontario maintain full ownership of Hydro One’s transmission assets, made up of 30,000 kilometres of high-voltage lines across the province, and privatize the utility’s distribution arm, which serves 1.4 million Ontarians. “There is far less reason to regard distribution as a core strategic asset than transmission,” the panel said.

As The Globe and Mail revealed last week, however, Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government is now thinking of both selling up to 60 per cent of the transmission business to investors and privatizing the distribution arm in order to spur a sector-wide consolidation among the spate of “local distribution companies” that interface with electricity customers across the province.

Both are interesting ideas. But the devil is in the details. And when it comes to Ontario governments meddling in the electricity sector, the details always seem to ruin everything.

On what grounds can the provincial government justify using proceeds from selling electricity assets to fund transit?

Read more

Snap Lake mine could close if dissolved solid limit not raised: De Beers – by Guy Quenneville (CBC News North – March 13, 2015)

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

Company asking Mackenzie Valley Land and Water Board to nearly triple limit

De Beers Canada says some recommendations for how to tackle a groundwater problem at its Snap Lake diamond mine could, if implemented, result in the mine closing down early — a move that would put 300 N.W.T. residents out of work.

De Beers has encountered higher than expected volumes of total dissolved solids (TDS) — including mineral salts — in water leaking through the inner walls of the underground mine, located 220 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife.

The company treats that water and releases it back into the lake. But to avoid going over the acceptable level of TDS for the lake, the company has also been storing TDS-high water underground since June 2014. De Beers is asking the Mackenzie Valley Land and Water Board to nearly triple the highest allowed level of TDS in Snap Lake to 1,000 milligrams per litre.

“Snap Lake mine cannot continue to operate if a level of [total dissolved solids] is set that is not sustainable,” said Glen Koropchuk, De Beers Canada’s chief operating officer.

Koropchuk said De Beers has already spent $20 million to capture and release TDS-high water at Snap Lake. It’s one of several unanticipated issues Koropchuk says De Beers has faced at Snap Lake since the mine opened in 2008.

Read more

Spring budget is Liberals’ fire sale to cure 12 years of mismanagement – by Christina Blizzard (Toronto Sun – March 14, 2015)

http://www.torontosun.com/

TORONTO – The deficit-plagued Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne is hanging the “For Sale” sign on government assets. The Liberals’ spring budget won’t be so much a fiscally responsible financial document outlining the government’s plan to prudently manage government programs as it will be a fire sale to help fund the Liberals’ 12 years of mismanagement.

Suddenly, Hydro One is for sale. And the government is going to open up wine and beer sales to large grocery stores and rake in millions in franchise fees.

This all has a Nixon to China flavour to it. If a Conservative government suggests changes to liquor sales or selling off utilities, it’s accused of being in the pockets of big business.

When Mike Harris’ government suggested selling off parts of Hydro One more than a decade ago, it was slammed for trading away the province’s “central nervous system.”

The difference back then was that Harris suggested selling off Hydro One because his government philosophically believed the private sector could do a better job. In hindsight, looking at the mess Hydro One is in, Harris was right.

Read more

Mining downturn a chance for governments to craft competitive policies: World Bank (Northern Miner – March 13, 2015)

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry.

Like other regions, Latin America has seen a slowdown in mining investment thanks to the global decline in commodities prices.

But however much it might hurt in the short-term, the slowdown represents a chance for Latin American countries to rethink their strategies around mining and the industry’s strategic role in spurring economic development, says Paulo de Sa, Practice Manager with the World Bank’s Energy and Extractives Global Practice group (GEEDR).

“It’s an opportunity for governments to think about competitiveness of their industries,” he said at a World Bank sponsored forum on mining in Latin America during the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention in March.

While in previous commodity downturns, countries cut taxes to remain competitive in a “race to the bottom,” de Sa is hopeful that this time around, governments will explore other ways to achieve competitiveness. “We believe there are many, many ways of continuing to be attractive to mining investment other than just reducing the taxes,” he said.

To give governments some ideas on how to do that, the forum heard from officials from several different jurisdictions inside and outside of Latin America.

Read more

[Northern Ontario – Iroquois Falls] Small Town Shut Down – The Agenda’s Steve Paikin interviews Michael Shea, Jamison Steeve, Madge Richardson and Stan Sudol (March 11, 2015)

http://theagenda.tvo.org/ Resolute Forest Products is shutting down the newsprint mill in Iroquois Falls, Ontario, a move that will result in the loss of 182 jobs , continuing to erode livelihoods in a town of just 4600. The forestry company essentially built Iroquois Falls a century ago and was its largest employer. Like many other single-resource …

Read more

THE LUNCH: The skinny on ex-Xstrata boss Mick Davis and X2 – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – March 13, 2015)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

LONDON — There’s a lot less to Mick Davis than there used to be.

Let’s start with the man himself. When he was running Xstrata PLC, the mining company he sold to Glencore PLC, the world’s biggest commodities trader, in 2013, he was a big man – “Big Mick,” they called him. He topped out at 317 pounds and had developed Type 2 diabetes. In the interests of survival, he launched a hostile raid on his own girth. Today, Big Mick is on the verge of skinny, at 196 pounds, a downsizing so successful that he no longer has to take diabetes medications.

I ask him how he did it. “You eat less, exercise more, and stick to it,” he says. “I took up cycling and I love it.”  His day job has shrunk too, even more so. At its peak just before the 2008 financial crisis, Xstrata, which bought Canada’s Falconbridge Ltd. in 2006, had a market value of about $85-billion (U.S.), making it the fourth- or fifth-largest mining company in the world, with almost 70,000 employees and contractors.

Today, he runs X2 Resources, which has 10 employees and zero assets other than $4-billion of investor capital, some of it from Canadian pension funds, sitting idly in the bank.

X2 was launched a year ago and has been shopping for mining assets or operating companies, but has come up short. Mr. Davis admits he is finding it harder to buy now than in the previous decade, when he spent $35-billion on 40 rapid-fire acquisitions in one of the greatest bull runs in history. “We’ve given some people an expression of interest,” he said. “I expect to do a deal this year.”

Read more

These gold hunting drones and drills don’t need a permit to make your rich – Business Network News Andrew Bell interviews Shawn Ryan (March 5, 2015)

http://www.bnn.ca/

Article by Jeff Lagerquist, BNN.ca staff

The people behind GroundTruth Exploration Inc. are the Navy SEALS of prospecting. They use innovative technologies to gather precise intelligence. They can work under the harshest conditions deep in the wilderness, almost anywhere in the world, leaving behind virtually no trace. The data they gather can literally be worth millions. And they get the job done with a level of speed and efficiency that threatens to upend the way mineral deposits are found.

Shawn Ryan, principal at GroundTruth relishes the comparison to the elite U.S. fighting force, and says his Yukon Territory-based company’s potent combination of existing technologies newly applied to the prospecting industry can cut exploration costs by 80 percent.

“What would normally cost us two field seasons in the Yukon, and $500,000 to $700,000, we do it in two weeks, any time of the year, for under $100,000,” he said.

Read more

Franco-Nevada ready to bankroll cash strapped producers ahead of exploration drought – Business Network News Andrew Bell interviews Pierre Lassonde (March 3, 2015)

 

http://www.bnn.ca/

Article Jeff Lagerquist, BNN.ca staff

It’s a buyer’s market for gold royalty companies as cash-strapped miners look to fill the capital void left by fleeting venture capital and bank debt. Few know this as well as Franco-Nevada (FNV.TO 1.17%), the Toronto-based rival of Silver Wheaton (SLW.TO 2.16%) who announced a dividend for the first quarter of 2015 earlier this month.

Pierre Lassonde, Franco-Nevada’s chair, is making big bets ahead of the exploration drought he sees five-to-ten years down the road to the tune of U.S. $900 million in 2014.

Franco-Nevada announced in October it’s providing an up-front deposit of $648 million to acquire the gold and silver stream from Freeport-McMoRan Inc.’s (FCX.N -4.1%) Candelaria operation in Chile from Lundin Mining Corporation (LUN.TO -2.14%). It’s the biggest deal of the year for Franco, the royalty and streaming investor that became famous for acquiring a royalty on Barrick Gold’s Nevada mine in 1985.

Read more

More Coal Cuts Needed as Demand for Steel Slows: Commodities – by Liezel Hill and Tim Loh (Bloomberg News – March 12, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

(Bloomberg) — In the last year, mining companies eliminated about 15 million tons of production capacity for the coal used to make steel, while outlining plans to double those cuts in the near future. It won’t be near enough.

That’s the determination of Chief Executive Officer Don Lindsay at Teck Resources Ltd., the world’s second-biggest exporter of metallurgical coal. For supply to match flagging demand, the industry must cut a total of as much as 45 million tons, he says, raising the ante as prices sit at a six-year low.

While U.S. and Australian miners are now losing money on as much as 50 million tons of annual capacity, they’re dragging their feet on reductions at high-cost mines. The result: a “miserable” market for at least six months, and perhaps as long as a year, according to Lindsay.

“There’s a lot of production that’s underwater, but it takes a long time for them actually to shut,” Lindsay said in an interview. “They always last longer than you think.”

There are two main types of coal. Lower-quality coal is burned to generate electricity, and coal with fewer impurities is used to make steel. Metallurgical coal makes up about 15 percent of production, and sells for about twice the price of thermal coal.

Read more

Kirkland Lake mounts a comeback on the Southern Abitibi (Northern Miner – March 12, 2015)

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry.

VANCOUVER — The past two years have been a story of redemption for producer Kirkland Lake Gold (TSX: KGI; US-OTC: KGILF) at its Macassa and South Mine complex in the prolific the Southern Abitibi gold belt 46 km due southeast of Timmins, Ont. The company just wrapped up its third consecutive quarter of positive earnings and free cash flow, and looks poised to hit the upper end of its annual production guidance.

On March 11 Kirkland reported that it sold 39,700 oz. of gold last quarter at an average realized price of US$1,371 per oz., which resulted in cash flow from operations of $23.7 million. Over the past nine months the company has cranked out around 162,000 oz. of gold at all-in sustaining cash costs of US$1,289 per oz., which marks a material improvement over the 131,000 oz. it produced in 2014 at all-in costs of US$2,054 per oz.

The main driver for Kirkland has been higher grades encountered at the South Mine Complex (SMC), which has also resulted in improved throughput rates at the Macassa mill.

Average production rates last quarter were around 934 tonnes per day, which marks a 3% quarter-on-quarter increase. The good news for Kirkland is that it managed a further improvement in January, when throughput averaged 1,107 tonnes per day resulting in the delivery of around 34,500 tonnes of ore to the mill.

Read more

65 Alberta Dams To Be Inspected For Integrity – by John Cotter (Canadian Press/Huffington Post – March 12, 2015)

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/alberta/

EDMONTON – The Alberta Energy Regulator says it will inspect the structural integrity and review the safety records of 65 dams used by the oilsands and coal industries in the province.

The announcement follows criticism by the auditor general that the provincial government is failing to properly regulate Alberta’s network of dams and tailings ponds.

The 65 dams are used to contain industrial waste and the regulator says 32 are classified as posing either “extreme” or “very high” environmental consequences if they were to fail.

CEO Jim Ellis said the regulator will apply the same safety standards to these dams that are used on oil and natural gas pipelines in order to ensure the safe, environmentally responsible development of energy resources.

“The auditor general has recognized the AER’s pipeline regulation performance, and Albertans can be confident that we will apply that same rigour to all AER-regulated dams,” he said. The regulator took responsibility for regulating energy industry dams from Alberta’s Environment Department last year.

Read more

AUDIO: Chambers’ Ring of Fire report card ‘not applicable’ to the north (CBC News Sudbury – March 12, 2015)

http://www.cbc.ca/news

A professor at Laurentian University calls a new report card on the Ring of Fire unfair. The report released this week by the Greater Sudbury and Ontario Chambers of Commerce gives the project a failing grade for development.

The report cites the absence of an agreement with First Nations, problems with permits and a lack of federal funding as the most significant barriers to development.

But David Pearson said the expectations for the project are too great and it’s unreasonable to think that all First Nation communities in the far north can speak to the project with one voice.

“I think the standards that you’ve used to put your F’s on and your C’s and your D’s and so forth are not standards that are applicable to the far north,” he said. Some industry experts have defended the findings, saying the point of the report is to draw a sense of urgency to the project.

A panel discussion on the subject was held in Sudbury Wednesday night at Dynamic Earth. The Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s Josh Hjartarson said he wants to talk about the project, but government officials aren’t returning his phone calls.

He’s said he’s trying to pressure the government to take action. “What I’m trying to say is that we’re spending some political capital,” he continued.

Read more

Northwestern Ontario’s Resourceful Economy [Ring of Fire Episode] (The Agenda with Steve Paikin – March 10, 2015)

http://theagenda.tvo.org/ Northwestern Ontario’s resource economy seemed poised for a game-changing resurgence with the “Ring of Fire” multi-billion dollar mining find. But after a few key delays and departures, the rapid expansion in other mining deposits, including gold, may hold the most immediate promise. The Agenda with Steve Paikin stops into Thunder Bay to survey the …

Read more