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Canadian Media Resource Articles

After 22 Years, Canada’s Aboriginals Issue First Bond – by Ari Altstedter (Bloomberg News – June 19, 2014)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

When Deanna Hamilton returned to her British Columbia Indian reserve after taking early retirement, she found herself revisiting a mystery she had encountered as a child.

Unlike her reserve, the city of Kelowna across the lake didn’t suffer from foul-tasting drinking water, unlit streets or sewage-saturated lawns that discouraged children from playing outside.

In short order, Hamilton discovered an explanation in one of capitalism’s most basic tenets: Kelowna could finance its superior infrastructure by raising money in the debt markets — an option not open to her Westbank First Nation reserve.

From there, it was simply a matter of gaining acceptance for an aboriginal bond — a process that tested her perseverance through 22 years. This is the week Hamilton, 71, should finally see the First Nations Finance Authority, which she helped create, issue Canada’s first bonds backed by aboriginal governments.

Ernie Daniels, chief executive officer of the finance authority, said he expects to sell C$90 million ($83 million) worth of 10-year notes with National Bank of Canada as the lead underwriter.

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Ring of Fire planning should be holistic, study advises – by Colin Perkel (CTV News – June 18, 2014)

http://www.ctvnews.ca/

The Canadian Press – Exploitation of Ontario’s Far North offers the potential for huge economic benefits but could also result in conflict and large-scale environmental degradation unless a comprehensive, regionally based planning is used before development gets underway, a new scientific paper indicates.

The working paper, to be released Thursday, warns that current piecemeal assessment tools are inadequate for the vast, unspoiled but mineral-rich region known as the Ring of Fire.

The issue has taken on new significance with the province’s newly re-elected Liberal government promising quick action on development in the region. “Ontario will have only one chance to get it right in the Far North,” the paper states.

“We simply will not be able to circle back and undo poorly considered decisions about development, infrastructure or ecological and social tradeoffs once plans are approved and shovels are in the ground.”

The paper by the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada and Ecojustice Canada advocates a holistic approach to development planning.

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Marten Falls First Nation chief says water ’emergency’ ignored – by Jody Porter (CBC News Thunder Bay – June 18, 2014)

 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay

Remote Northern Ontario reserve has been without safe drinking water for nearly a decade

The Chief of Marten Falls First Nation says the government isn’t taking a drinking water emergency in his community seriously. A boil water advisory for Marten Falls was first issued in 2005. The First Nation has been without potable water since then.

Now, Eli Moonias said a broken water filter at the water treatment plant means the tap water is no longer safe, even for bathing. Moonias said he’s worried someone will get seriously ill from the bacteria in the water.

“It’s possible, you know, we could have a situation here similar to Walkerton if someone ingests bacteria,” the chief said, referencing the southern Ontario town where people died after drinking contaminated tap water.

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China’s largest gold miner looks to partner with Barrick, Newmont – by Rachelle Younglai (Globe and Mail – June 18, 2014)

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.

China’s state-owned gold mining company is working on potential partnerships with both Barrick Gold Corp. and Newmont Mining Corp., its president said on Tuesday.

If the Asian company is successful, the alliances would bring one or both of the Western miners closer to China, a country that is now the world’s largest consumer and producer of the yellow metal.

“Both sides are making an effort to co-operate in the future,” Xin Song, the president of China National Gold Group Corp., China’s largest gold producer, said in an interview.

For Toronto-based Barrick, the talks represent a step forward, one that could be the beginning of a long-lasting and meaningful union that Barrick’s new chairman John Thornton wants to establish with the Chinese.

When Mr. Thornton was an executive at Goldman Sachs, he started developing relationships with key Chinese policymakers. The investment banker was chosen by Barrick’s founder Peter Munk for his contacts in China to align Barrick more closely with the rapidly growing economy and to further his vision of turning Barrick into a major, diversified miner.

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Government silent as questions mount about asbestos danger – by Gloria Galloway (Globe and Mail – June 18, 2014)

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.

OTTAWA — The federal Conservative government is refusing to join the rest of the developed world in declaring that there are no safe uses for asbestos, even though the material is the top workplace killer in Canada and deaths from exposure are expected to rise.

While such countries as Australia, Japan, Sweden and Britain have imposed a ban on the flame-retardant mineral once widely employed in construction and still used in other applications including brake pads, Canada continues to allow asbestos to be both imported and exported.

The government would not respond directly on Tuesday to a question from the opposition about why the policy has not changed despite overwhelming evidence of the health risks.

A Globe and Mail report on Saturday said the federal government has dragged its feet in protecting this country’s citizens from asbestos’s deadly effects, and that more than 1,200 successful claims for fatality benefits were made in Canada between 2007 and 2012.

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First Nations hold the key to the Northern Gateway pipeline – by Ken Coates (Globe and Mail – June 18, 2014)

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.

Ken Coates is Canada Research Chair in regional innovation at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy in Saskatchewan, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

The government of Canada has made an obvious and much-anticipated decision on the Northern Gateway pipeline, but the debate is far from over. Based on the report of the Joint Review Panel, which recommended approval subject to important modifications and conditions, and the government’s strong commitment to resource development, few expected the plan to be rejected.

Now the real work begins. The criticism of the Northern Gateway project is broad and comprehensive, but there are three main opponent groups who have to be addressed:

First are the environmentalists, who oppose the expanded development of the oil sands and see the northern Alberta resource as a climate-change danger. This group is substantially unreconcilable. Their critique is well-known, and the federal government has rejected their intervention on many occasions. There is no federal effort to mollify this group.

Second are the environmentalists concerned about the potential effects of an oil spill on northern British Columbia and the coastal waterways outwards from Kitimat.

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Northern Gateway approval from Ottawa now means British Columbia must get on board – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – June 18, 2014)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

With the Conservative government’s approval of Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway pipeline Tuesday, the spotlight now is on British Columbia — politicians, aboriginals, ordinary citizens — to get on board.

They’re the holdouts in this over-the-top melodrama that’s out of step with the rest of the country’s desire to diversify its export markets and get top value for its resources. It’s particularly out of step with Alberta, which desperately needs passage to the West Coast for its oil, much as B.C. natural gas has for decades traversed Albertan lands on the way to U.S. consumers.

British Columbians, too, need to accept the judgment of Canada’s institutions and trust Canada’s energy sector to deliver on its commitments.

Anything less presents a risk to the province that is more immediate than any risk to the environment of an oil pipeline or tanker rupture — a reputation for B.C. as a rogue jurisdiction where the economy is held hostage by environmentalists and aboriginals who oppose lots and offer little.

British Columbians seem to have forgotten that they courted Northern Gateway in the first place; making claims that Ottawa is imposing this project against their will is dishonest.

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The Invisible Epidemic [Asbestos] – by Tavia Grant (Globe and Mail – June 14, 2014)

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.

For John Nolan, the first warning signs came mid-November of last year while he was leading a tour in the Peruvian Andes. Mr. Nolan, 67, who lives in Fort Erie in southwestern Ontario, was guiding a group through the mountains near the storied Incan city of Cuzco.

He had criss-crossed the planet for years as a tour guide, and knew what higher altitudes typically felt like. But something terrifying happened while he was hauling his luggage up some steep stone steps to his cabin.

“I’ve never been out of breath in such a panicky, horrible way,” Mr. Nolan says in a raspy voice between laboured breaths. “Normally, when you run out of breath, you know you’re going to get it back. This was different. It was as if you were hitting a stone wall, with no hope of getting air. It was like suffocating.”

The diagnosis, back at home, was swift and cruel. It was mesothelioma — an incurable cancer caused almost exclusively by asbestos exposure. Mr. Nolan was initially given a few months to live.

Asbestos is the top on-the-job killer in Canada. But a Globe and Mail investigation has found that this stark fact has been obscured by the country’s longstanding economic interest in the onetime “miracle mineral.” Even though Canada’s own asbestos industry has dwindled from pre-eminence to insignificance —

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Canadian government approves Enbridge’s controversial Northern Gateway pipeline – by Shawn McCarthy and Steven Chase (Globe and Mail – June 17, 2014)

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.

OTTAWA — The Harper government has approved construction of the proposed $7.9-billion Northern Gateway pipeline, setting up a battle in British Columbia with opponents who vow to use every means possible to block it.

In releasing the much-anticipated decision Tuesday, Natural Resources Minister Greg Rickford said the government accepted the advice of a federal review panel which recommended in December that cabinet approve Enbridge Inc.’s project, subject to the company meeting 209 conditions covering safety, environmental protection and consultations with local communities, including First Nations.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has long argued that Canada must have access to west coast ports for its booming oil sands industry, a conviction that hardened after the Obama administration delayed a decision on whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast. The government made the announcement through a press release, with neither Mr. Rickford, nor the government’s B.C. heavyweight, Industry Minister James Moore, available to answer questions.

Speaking prior to the announcement in the House of Commons, Mr. Harper said his government would not approve a resource project “unless we can determine that it is safe for the environment and safe for Canadians.”

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Kinross lobbying Ottawa over sanctions – by Rachelle Younglai (Globe and Mail – June 17, 2014)

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.

Kinross Gold Corp. has been working feverishly to ensure that its prized Russian mines do not become a casualty of the diplomatic spat between Russia and the West.

During a difficult period in which the company has struggled to placate both sides, federal lobbying records made public in June show that Kinross’s chief executive Paul Rollinson and a lobbyist for the Toronto-based gold miner have had numerous communications with the Canadian government’s top officials, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s foreign affairs policy adviser.

The high level of interactions with the federal government comes as investors fret over Western sanctions against Russia, which were imposed in an attempt to curb the country’s aggression in Ukraine.

In April, Kinross hired three lobbyists with ties to Mr. Harper’s Conservative government. The lobbyists include Michael Coates, the chief executive of Hill and Knowlton Canada and a former adviser to Mr. Harper who helped him prepare for elections in 2004, 2006 and 2008.

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Rising instability may make $100-a-barrel oil seem cheap – by Peter Tertzakian (Globe and Mail – June 17, 2014)

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.

“Five years ago, they told us we were running out of oil,” the speaker quips with a chuckle. Grinning, he pauses and fires the shot at the audience, “But we didn’t run out of oil.”

You’ll often hear variations of this wisecrack delivered at energy conferences or in written words. But the notion that a shortage of oil was avoided circa 2007 is misplaced. Make no mistake: The world did run out of oil in that decade. The world ran out of $20 (U.S.) oil.

It’s an unsettling reality that the price of a barrel had to jump fivefold and sustain at $100 before producers found the inventiveness to coax more out of the ground. And it’s remarkable that even after this sharp quintupling of price, global demand still continues to grow at over one million barrels a day, year over year.

Ten years ago, in the geriatric oil fields of the United States, Canada and the North Sea, a twenty-dollar bill had long lost its appeal as a draw for domestic investment. Abroad, twenty bucks lacked lustre in many major oil-producing countries. “Above ground” fiscal friction like corruption and geopolitics had added a fat layer of soft costs to the hard problem of satisfying unsustainable consumption growth from emerging economies.

“We’re not running out of oil.

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Treasury Metals aiming at becoming Ontario’s next gold producer – by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – June 17, 2014)

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Recent drilling results at TSX-listed Treasury Metals’ Goliath project, in western Ontario, have confirmed that gold mineralisation at a new zone continues at depth, highlighting the significant exploration upside at a project the company bills as probably being Ontario’s next gold producer.

Speaking to Mining Weekly Online in an interview on Monday, Treasury president and CEO Martin Walter noted that the company was well on its way to progressing the project up the value curve, being fully funded by South Africa-based Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) through to the “shovel-ready” stage.

“We have found a number of encouraging intercepts in the high-grade area of the C Zone, which is shaping our plans positively for the eventual underground mine. We will be testing more of these high-grade targets later in the year and we honestly believe that we will be able to breach the two-million-ounce resource level with our next resource update due out in the third quarter,” he said in Toronto.

Treasury last week reported that the company’s current drilling programme at Goliath, which was aimed at expanding the gold resource within the developing C Zone horizon as well as to tighten grades and extend known mineralisation at the Main Zone through infill drilling, was confirming significant upside to increase the resource beyond its current limits.

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Canaries and Coffins – by Russell Noble (Canadian Mining Journal – June/July 2014)

Russell Noble is the editor for the Canadian Mining Journal, Canada’s first mining publication.

Canaries and coffins were once commonly listed as “supplies” at many mines because as we all know, in the earlier days of underground mining, particularly coal mining, the working conditions weren’t all that great and safety certainly wasn’t a consideration.

In fact, they were deplorable based on some historical photos I’ve seen that show workers subjecting themselves to environments unimaginable by today’s standards. Mind you, particularly during the aftermath of the recent Soma disaster in Turkey, are the mines of the world really all that much better today?

One would hope so but increasingly we’re hearing of, and seeing more examples that demonstrate they’re not!

There’s no argument that the mines in North America and many others around the world for that matter that are owned
and operated from here are safer by comparison, but it’s the others that are run in a haphazard manner by sketchy owners and governments with no respect nor compassion for the well-being of their miners that broad brush the mining industry as being heartless and negligent.

What just happened in Turkey, and routinely happens in China I suspect, just shows how little value too many governments place on their own people.

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Ontario’s economic fundamentals need fixing – by Kevin G. Lynch (Toronto Star – June 17, 2014)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Now that Ontario’s government is decided, it’s time to address a series of economic challenges that we ignore at our peril.

With Ontario’s government now decided, the governing begins. And it will be a challenging task. Ontario faces economic challenges that we ignore at our peril. The pace of growth has declined, and it is permanent, not temporary. The government debt of Ontario is high, and still rising. The productivity of Ontario business is low, and barely increasing, while its innovation performance is poor and shows only isolated pockets of improvement. The Ontario cost base, from electricity to regulations to congestion is relatively high, and shows few signs of becoming more competitive. As the Jobs and Prosperity Council bluntly observed, the status quo is not an option for Ontario.

Growth in Ontario, long the stalwart of the Canadian economy, averaged roughly three per cent annually from 1980 to just before the global recession, but is now heading downwards to a long term growth path of only 2.1 per cent per year according to the government’s Long-Term Report on the Economy, or even lower by other estimates.

This massive decline in Ontario’s potential growth is the result of a variety of interconnected factors: aging demographics, weak productivity growth, structural shifts in manufacturing competitiveness and sustained weakness in our traditional trading partners. What is clear is that a failure to rebuild Ontario’s growth capacity will affect everything from the affordability of public services to the number and quality of jobs to living standards.

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Euromax proving to be an exception for Canadian mining firms in Europe – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – June 16, 2014)

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.

Canadian mining companies have had a rough go in Europe. Clobbered by political indecision and fierce opposition from environmental groups, Gabriel Resources seems on the verge of abandoning its 15-year attempt to open the continent’s biggest gold mine, in Romania. Eldorado Gold has been besieged by protests and an arson attack that have slowed, though not killed, its mine development in northern Greece.

Euromax Resources is proving the exception to the rule that no Canadian mining development in Europe shall go unchallenged. The company’s shares, which are listed on Toronto’s Venture exchange, tripled over a three-day period starting June 5, when it released a pre-feasibility study that, it claimed, amply displayed the “economic robustness” of its Ilovitza gold-copper deposit in southeast Macedonia. The shares last traded at 60 cents; at one point in April, they were under a dime.

The encouraging study means that the $500-million (U.S.) open-pit mine is almost certain to go ahead. “We have the chance to build the first greenfield mine that anyone has seen in the Balkans for 30 years,” says Euromax CEO Steve Sharpe.

Even better, the permitting risk, while not absent, seems low. Macedonia is a new country that is working hard to attract foreign investors. To streamline development, it front-end loads the permitting process, that is, government departments and regulators provide permits based on detailed conceptual studies. “You get government buy-in from day one,” Mr. Sharpe says, noting that Euromax expects no problems in obtaining the construction permit.

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