Canadian Media Resource Articles – Page 619

Ontario Premier Wynne’s China visit seeks to reduce U.S. reliance – by Adrian Morrow (Globe and Mail – October 25, 2014)

October 28, 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.

Mr. Fang suggested the two countries also work together on the Ring of Fire, a large
chromite deposit north of Thunder Bay. China could use the minerals, he said, if
Ontario can get the necessary rail line built to haul the ore out of the Ring’s
remote location.

TORONTO — Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne will make a full-court press for trade in China next week as she seeks to expand her province’s sluggish economy and wean it off its long-standing dependence on the American market.

The trip unfolds against a backdrop of heightened tension in Sino-Canadian relations. Ottawa and Beijing have accused each other of espionage in recent months, while China continues to grapple with lingering pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. And Ms. Wynne, who is making her first overseas trip as Premier, is pledging not to shy away from raising thorny human-rights issues during her visit.

“I absolutely support peoples’ right to freedom of speech and the right to gather peacefully. I’ve said that to Chinese representatives here, I will say that in China,” she said in an interview at her Queen’s Park office.

Cliffs books $5.9bn loss on iron-ore, coal asset write-downs – by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – October 28, 2014)

October 28, 2014

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

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – US miner Cliffs Natural Resources reported a third-quarter net loss of $5.9-billion, or $38.49 a share, after booking a $5.7-billion write-down of its iron-ore and coal assets.

The Cleveland, Ohio-based company, who came under new management in July, following activist shareholder Casablanca Capital’s victory in a proxy contest, wrote down $4.5-billion related to the Bloom Lake iron-ore project, in Quebec, $28-million related to the shuttered Wabush iron-ore mine, in Labrador, $390-million related to its Asia Pacific Iron Ore (APIO) business segment and $539-million related to its North American Coal assets.

The company also booked a $254-million charge on its chromite assets, after indefinitely pulling out of Ontario’s Ring of Fire earlier this year.

Excluding the one-off charges, the company reported an adjusted profit of $33-million, or $0.21 a share, compared with an adjusted net income of $144-million, or $0.88 a share, in the same three-month period ended October 30 a year earlier.

Consolidated revenues of $1.3-billion were 16% lower year-on-year, mainly owing to iron-ore pricing sliding 32% in the past year, while metallurgical coal pricing declined 17%.

Innu want say in Plan Nord – by Geoffrey Vendeville (Montreal Gazette – October 26, 2014)

October 28, 2014

http://montrealgazette.com/

For Quebec’s Innu First Nations, the provincial government’s lucrative northern development plan represents a “golden opportunity,” under the right circumstances, said chief Gilbert Dominique.

“We’ve said it many times: We’re not against development. We just want it to be done in a way that is respectful of our way of life and the environment, and that there be economic benefits for First Nations,” he said.

The traditional territory of the province’s nine Innu bands covers one-third of the land slated for development under Quebec’s Plan Nord, Innu leaders said in a parliamentary commission Friday.

Seven Innu villages are located on the Côte-Nord, two on Lac-St-Jean and two more across the border in Labrador. Numbering about 16,000, the Innu are the second largest native group in Quebec.

Dominique said his community of Mashteuiatsh isn’t immune to the social ills that afflict other disadvantaged First Nations including higher levels of unemployment, addiction and violence. The Plan Nord may be a way to improve their situation and give younger generations more hope for the future, he said.

Aboriginal rights: A simple matter of rights denied – by Jim Coyle (Toronto Star – October 26, 2014)

October 27, 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.

“People went into the Ring of Fire under the old idea that they could get what
they wanted under the old terms. And it turns out that under the new terms it’s
going to be done differently. This is the shifting of power, just as the pipeline
story is the shifting of power. Suddenly, people are realizing that they can’t get
those pipelines without the aboriginals. That’s real power. This is not the same
Canada.” (Public thinker John Ralston Saul)

If the biggest favour one human being can do another is to speak the truth, especially when that truth is uncomfortable to hear, then Canadians probably owe John Ralston Saul a collective nod of thanks.

To this high season of books by and about aboriginal people in Canada, Saul this week adds The Comeback, a celebration of how native people are empowering themselves, a review of how they’ve been (and continue to be) wronged, and a warning that Canada is at an historic moment when this missing piece in nation-building must be addressed.

He does not claim to speak for aboriginal Canadians. More than ever, they do that for themselves, he says. “There’s a critical mass of aboriginal thinkers and leaders and writers who are using the methods which can get to the population at large — very fine novels, very fine essays, very fine public arguments,” he told the Star.

Doomsay away, it’s still China’s century – by David Olive (Toronto Star – October 25, 2014)

October 27, 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.

Why China matters, even as alarms are sounding about a looming debt crisis in the People’s Republic.

More signs that this century is destined to be recalled as China’s century as much as America’s have appeared in recent weeks, even as alarms have recently been sounded about a looming debt crisis in the People’s Republic, and an alarmist but influential report this week forecasts plunging growth rates in China’s economy through to 2025.

China matters, of course, as a long-time exporter of affordable goods that have increased the standard of living, and reduced the cost of living, for hundreds of millions of North Americans and Europeans. China is also an increasingly important customer for imports. It is now the world’s biggest buyer of industrial robots, for instance. And Beijing long ago assigned to Montreal-based Bombardier Inc. the megaproject of building China’s state-of-the-art intercity commuter rail network.

China has also rapidly created industries that generate vast amounts of electric power and manufacture cars and trucks, jetliners and advanced environmental-protection goods, gaining an early lead on the U.S. in, for instance, solar panels.

“China shouldn’t be underestimated,” economics columnist John Cassidy wrote this week in The New Yorker. “Whatever one thinks of (China’s) authoritarian state-capitalism model, its success in building industries from scratch cannot be denied.”

Federal bill to boost transparency of public, private resource companies – by Shawn McCarthy (Globe and Mail – October 25, 2014)

October 27, 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 — he federal government has introduced legislation requiring resource companies to publish what they pay to foreign and domestic governments, with a plan to include First Nations governments after two years.

Representatives of mining and oil and gas industries welcomed the bill Friday, saying it would make it easier for them to demonstrate the benefits of their investments to local communities at home and abroad.

The long-promised legislation was part of an omnibus bill introduced Thursday, and will impose fines for companies that fail to report payments exceeding $100,000. It covers all publicly traded companies, as well as privately held ones that meet two of the following three conditions: have at least $20-million in assets, $40-million in revenue or 250 employees.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised to pursue the “publish-what-you-pay” initiative at a G20 meeting in Britain in 2013. Some industry groups had urged the provincial securities commissions to take the lead on the effort to be consistent with similar rules in the United States and the European Union.

Saskatchewan mining has quiet future – by Paul Sinkewicz (Regina Leader-Post – October 25, 2014)

October 27, 2014

http://www.leaderpost.com/index.html

Gouging potash from deep beneath Saskatchewan’s surface has been the work of nasty, snarling, belching beasts of machines for more than 60 years.

The application of brute force courtesy of workhorse diesel engines did the job just fine, but with each burly r.p.m. came the inevitable byproducts of internal combustion – fumes and diesel particles and the need to bring more sweet, clean air down the shaft and deep into the subterranean tendrils of the mines.

That will all change if Patric Byrns has his way. The president and CEO of PapaBravo Innovations has been rapidly creating a new way of doing business in the province’s potash mines with a line of electric trucks. They are clean, quiet and powerful, and they are attracting attention.

“You can only exhaust so much diesel particulate into a confined space without expanding the ventilation system,” said Byrns. “So, in that environment, if you can replace diesel engines with electrics, it expands their production capabilities for what they have for ventilation, and ventilation costs a lot of money.”

Byrns said converting to electric vehicles provides operators with almost a blank cheque for how many vehicles they can put underground.

Gordienko, Hunt, Cochrane and Sigurdson: Environmentalists get facts wrong about coal – (Vancouver Province – October 26, 2014)

October 27, 2014

http://www.theprovince.com/index.html

Mark Gordienko is president, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada; Steve Hunt is director, United Steel Workers District 3; Brian Cochrane is business manager, International Union of Operating Engineers Local 115; and Tom Sigurdson is executive director, B.C. Building Trades.

“I look at it from the perspective of the importance of coal…..in terms of employment, it’s huge here but I would remind city folk that it provides employment also for people in the Greater Vancouver area.” — Sparwood Mayor Lois Halko

While there has been much attention and controversy surrounding a small, proposed coal terminal — Fraser Surrey Docks — the larger picture of how important coal mining and exports are to British Columbia’s economy is being missed.

Our unions’ members are the coal miners and workers who ship steelmaking coal from B.C. to markets overseas, where steel is made to produce everything from cellphones to wind turbines to subway cars to surgical equipment.

B.C.’s coal sector employs 26,000 people directly and indirectly, creates $3.2 billion in economic activity and generates $715 million in tax revenues for the province and B.C. cities and towns every year.

‘Please tell people about this:’ London students’ horror at Dominican Republic mines – by Mark Spowart (Metro News – October 27, 2014)

October 27, 2014

http://metronews.ca/

Three London students were shocked by what they found last winter during a trip to the Dominican Republic. Canadian mining companies, they say, are destroying lives in the country.

“We visited the Barrick Gold mine, and while we were there, we spoke with a woman named Juliana (Rodriguez). She is 82 years old and has lived in the area for all of her life,” Klaire Gain said. “She told us the last four years, which (has seen) Barrick Gold mining in the region, have been the worst years of her life.”

Now, Gain, Claire Morrow and Natasha Jimenez — all recent graduates of the social justice and peace program at King’s University College — are working to show the world what they witnessed. Using their own money, and some brought in through fundraisers, the trio travelled back to the region this summer.

They spent two months living in the area, working on farming co-ops, meeting and talking with as many residents, along with environmental and academic experts, as they could. They also hired former CBC cameraman Mark Visser, and flew him to the region where he filmed more than 100 hours of footage for a documentary expected to be ready by spring 2015.

The limits of Ecuador’s shakedown statism – by Peter Foster (National Post – October 24, 2014)

October 24, 2014

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

Ecuador is run by the left-wing caudillo windbag Rafael Correa, whose hero was Hugo Chavez

The great eighteenth century lexicographer and wit Samuel Johnson described second marriage as the “triumph of hope over experience.” How then might one characterize the tendency of Canadian mining companies to return again and again to the altar of commerce with foreign government partners who recall Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction?

This week, Vancouver-based Lundin Group confirmed that a subsidiary would take over the Fruta del Norte prospect in Ecuador from Toronto-based Kinross Gold Corporation for US$240 million. Ecuador is run by the left-wing caudillo windbag Rafael Correa, whose hero was Hugo Chavez, the man who turned oil-rich Venezuela into a basket case.

Mr. Correa’s preferred mode of money-raising is the shakedown. The two most spectacular examples in recent years have been an attempt, via the “Yasuni Initiative,” to blackmail the rest of the world into putting up US$3.6 billion in return for Mr. Correa (italics) not (close italics) drilling for oil in an Amazonian nature reserve; then there is a beyond-fiction trumped-up court case against California-based Chevron Corp. seeking (at last count) US$9.5 billion for alleged damage to the rainforest.

Kinross took a massive flier by buying Fruta del Norte in 2008 for $1.2 billion when Ecuador had no clear mining policy. The company’s attempt to develop FDN turned out to be the proverbial marriage from hell.

How the Fruta del Norte project is another high-risk, high-reward gamble for Lundin Group – by Peter Koven (National Post – October 23, 2014)

October 24, 2014

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

If anyone was going to tackle the Fruta del Norte project, it would naturally be Lukas Lundin.

The Vancouver-based mining entrepreneur has never shied away from investing in the most politically challenging parts of the world. And by getting into countries including Argentina and the Democratic Republic of Congo ahead of the pack, the Lundin Group has taken hold of many world-class projects at low cost and made a fortune for its shareholders.

Fruta del Norte (FDN) fits the bill for Mr. Lundin perfectly. It is arguably the world’s best undeveloped gold deposit, with 6.8 million ounces of very high-grade reserves. It is also in Ecuador, a country that has been inhospitable for mining investment and has scared away the rest of the gold sector. As a result, the asset was available at a bargain-basement price.

“One of those things the Lundin family has done so well over so many years is [obtaining] great assets,” Ron Hochstein, chairman of Lundin shell company Fortress Minerals Corp., said in an interview. “And also having the ability to work with governments and with the population to see them through.”

Fortress announced late Tuesday it will buy FDN from Kinross Gold Corp. for US$240-million in cash and stock. Fortress will be renamed Lundin Gold Inc. and plans to use FDN as the foundation to build a significant gold producer.

BHP Billiton to pursue demerger with no share listing in Canada – by Barry Critchley (National Post – October 22, 2014)

October 23, 2014

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

For the second time in four years, BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s largest mining company — which holds its annual meeting in London Thursday — has announced plans that don’t include a Canadian share listing.

In the summer of 2010, BHP Billiton – the result of the 2001 merger between BHP and Billiton – launched a hostile bid for Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan Inc. It offered US$130 cash a share — a potential US$40-billion transaction.

At the time, BHP Billiton noted it had business interests in Canada dating back almost 40 years.

The most significant interest was EKATI, a diamond mine in which it had invested about US$5-billion since production began in 1998. BHP, which sold the EKATI mine in 2012, had also acquired exploration rights in potash, notably the Jansen mine.

But, perhaps as a reflection of the takeover consideration, BHP Billiton, which at the time had a market cap of US$188-billion, made no plans to list its shares on the TSX. However, late in the game when opposition to its takeover was mounting, it offered a secondary listing on the TSX to complement listings Australia, London, Johannesburg and New York. But its TSX-listing plans were shelved when the takeover was withdrawn after Ottawa nixed the deal after applying the net benefit test.

Define ‘consultation’ and ‘social licence’ – by Jeffrey Simpson (Globe and Mail – October 22, 2014)

October 23, 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.

What does it mean to be “consulted?” Does it mean to give an opinion and to be heard? To have your views prevail? To exercise a veto? We don’t know, and as a result of this, much confusion surrounds public decisions, especially for projects that require this amorphous idea of “consultation” or “social licence” to proceed.

Who defines “social licence?” Interest groups such as NGOs or businesses? Courts? Public opinion, but as measured by what? Polls? Write-in campaigns? Social media comments? Street demonstrations? Elections?

The confusion about “consultation” and “social licence” deepens when it comes to Canada’s First Nations. Courtesy of court rulings and depending on their title or land claim or treaty, aboriginals have to be “consulted,” their interests “accommodated,” and, if title is demonstrated, give their assent – except in the face of a “pressing and substantial” public interest.

What might that be, the “public interest?” Take the Northern Gateway pipeline to pump Alberta bitumen oil through northwestern British Columbia to Asia-Pacific markets.

The three-person National Energy Board panel that exhaustively studied the pipeline proposal – and supported it, with 209 conditions – declared that “the public interest is the interest of all Canadians.”

Yukon mining project partners with China (CBC News North – October 22, 2014)

October 23, 2014

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

Collaboration with Beijing institute could ‘reduce costs by 40%’ says Canadian CEO

A mining project in Yukon is hiring Chinese engineers. Copper North Mining is planning for work in the Carmacks area. The company has announced a firm in Beijing will help design a process to help it recover copper, gold and silver.

The project is at the feasibility study stage but Chinese workers will help design the mine and ship equipment to Canada.

Harlan Meade is President and CEO of Copper North Mining. He says this approach could reduce costs by as much as 40 per cent.

“What (Copper North Mining) is doing is getting them to do the detailed design engineering. We oversee it here in Canada then we get the procured equipment in China. We have it delivered and then our Canadian engineering firm, JDS Energy and Mining Inc, does the construction management, mining, earth works, and the other parts of the project.”

Meade says Chinese engineers would provide “about half” of the work at the feasibility stage with Canadian engineers hired to do the rest.

The project would see also savings as it would obtain its equipment directly from Chinese suppliers.

Taseko seeks to sue Ottawa for damages over B.C. mine rejection – by Peter Koven (National Post – October 22, 2014)

October 23, 2014

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

Taseko Mines Ltd. claims the federal government acted unlawfully in pushing its British Columbia copper project off the rails. Its solution: Try to sue the government for damages and to find out precisely what happened.

On Wednesday, Taseko will appear in a federal court in Vancouver to argue that its two judicial review applications to Ottawa should be combined into one civil lawsuit seeking damages. The move, which appears to be unprecedented, is being fiercely opposed by the government.

“We haven’t found another instance where a company in precisely this position sues the federal government,” said lawyer John Hunter of Hunter Litigation Chambers, which is representing Taseko.

Taseko claims it was the only logical course of action. The Vancouver-based miner says it has evidence of actual malfeasance by federal officials, including secret meetings with opponents of the $1.5-billion New Prosperity project that could have swung Ottawa’s decision.

The project has been controversial for many years. Taseko’s first Prosperity mine proposal was approved by the British Columbia government in 2010, but rejected by Ottawa later that year. It cited environmental concerns over Taseko’s plan to drain the nearby Fish Lake.