Twitter

Corporate Social Responsibility

Northern Ontario Aboriginal youth camps help build a new generation of miners

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.

Congratulations to the dozens of new graduates from three Mining Matters Aboriginal Youth Camps held recently.  With the support of Ontario Mining Association member Noront Resources, these special week long educational camps for Aboriginal youth were held in Webequie, Marten Falls and Thunder Bay.

Close to 100 people graduated from these three programs in Northwestern Ontario.  While most of the participants were children of elementary and high school age, there were a number of adults who took part in the course at Confederation College in Thunder Bay, which did a first-rate job managing and hosting the educational program.

Each camp was five days in length and it offered students the opportunity to gain knowledge about Earth science and the mineral industry through hands-on learning and activities.  The camp involved classroom and field lessons.  Topics covered included basic geology and the structure of the earth, GPS and compass work, prospecting, line cutting, geochemistry, biodiversity, health and safety, mining operations and career options within the sector.

Read more

Canada lax in support of efforts to ease corruption abroad – by Don Cayo (Vancouver Sun – September 9, 2011)

www.vancouversun.com

http://eiti.org/ (Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative)

Canada is less enthusiastic than it ought to be in support of a high-level attempt to shine light into the oftenmurky world of international mining and oil extraction, says the head of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.

And Canadian companies drag their feet worse than our government, says Clare Short, the former U.K. cabinet minister who made her country a leader in effective international development and is now the chair of the decade-old initiative launched by former British prime minister Tony Blair and supported by the G8.

The federal government endorses the initiative and has a representative on its board, and seven major companies – Vancouver-based Goldcorp and Teck, plus Barrick, Kinross, Rio Tinto, Talisman and Vale – have signed on to abide by the principles of the initiative.

But Canadian companies punch far above the country’s weight in international mining – Short says Canadian miners are the biggest single international player in Africa, for example – and she thinks many more should be on board.

Read more

[Agnico-Eagle Meadowbank gold mine] Inuit embrace mining to secure future – by Marilyn Scales (Canadian Mining Journal – August, 2010)

Marilyn Scales is a field editor for the Canadian Mining Journal, Canada’s first mining publication. She is one of Canada’s most senior mining commentators.

Site Visit By Field Editor Marilyn Scales

A true partnership has been forged by Agnico-Eagle Mines and the Inuit of Baker Lake, Nunavut, one that treats the land with respect and provides a modern future for young members of the community. The elders have embraced Agnico’s vision of gold mining. They know mining will provide education, training and well-paying jobs for many years. And most importantly, they trust Agnico to be a responsible steward of their land.

The Meadowbank project offered many firsts for all involved. It is the first project Agnico has pursued in the Arctic. It is the first gold mine in Nunavut (and currently the only mine). It is the first to be developed on Inuit land. It is the first mine to be covered by a water compensation agreement, signed in April 2008 with the Kivalliq Inuit Association.

Agnico gained control of the Meadowbank deposit when it purchased Cumberland Resources in 2007. Cumberland had great success exploring the deposit in the previous decade. A pre-feasibility report was completed in 2000 and updated five years later. The takeover of Cumberland cost $710 million, but it increased Agnico’s gold reserves by 23%.

Read more

Harper sells vision of economic development in North as Arctic tour continues – by Bruce Cheadle – The Canadian Press/Global BC

http://www.globaltvbc.com/

“Oh yeah, it was (rough),” the burly Innu says of life
in Baker Lake before the mine opened. “Everybody was
on social welfare and now they can afford to buy food
and snowmobiles and trucks and clothes and help out
their families.”

BAKER LAKE, Nunavut – Stephen Harper used the backdrop of peaking gold prices amid international economic turmoil Wednesday to sell his vision of economic development in Canada’s Far North.

The prime minister made no apologies for his Conservative government’s development-first strategy after touring the roaring Meadowbank gold mine near Baker Lake. It is Nunavut’s only operating mine, but many more are promised.

Critics have long complained the Harper Conservatives are ignoring environmental damage and the impact of climate change as they rush to capitalize on a thawing Arctic. With gold prices hovering near $1,800 an ounce, Harper was not prepared to concede an inch.

Read more

[Mining conflict] As industry encroaches, Yukoners make last stand to preserve unspoiled wilderness – by Paul Watson (Toronto Star – August 21, 2011)

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.

BONNET PLUME LAKE, YUKON—In the long, often biting, argument over the Peel River wilderness, few places rouse more passion than a region below Aberdeen Canyon, where nature still has the upper hand over humans.

Here the Wind, Bonnet Plume and Snake Rivers reach like long fingers across a mountainous landscape. They put a lifelong grip on anyone lucky enough to feel their touch.

The only way in is by air. There’s a steady, growing traffic of helicopters and float planes ferrying mining exploration crews to and from remote camps or dropping off well-heeled hunters and adventurous paddlers with their canoes and kayaks.

I flew into Bonnet Plume Lake, around 435 kilometres north of Whitehorse, in Alpine Aviation’s 1952 vintage de Havilland Beaver, a stalwart single-engine bush plane.

Read more

[Mining conflict] A majestic Yukon where humans are still outsiders – by Paul Watson (Toronto Star – August 20, 2011)

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.

BONNET PLUME LAKE, YUKON—Sketching peaks shrouded in morning mist, Joyce Majiski squints up at bands of red blue and green all around her, searching for signs of our planet’s ancient enduring heartbeat.

In one of Canada’s last wilderness watersheds, a vast expanse where humans are still outsiders, the artist biologist and former river guide can hear the murmur of water spilling down a steep creek bed on the far side of this placid lake.

It’s fed by patches of melting snow that wind through scree deposited by a glacier that disappeared when the planet warmed at the end of the last Ice Age, leaving a bowl (“cirque”) carved out of the mountainside.

We are sitting on the edge of Bonnet Plume Lake, 1,153 metres above sea level, where the loudest sound is a late summer breeze.

The peace belies an epic conflict playing out across Canada’s North, where aboriginal people and environmental activists are pushing back against building pressures from a warming climate and the global demand for more resources.

Read more

OMA member profile: Blue Heron — providing practical environmental solutions for 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.

When Linda Byron-Fortin started Blue Heron Solutions for Environmental Management from her Timmins basement in 2004, she may not have envisioned it growing into the operation it is today with a payroll of 17 occupying a 7,000 square foot facility. 

From her Timmins headquarters, she can list among her mining clients De Beers Canada, Xstrata Nickel, Xstrata Copper, Goldcorp, Lakeshore, Northgate, Kirkland Lake Gold, St. Andrew Goldfields and a range of junior exploration and development companies.  Blue Heron’s spectrum of environmental services encompass planning and compliance, education and eco-retailing.

“I like having an ability to help people and I have an interest in management systems,” said Ms. Byron-Fortin.  “Most of my staff are ex-environmental coordinators from the resource sector who take an operational perspective on environmental permitting and compliance programs.”

Read more

[Goldcorp mine restoration] ‘Liquid gold’ a big hit in Shania’s hometown – by Lisa Wright (Toronto Star – July 23, 2011)

Lisa Wright is a business reporter with 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.

After decades in the mining game, Goldcorp Inc. has finally figured out a way for its worker bees to make “liquid gold.” The enterprising environmental team at the Canadian company’s subsidiary in Timmins has transformed an old mine tailings property into a real hive of activity, where bees make honey amid the tall grass and flowering vegetation that until recently was a barren wasteland.

The Vancouver-based mining giant inherited the mined-out land as part of its purchase of a massive property known as Porcupine Gold Mines (PGM) in the northern Ontario city back in 2006.

The 58 hectares called the Coniaurum (which is Latin for constant gold) was mined for nearly 50 years and then abruptly abandoned in 1961 following a serious storm that breached tailings containment dams and caused discharge problems. Back then the industry was an unregulated wild west where miners would dig in and then just duck out when they were done.

Enter Goldcorp and modern day mining. Coniaurum is one of 20 burnt out mines amid its PGM operations and the first to be renewed as a wildlife habitat and rolling green field — and also an experimental ground on how to resurrect the rest of these eyesores.

Read more

Mining the Congo: Golden opportunity [Banro Corp.] – by Jennifer Wells (Toronto Star – July 10, 2011)

Jennifer Wells is a feature writer with 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. No stranger to the mining industry, Ms. Wells won the 1999 National Business Book Award for Fever: The Dark Mystery of the Bre-X Gold Rush as well as covering many other major mining stories.

TWANGIZA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Baraka Zihindula appears small for 13, sitting on his bum on the ground, in his royal blue school shorts and short-sleeved shirt. He’s worrying the earth with a stick in the distracted manner of adolescent boys everywhere as he tells his life story, a task that might seem inflated for a mere 13-year-old, until you learn Baraka’s life thus far has included six years of hard labour.

Baraka was 8 when he started panning for gold, working artisanally as a miner alongside his two brothers and his father, just one more family, invisible amid the million-plus informal miners who scrabble for a subsistence living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Baraka’s family lives in the village of Luchiga and every day, seven out of seven, the boys would accompany their father to the river. A little gold was found just about every day, Baraka says, and that little gold was converted to a little money and with that little money his mother was able to feed the family.

Sometimes the father would keep the boys working overnight.

Seated in the shade of a tree, a stone’s throw from the school he now attends, Baraka has kicked off his plastic sandals. There’s a light breeze, the air is fresh and Baraka looks handsome in his schoolboy uniform.

Read more

Goldcorp creating a good buzz [Timmins tailings restoration] – by Ron Grech (The Timmins Daily Press – July 7, 2011)

The Daily Press is the newspaper of record for the city of Timmins.

Six years ago, the Coniaurum mining tailings property was a barren site, resembling the surface of another planet. Today, the same are is covered with tall grasses and flowering vegetation. In the midst of this reclamation site, is an enclosed area of hives set up for honeybees.

For its efforts, Goldcorp Porcupine Gold Mines has earned an award for a reclamation project which went above and beyond the usual requirements for re-greening tailing sites. The Tom Peters Memorial Mine Reclamation Award was presented to Goldcorp at a provincial reclamation held in Sudbury last week.

The award was in recognition of improvements made to the Coniaurum reclamation property on Carium Rd. in Schumacher.

Read more

Goldcorp wins reclamation award for transforming Timmins old mine tailings into honey

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. 

Ontario Mining Association member Goldcorp has won the Tom Peters Memorial Mine Reclamation Award for its work on the Coniaurum property in Timmins.  The company earned this prestigious honour for cleaning up and transforming an old mine site and tailings area into flourishing habitat for the bears and the bees.  The award was presented last week at the  fourth annual CLRA-OMA Mine Reclamation Symposium, which is incorporated into the “Mining and Environment Conference” in Sudbury.

The Coniaurum site is located just east of downtown Timmins.  Mining operations took place from 1913 to 1961.  The Coniaurum mine produced 1.1 million ounces of gold from 4.5 million tonnes of ore and its mill operated from 1928 to 1960.  The site was virtually abandoned in 1961 following a serious storm, which breached tailings containment dams and caused discharge problems.

In 2002, Goldcorp’s Porcupine Gold Mines took possession of the property and began rehabilitation planning.  Reclamation activities began on the Coniaurum tailings management area, which was a 58 hectare impound with varying tailings depths from 6.1 to 13.3 metres, in 2005. Work was carried out to stabilize existing erosion channels, depression areas were filled in and biosolids were applied and topped with wild seed mix to promote vegetation growth.  Erosion gullies were graded to uniform slopes, dams were upgraded along with the sedimentation pond and the discharge channel was improved.  

Read more

Sitting on a gold mine – by Lisa Wright (Toronto Star – July 2, 2011)

Lisa Wright is a business reporter with 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.

It began with dreams of a glittering gold price and a gutsy geological gamble. And it took shape in Malartic, population 3,600, a town 520 kilometres northwest of Montreal that literally sits on a gold mine. The highly anticipated project became Canada’s largest gold mine when it opened in June.

But when Osisko Mining Corp. started drilling in 2005, they quickly made a discovery. “We realized the biggest problem was that there were 205 houses and six institutional buildings sitting right on top of it (the deposit),” recalls Osisko chief executive Sean Roosen.

“After we drilled 30 holes we said, ‘Well, that’s a pretty interesting deposit. Unless we can convince the good folks of Malartic to move, it’s a no go.’” That wasn’t the only hurdle.

Osisko had to talk Bay St. into a $1 billion financing for the big move and mine construction in the remote Quebec town amid a severe market downturn.

Read more

Our world needs more Peter Munks – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – June 11, 2011)

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. mwente@globeandmail.com

Some parts of the world are nastier than Canada. Peter Munk should know. He came from one.

Mr. Munk is the founder and chairman of Barrick Gold Corp., the world’s largest gold miner. From the day he landed in Toronto from war-torn Europe, he has loved this country with a passion. “I arrived in this place not speaking the language, not knowing a dog,” he says. He was 18 – an alien, a foreigner, a Jew in a funny-looking suit. In Europe, people were living in the ruins, like rats.

The young refugee presented himself at Lawrence Park Collegiate, where nobody had seen a foreigner before. He expected to be shunned. Instead, the principal took him to a sun-filled classroom, where, unbelievably, boys and girls studied together. At lunchtime, everybody streamed into the cafeteria, where a trestle table groaned with meat, bread and milk. “The amount of food in that place could have fed any city in Europe for a whole day,” he recalls. Kids began asking him home, where their parents invited him to raid the fridge.

For Mr. Munk, this generosity became a metaphor for Canada. “People here don’t ask about your origins,” he says, “only about your destiny.”

Today, the company that he founded is embroiled in controversy, and Mr. Munk himself has come under vicious attack. Billionaires and mining giants will never be exempt from criticism, nor should they be. But these attacks are so toxic, they demand a response.

Read more

Canadian miners abroad learn wider responsibility – Globe and Mail Editorial (June 6, 2011)

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.

The Canadian mining industry is no longer just about extraction. The 1,800 companies operating around the globe must also live up to public expectations that they protect human rights and the environment in their overseas operations. Failure to do so invites public-relations disaster, as Barrick Gold Corp.’s recent experiences in Tanzania and Papua New Guinea show.

Last week, Barrick announced it was investigating allegations that its own private security guards, as well as Tanzanian police, had sexually assaulted 10 women over the past several years at their North Mara mine. This comes just two weeks after seven people were killed at the site, following an incursion of locals scavenging for gold-laced rocks. \

At another Barrick property, in Papua New Guinea, a Human Rights Watch report released this year said the mine’s private security force was implicated in a “pattern of violent abuses, including horrifying acts of gang rape.”

Read more

Peruvian election strikes fear into global miners – by Brenda Bouw (Globe and Mail – June 7, 2011)

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. Brenda Bouw is the Globe’s mining reporter.

The election of a left-wing nationalist as Peru’s next president has panicked investors, who fear the country will join a growing trend of governments squeezing more profits from the resource sector.

Ollanta Humala’s narrow victory Sunday over conservative Keiko Fujimori is expected to result in, at the very least, higher tax and royalty rates for mining companies operating in the mineral-rich nation.

Investors are also fretting that Mr. Humala’s past ties with Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez will lead to suggestions about nationalizing operations based in Peru. The concerns caused Peru’s stock market to drop by a record 12.5 per cent on Monday, alongside steep selloffs of Canadian and international mining companies with operations in the country.

That’s despite Mr. Humala’s attempt to run a free-market friendly campaign this time around, a shift in stance from his unsuccessful 2006 run for the top job.

Read more