Andrew Bell interviews Integra Gold’s George Salamis and Guy Desharnais of SGS Geostat
Integra Gold (ICG.V -4.4%) could have used high-paid consultants to find new deposits buried in the digital archive of mining and exploration data it acquired as part of a deal last year. Instead, the Quebec-based explorer took to the internet offering a million-dollar pay day to anyone who could help them pinpoint promising drill sites.
More than 1,300 people from 90 countries signed up for the challenge and poured over more than six terabytes of data.
A steady stream of “shell” companies with little cash, assets or business plans marched onto public markets in 2014 and early last year. Now, under pressure from regulators, the Canadian Securities Exchange is taking significant steps to tighten that access.
An overhaul of the CSE’s listing requirements is in progress, the result of negotiations with regulators, primarily at the Ontario Securities Commission, sources say. The market watchdogs are understood to have been alarmed by the proliferation of these shells and the potential risk they might pose to investors.
The CSE, an upstart rival to the Toronto Stock Exchange, plans to introduce strict working capital requirements for newly listed companies, effectively pushing empty shells out of the picture.
L-to-R back row: Steve de Jong, President & CEO, Integra Gold; Luc Blanchette, Quebec Minister for Mines; Brent Cook, Gold Rush Titan; Sean Roosen, Gold Rush Titan; Shaun Majumder, Comedian and Gold Rush Finale MC; George Salamis, Executive Chairman, Integra Gold; Chantal Gosselin, Gold Rush Titan; Mark Stockton, Business Development, Integra Gold; Rob McEwen, Gold Rush Titan; Randy Smallwood, Gold Rush Titan L-to-R front row: Doug Hatfield, SGS Geostat; Jean-Philippe Paiement, SGS Geostat; Guy Desharnais, SGS Geostat Credit: George Pimentel Photography
SGS Geostat Awarded C$500,000 for their submission C$250,000 in finale event proceeds donated to local charities in Val-d’Or, Quebec
VANCOUVER, BC – March 7, 2016: Integra Gold Corp. (TSX-V: ICG, OTCQX: ICGQF) (“Integra” or the “Company”) is thrilled to announce that SGS Geostat team from Québec was awarded first place in the Gold Rush Challenge last night in front of a crowd of 400 at the Gold Rush Challenge Live Finale at the Carlu in Toronto. The SGS Geostat team beat out 4 other finalists and emerged as the winner with their submission that utilized a combination of machine learning and traditional geological methods to produce targets across the Company’s Lamaque project in Val-d’Or, Québec.
SGS Geostat used sophisticated geostatistical methods to drive data into an expansive and unbiased block model. A prospectivity scoring system harnessed both geological knowledge and machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, to identify high value targets, which were then vetted through Virtual Reality with Oculus Rift technology.
In mining, the great bifurcation is finally underway. After a multi-year bear market in which nearly every junior mining stock got decimated, the sector is enjoying an honest-to-goodness recovery in 2016. This year’s PDAC conference is ringing with renewed optimism as commodities, particularly gold, are rebounding.
But the early evidence suggests this recovery is limited to a very small group of companies. The high-quality juniors are raising money again and enjoying huge bumps in their share prices. Meanwhile, nothing has changed for most of the companies, which remains entrenched in an awful bear market with no end in sight.
During the commodity boom, the rising tide of metal prices really did seem to lift all boats. Hundreds of low-quality miners were able to raise billions of dollars of capital from willing investors. Venture-listed companies raised an astounding $4.2 billion from brokered deals in 2007 alone, according to Financial Post data.
Oban Mining wants to become Canada’s next great mining house.
Like the 14-year-old Scotch whiskey it’s named for, the executives at Oban Mining hope the company will only get better with age, satisfying even the most finicky of investor palates.
Launched by the same team that brought the Canadian Malartic gold mine online, Oban wants to be the next great Canadian mining house, and president-CEO John Burzynski doesn’t shy away from making bold statements about its plans.
“We intend to be the next Osisko Mining Corporation,” he said during a January presentation to the Sudbury Prospectors and Developers Association.
Discovering new orebodies and opening new mines in Northern Ontario is urgent and necessary.
In the past, providing a stimulus to prospectors — as the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines has recently done — and making an investment in exploration to provide better returns would do the trick.
The government has now done about as much as it can on this front, but in 2016 the field of mineral exploration needs much more than a short-term financial jolt.
The impact of the current downturn means the industry has to make fundamental changes in the way it conducts this part of the business.
CALGARY, AB–(Marketwired – February 23, 2016) – Permit times — the length of time it takes to get approval for mining exploration — are increasing across Canada and especially in Ontario, according to a survey of mining companies released today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian policy think-tank.
“Growing wait times for permits add to the cost of exploration and therefore deter investment and ultimately hinder Canada’s ability to realize its considerable mineral potential,” said Kenneth Green, Fraser Institute senior director of energy and natural resources and co-author of Permit Times for Mining Exploration: How Long Are They?
Based on the experiences and opinions of industry professionals, the study compares the efficiency, transparency and certainty of the permitting process in jurisdictions across Canada.
TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – The British Columbia provincial government on Tuesday extended its support for the provincial Mining Exploration Tax Credit (BC METC) through to January 1, 2020, and also renewed the BC Mining Flow-Through Share tax credit, which expired on December 31, 2015.
The projected fourth consecutive balanced provincial budget pegged the 2016 BC METC at its regular rate of 20% and reconfirmed the enhanced rate of 30% for areas affected by the mountain pine beetle. The tax credit had been originally set to expire on December 31, 2016.
Liberal Premier Christy Clark first revealed the proposed tax incentives during her remarks at the opening of the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia’s (AME BC’s) Exploration Roundup Conference on January 25.
TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Proponents of Canada’s long-standing flow-through share tax incentive programme, which is available to mineral exploration companies to raise funds to look for new deposits, say that increased benefits could help resuscitate the domestic industry, even though signs are pointing towards a possible trough being reached in what has been one of the worst commodity price downturns in decades.
“Our number one priority, as we have been doing for the last decade now, is to get in front of the new Liberal government, to understand what their priorities are and to explain the value of the flow-through share programme to ensure that the framework is maintained – that’s the critical starting point.
We’ve done the cost-benefit analysis, and we need to make sure that everybody understands the importance of the flow-through regime,” PearTree Securities president Trent Mell told Mining Weekly Online in an interview.
For several years, participants in the technology sector have advocated extending the flow-through share program currently available to resource companies by making it available to the innovation sector. With the erosion of our manufacturing base and the commodity and energy downturn, the case for using flow-through shares to catalyze our underperforming innovation sector has become more compelling.
A recent paper by Vijay Jog, published by the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy (and taken up in FP Comment in Kevin Libin’s column on February 9) found poor investment returns for flow-through investors between 2008–2012.
From that, the paper concludes that between the investor losses, the cost to government and the potential “crowding out” of investment in other sectors, flow-through shares do more harm than good and should be phased out.
You’d be hard pressed to find bigger fans of “flow-through shares” than the Bay Street lawyers and bankers using them to finance roughly a half-billion dollars in mining and energy deals every year.
But they’re hardly alone. Once dubbed by the Financial Post as “Canada’s quirky tax innovation,” flow-through shares were given high praise recently, in another national news outlet, by Richard Sutin, senior partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, who called them a “spectacular success, positioning Canada’s capital markets as a global leader in resource finance.”
And in its “Action Plan for Prosperity” a few years ago, the Coalition for Action on Innovation in Canada, chaired by Liberal big-thinker John Manley, urged policy-makers to build on the “success” of the flow-through share program — which “has helped make Canada a global leader in resource financing” — and expand them to other industries.
VANCOUVER — Mining financier and entrepreneur Ross Beaty told an audience at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference in late January that it’s a “phenomenal” time to buy resource stocks.
“The tide is way out and it’s a buyer’s market everywhere across the board from oil, mining, currencies, and real estate,” Beaty said. “Every so often cycles get to the point where they’re at today and it’s just hard to lose. It’s a wonderful time to be in the market.”
He admits the vast majority of his money has always gone into companies he either manages or is otherwise involved with, but in recent years, he’s been beefing up his stake elsewhere in the junior resource sector.
Toronto, February 2, 2016 – In its pre-budget submission to the Government of Canada, the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) outlines its priorities for Federal Budget 2016 to support Canada’s mineral exploration and development sector. The PDAC recommends the Government take action to improve the flow of capital to the junior exploration sector, and address the infrastructure deficit in northern and remote Canada.
“A healthy junior mineral exploration sector is vital to the continued prosperity of Canada’s minerals and metals industry—an industry that contributes 4% of GDP and employs over 375,000 workers across the country,” says PDAC President Rod Thomas. “Canada’s junior mineral exploration sector is world-class, and has made 70% of all discoveries in Canada over the last 10 years.”
While the minerals sector is a key driver of the Canadian economy, it currently faces challenges that threaten its ability to continue to be a source of economic growth.
A new mining project coming to Timmins has the capacity to create 1,000 local jobs and economically diversify the City With a Heart of Gold.
General Magnesium Corp. is set to start production this spring on a magnesium-talc mine that has an NI 43-101 resource estimate of close to 100 million tonnes, including 54,076,357 tonnes in the measured and indicated category, and 43,000,000 tonnes in the inferred category.
Last fall, following 16 months of due diligence, the company secured a multi-year, $4.9-billion deal with Hunter Douglas Metals, whose parent company manufactures aluminum blinds. Magnesium is a key component used as an alloy in manufacturing aluminum.
Toronto stock exchange-listed Royal Nickel Corporation will take a controlling interest in the privately owned Beta Hunt mine near Kambalda in a $C7.5 million ($7.56 million) cash-and-scrip deal.
Royal Nickel will emerge with 67 per cent of Derek Fisher’s Salt Lake Mining, which acquired Beta Hunt for $10 million in 2013. Beta Hunt first operated in the 1970s and has the rare feature of nickel and gold resources in adjacent mineralised zones.
Nickel ore is delivered to BHP Billiton’s Kambalda concentrator, while gold is treated at St Ives, owned by South Africa’s Gold Fields, which holds the mining tenements at Beta Hunt.
