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Mining Railway, Road and Other Infrastructure

Nunavut deputy minister dishes on what will drive northern economy – by Beth Brown (Nunatsiaq News – May 29, 2017)

http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/

Record public spending on infrastructure, along with a surge in mining and exploration, could cause as much economic growth as Nunavut saw in the late 1990s. That’s according to Sherri Rowe, deputy minister for the Department of Economic Development and Transportation for the Government of Nunavut.

“I believe we are at a very important time in the territory’s development,” Rowe said, over a breakfast of granola and pancakes at Iqaluit’s Hotel Arctic. Rowe, who has been a bureaucrat and in business for 25 years, was the second speaker featured in a breakfast series hosted by the Iqaluit Chamber of Commerce, May 25.

She talked about ongoing development projects in Nunavut, from mining and tourism to airport and marine infrastructure. “Nunavut has a consumer market that didn’t exist two decades ago,” said Rowe—and Iqaluit is the centre of that opportunity.

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Reinstating passenger rail in Nipissing not part of provincial transportation talks – by Laurel J. Campbell (Almaguin News – May 29, 2017)

https://www.muskokaregion.com/

ALMAGUIN — The Ministry of Transportation is expected to release the draft of its multimodal transportation strategy for Northern Ontario by the end of this month.

Plane, train, automobile and truck travel has been analyzed extensively over the past few years in order to determine a plan that will keep goods and people moving until 2041, but reinstating passenger rail travel through Nipissing District is not part of the current discussion.

“The province recognizes the importance of transportation in Northern Ontario and every community that was served by the former Northlander train is served by ONTC (Ontario Northland Transportation Commission) motor coach service,” Ministry of Transportation spokesperson Bob Nichols told the News. “While there is currently no plan to resume the Northlander passenger train service, the province remains committed to continuing motor coach service to every community that is served only by the ONTC.”

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Laying the groundwork for a Ring of Fire road – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – May 15, 2017)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Northwest communities, industry study freight, ore-haul transload facility

With no funding or direction coming from Queen’s Park on Ring of Fire transportation infrastructure, Sioux Lookout is taking the lead in promoting a road-to-rail transload facility to move material and supplies in and out of the largely dormant mineral belt.

The northwestern Ontario town has pulled together a “working group” of like-minded business leaders, community and First Nation partners to craft a logistics concept called the Integrated Transportation System (ITS). It binds together the town’s local highway, rail and air connections, and creates much-needed brownfield space.

To Vicki Blanchard, the town’s economic development manager, Sioux Lookout is the “place to start” to stage, ship and transfer raw materials, industrial supplies, fuel and goods to remote communities and the potential Ring of Fire mining camp through an east-west road corridor.

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China pitches ‘One Belt, One Road’ by telling other countries they have nothing to fear – by Nathan Vanderklippe (Globe and Mail – May 15, 2017)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Have no fear, China’s top political leader urged Sunday: in a world of sectarian strife, poverty and rising isolationism, Beijing has an answer that can bring new wealth by tearing down old barriers.

China’s One Belt, One Road initiative is “a project of the century,” President Xi Jinping said Sunday in a major speech at the outset of a two-day conference that gathered together presidents, cabinet ministers and investors from 130 countries. Among them was Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, Canada’s parliamentary secretary to the Minister of International Trade, who came, she said, as part of Ottawa’s new push for “deepening ties” across the Pacific.

She joined what Chinese state media declared “the most prestigious international assembly China has ever inaugurated,” a moment for the world’s second-largest economy to sketch its vision of future global growth inspired by the China model, and funded with Chinese money.

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China’s push to reshape global trade comes with high costs – by Nathan Vanderklippe (Globe and Mail – May 15, 2017)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

BEIJING — Had you come to Gwadar in 2000, you would have taken in what Sohaib Jamali saw on his first trip here: a small, dusty fishing outpost huddled at the end of a long and terrible road in the distant southwestern corner of Pakistan, just 70 kilometres from the border with Iran.

Even three or four years ago, “it was still a sleepy village and nothing else,” said Mr. Jamali, a Karachi-based economist and independent researcher who has been to Gwadar a dozen times.

Now, the town is showing glimmers of a transformation that promise to turn it into a major trading axis in a vast project led by Beijing, one using Chinese money and Chinese methods to redraw maps of global trade and influence to the benefit of the world’s second-largest economy – while also, China promises, allowing others to emulate its own success in building prosperity.

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Outfitters’ objections do not sway YESAB, which recommends mining road – by Philippe Morin (CBC News North – May 4, 2017)

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

Yukon assessor says hunting outfitters ‘only one component of economic activity’, cites project’s benefits

The Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board (YESAB) has recommended a new 65-kilometre mining road in central Yukon be approved, despite concerns about its potential impact on wildlife.

The road is proposed by B.C.-based ATAC Resources as necessary, to allow heavy machinery to reach the Tiger deposit on its Rau gold property north of Mayo. Right now, the property is accessed only by air, or over a frozen swampy trail. The new road would require eight bridges and 38 culverts over small streams and rivers. It would be intended to last 10 to 20 years.

YESAB’s recommendation, published Wednesday, is that the road be approved with a number of terms and conditions, meant to minimize impact on wildlife, and traditional hunting and trapping.

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First Nation Chief plans China trip to discuss Ring of Fire rail line – by Bill Curry (Globe and Mail – April 29, 2017)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

OTTAWA — Bruce Achneepineskum is heading to China next month to hear about a $4-billion plan that includes building a rail line to the Ring of Fire through his community’s traditional territory.

The Chief of Marten Falls First Nation, a remote fly-in community of 770 registered people of which only about half live on the remote Northern Ontario reserve, says he’s interested in the latest overture from a small mining company with big plans.

KWG Resources Inc. announced this week that it is working with Marten Falls First Nation on an equal partnership to develop the Ring of Fire’s chromite deposits, which are used to make stainless steel. China is the world’s leading producer of stainless steel and the company hopes that Chinese investors will be willing to finance the $4-billion rail line and mining project in order to secure a long-term, reliable source of chromite.

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Ice Roads Ease Isolation in Canada’s North, but They’re Melting Too Soon – by Dan Levin (New York Times – April 19, 2017)

https://www.nytimes.com/

“These roads are the only way our people can survive,” said Alvin Fiddler,
grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which represents 49 indigenous
communities in northern Ontario, including 32 that are isolated from Canada’s
highway network and electrical grid and depend on the winter road system to
replenish stocks of fuel, food and building materials. Some of those
communities nearly ran out of diesel fuel because an ice road opened
several weeks late, Mr. Fiddler said.

ON THE TLICHO WINTER ROAD, Northwest Territories — In Canada’s northern latitudes, the frigid winter means freedom. That is when lakes and rivers freeze into pavements of marbled blue ice. For a few months, trucks can haul fuel or lumber or diamonds or a moose carcass to the region’s remote communities and mines that are cut off by water and wilderness, reachable for most of the year only by barge or by air.

But Canada’s ice roads — more than 3,300 miles of them — have been freezing later and melting earlier, drastically reducing the precious window of time that isolated residents rely on to restock a year’s worth of vital supplies, or to simply take a road trip.

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Cyclone Wreckage Lays Bare Met Coal’s Top Exporter Weak Link – by Perry Williams and Ben Sharples (Bloomberg News – April 13, 2017)

https://www.bloombergquint.com/

(Bloomberg) — Two weeks after a cyclone tore through Australia’s biggest metallurgical coal mining basin, the industry is still reeling. The outages are a flashback to deluges in 2008 and 2010-11, which forced miners in the world’s largest exporter of the steel-making commodity to update operations with stronger flood defenses and better pumps to drain water.

Though producers now have bigger walls, the weakest link in the supply chain this time has been rail lines, particularly the Goonyella network that was swamped by landslides, cutting off deliveries to major ports on the east coast.

“There’s not much you can do to protect the rail,” said Keith De Lacy, former chairman of Macarthur Coal Ltd., which was acquired by Peabody Energy Corp. “They are always subject to washouts. Goonyella is a major line and carries an enormous amount of coal, and once it’s knocked out it can’t just be repaired overnight.”

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[Ontario] Poor rail service continues to plague north – by Éric Boutilier (Sudbury Star – April 17, 2017)

http://www.thesudburystar.com/

Éric Boutilier is a spokesperson with the Northern & Eastern Ontario Rail Network.

I’ve recently made an observation as a lifelong resident of Northern Ontario: if you don’t own or are unable to operate a vehicle, don’t expect the government to care or assist you with your need to travel to and from your community.

If you’re sick, poor, frail or live in an isolated region, both the provincial and federal governments don’t see the need to provide you with a safe, reliable and comfortable means of transportation in order to access health care, education, tourism opportunities, or to visit family and friends.

Since 2012, the Liberals and Conservatives have axed a number essential transportation routes without public consultation. The Grits cut the Northlander, the region’s only daily train, in favour of an “enhanced bus service.”

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All season roads focus at Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) Infrastructure Summit – by Rick Garrick (Wawatay News – March 11, 2017)

http://wawataynews.ca/

All-season roads were raised during the Nishnawbe Aski Nation Infrastructure Summit, held March 7-8 at the Victoria Inn in Thunder Bay.

“We all know that based on what we are seeing, based on what we have experienced over the last couple of years that we cannot continue to rely on the winter road system,” says Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler. “It’s getting too unpredictable; it’s becoming too short, the winter road season, and it’s becoming unsafe. So we need to look at alternatives, we need to look at other ways of transporting our goods in the long term and that may mean building an all-season road network right throughout the NAN territory.”

Weagamow has already started work on the construction of an all-season road to their community, which is located about 45 kilometres from the Windigo Road. “Last summer was the first time they were able to drive in and out all year around, but they had to park their vehicles across the lake from the community,” Fiddler says. “But the work to construct an all-season road around the lake is now starting.”

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Nunavut regulators ponder hovercraft proposal from Agnico Eagle (Nunatsiaq News – April 11, 2017)

http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/

“Best overall alternative for exploration from an environmental and economic perspective”

If you’ve ever seen a hovercraft in action, it was probably shown whipping through the Everglades in Florida. But Agnico Eagle Mining Ltd. would like to bring two hovercraft to Nunavut’s Kivalliq region this summer for use in a pilot project that is now awaiting an April 17 screening decision from the Nunavut Impact Review Board.

By design, hovercraft can be used on water and land, taking people or industrial loads over small and large rivers, lakes, swamps, snow, soil, packed ice bogs, tundra, and coastal seas throughout the year.

And hovercraft have resolved numerous logistical and transportation problems in Siberia and the Far East, Agnico Eagle said in its project proposal to the NIRB. “It is expected that they will also be applicable in Nunavut and may have future all-season benefits for Nunavummiut,” Agnico Eagle said.

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[Silk Road] President Xi is heading to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago for a chance to personally suss out the ‘America first’ mantra – by (Globe and Mail – April 6, 2017)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

As Donald Trump and Xi Jinping prepared to meet for the first time this week, Jean-Guy Carrier was in Jordan, chatting up Middle Eastern financiers. He had come to a conference of the Union of Arab Banks – a place that could hardly be farther from the nexus of power and diplomacy that Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort will become on Thursday and Friday.

And Mr. Carrier, a former Canadian journalist who once covered the North by hitching rides on planes out of Churchill, Man., could hardly be more distant from the crowd of real estate tycoons and Communist Party elite who will gather in southern Florida.

Mr. Carrier is now executive director of the Silk Road Chamber of International Commerce, and he was in Amman to spread the gospel of China’s “One Belt, One Road” project, with its ambition to spread Chinese money and influence far and wide. Invited by Palestinian billionaire Munib Masri, Mr. Carrier described how Chinese banks and government institutions can be partners and financial enablers for all manner of government spending projects, in Jordan but also in places as distant as Iceland, Kyrgyzstan and Mexico.

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NWT, Nunavut promote road corridor from Yellowknife to the Arctic Ocean – by Jane George (Nunatsiaq News – April 6, 2017)

http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/

Road-port combination could unlock billions in mineral revenues, backers say

Within 15 years, you may be able to drive from the Northwest Territories capital of Yellowknife right up to Grays Bay on western Nunavut’s Arctic coast.

The road would run 550 kilometres from Yellowknife to the NWT-Nunavut boundary, where it would link up with a 350-km road that would terminate at a deep water port on Coronation Gulf, close to Kugluktuk to the west and Cambridge Bay to the north.

Along the way to the port, there would be spur roads leading off to mines. That’s the vision promoted by two speakers April 5 at the Nunavut Mining Symposium in Iqaluit. The GNWT has already looked at three road options for its part of the road, which it calls the Slave Geological Province Access Corridor, using geological and mineral data to guide the road’s path.

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Look to public-private partnerships to build infrastructure for Ring of Fire – by Joseph Quesnel and Kenneth Green (Thunder Bay chronicle-Journal – March 1, 2017)

http://www.chroniclejournal.com/

Joseph Quesnel is a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute.Kenneth Green is senior director of natural resource studies at the Fraser Institute.

It has been 10 years since the discovery of a massive chromite deposit in Northern Ontario, which could be a game changer for the region’s economy. But despite this potential, the developers are still as far away from bringing a mine into operation today as they were a decade ago.

Known as the Ring of Fire, the area is rich with deposits of chromite — which is used in the production of stainless steel — nickel and copper.

The possible upside of the region’s economic potential is tremendous. At one point, then Conservative treasury board president Tony Clement called the Ring of Fire an economic equivalent of the Alberta oil sands given the projected investment required. That may be an exaggeration of course, but the deposit nevertheless has the potential for thousands of jobs for several decades of mining.

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