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Ontario Mining

Ontario’s Ring of Fire: An Issue of Sustainability – by Patrick Whiteway (Canadian Mining Review Blog – May 29, 2011)

Canadian Mining Review: Discussing ideas and issues related to mining in Canada 

Our national mineral development strategy should include a requirement
to use mineral resources to our advantage by processing them prior to export.
(Patrick Whiteway)

The close proximity of Ontario’s Ring of Fire, Manitoba’s Thompson Nickel Belt and low carbon-emitting hydro power, give Canada an unparalleled opportunity to become a long-term, sustainable producer of stainless steel, the enviro-metal. If only the sustainability of the northern boreal forest could be assured as well.

Massive deposits of chromite and nickel have been discovered in the ‘Ring of Fire’ under the boreal forest of northwestern Ontario and plans by Cliffs Natural Resources and Noront Resources respectively to develop them are well underway. How this development is managed by the federal and provincial governments could be historically significant for resource development in Canada.

The scale of the undertaking is huge. It could, in the next 10 years, create Canada’s first chromite mine and with an appropriate level of visionary leadership, could also transform Canada into the lowest-carbon-emitting source of stainless steel on the planet.

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[Sudbury Basin’s] ‘Victoria’s secret’ has eyes popping in Canada’s mining industry – by Lisa Wright (Toronto Star – June 14, 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 almost 130 years of mining activity, it’s amazing that we keep finding
such significant and rich deposits like the Victoria mine,” says mining industry
consultant and Sudbury native Stan Sudol. “The Sudbury basin has not given up
all her geological secrets—not by a long shot,” adds Sudol, who writes the
popular RepublicOfMining.com blog.

Michael Winship laughs when he thinks of the racy nickname his colleagues gave to a grubby nickel deposit with 110-year-old working roots in the Sudbury basin.

Though the new chief operating officer of Quadra FNX Mining Ltd. has spent more than 30 years in the metals game, you don’t have to have his globe-trotting resume to know that mine sites aren’t the least bit sexy or glamorous environments to set foot in.

But considering the jaw-dropping find that the Toronto firm’s geologists recently made just a kilometre from the previously-mined Victoria site — and which they quietly felt for some time could turn into something spectacular — the cheeky ‘Victoria’s secret’ moniker fits just fine. “We’ve got one of the richest deposits in Sudbury in the last few decades,” the affable Winship says in an interview.

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Rafting down the Albany River to the Ring of Fire – by Tanya Talaga (Toronto Star – June 12, 2011)

Tanya Talaga is the Queen’s Park 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.

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

ALBANY RIVER, ONT.

There is a Cree legend about the insatiable appetite of big brother. Always famished, big brother demands his little brother work harder to bring him more timber, gold and fuel so he can feed his hungry belly.

Ed Metatawabin tells this story from a wooden raft as it slowly makes its way through the pummeling rain down the 1,000-kilometre-long Albany River in Ontario’s Far North.

Directly above the Albany lies the Ring of Fire — more than 5,000 square kilometres of pristine wilderness that is believed to contain a $30 billion deposit of chromite, the ore used to make stainless steel. Prospectors also say a treasure trove of platinum and diamonds lies underneath.

But the pursuit of these riches means little brother must blast, bulldoze and bigfoot through the Albany watershed, the surrounding boreal forest and the swampy peatland of the Hudson Bay lowlands.

The race to develop the ring is already furiously underway. International mining companies have staked more than 9,000 claims covering 480,000 hectares. All-weather roads, bridges and a railway line are being planned to transport the precious ore south.

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An Ontario gold rush – by Christina Blizzard (Toronto Sun – June 10, 2011)

Christina Blizzard is the Queen’s Park columnist for the Toronto Sun, the city’s daily tabloid newspaper.  christina.blizzard@sunmedia.ca

Remember a couple of years ago, Premier Dalton McGuinty said this province
 could no longer count on “pulling stuff out of the ground” for jobs? All goes to
show just how wrong he was. And how out of touch, not just with northern Ontario,
but with the economy. (Christina Blizzard – June 10, 2011)

Mining companies spending billions here in search of riches. So why did Dalton McGuinty blow them off?

Skyrocketing world gold prices are providing a boost to this province’s northern economy, as mining companies look to old mines in search of the precious metal.

Detour Lake gold mine, near Cochrane, will be the largest gold mine in Canada when it starts production in 2013. Based on today’s spot gold price, it will generate more than $1 billion a year for 21 years, says Detour Gold President and CEO Gerald Panneton.

And while the price of gold, like all resources, fluctuates, he says gold’s been around for 6,000 years and it’s here to stay. “People have tried to push it away and then get rid of it, but it always came back,” Panneton said in an interview.

Gold is tough to replace and is the most versatile, malleable element you can find. “If you try to accumulate value in silver or copper or zinc, you’ll need a huge warehouse,” he said.

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Tragedy at [Sudbury] Stobie Mine a reminder of our spirit – Brian MacLeod (Sudbury Star – June 10, 2011)

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. Brian MacLeod is the managing editor.

The tragic deaths of two miners at Stobie Mine on Wednesday night is a painful reminder to us that those who work underground are still the soul of this community.

Jordan Fram, 26, and Jason Chenier, 35, died when they were struck by broken rock at an ore pass 3,000 feet underground at Vale’s Stobie Mine. The cause of the accident is under investigation.

Jason had been a miner for 11 years, and Jordan for six.

Vale’s general manager of Ontario operations, John Treen, called the deaths a devastating loss. Many members of the community have expressed their condolences online.

Virtually everyone in the community knows someone who works in one of the city’s mines. The willingness of thousands of workers to go underground each day is still the city’s raison d’etre.

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Mining Marshall Plan for Northern Ontario – Stan Sudol

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant and strategist who writes extensively on the mining sector. stan.sudol@republicofmining.com

What a difference a decade makes! Ten years ago, according to many in the Toronto-media, mining was a sunset industry and any modern industrial country/province should not be in such a supposedly “low tech” sector. Some even thought we should let the industry die and allow lesser developed and some politically unstable countries be the primary suppliers of mineral commodities.

At that time, Ontario budgets were only a billion or two in the red, and its manufacturing sector was the cornerstone of a strong economy. Today, emerging markets like China, India are competing with the U.S., Japan, South Korea and other developed nations for access to mineral resources around the world, the basic building blocks of any modern industrialized society. The mining sector has become one of the most strategic sectors of the global economy. And Ontario is a “have-not” province.

Currently, Ontario faces a number of key economic problems including an aging workforce, crumbling infrastructure and provincial budget deficits that will not be able to sustain existing social programs. In addition, the south’s manufacturing might, which supported Ontario’s high standard of living since the 1950s, is under extreme stress due to globalization, a weak U.S. market – the destination of almost 90% of our manufactured goods – and high electricity costs.

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Mining activity near Sudbury, Ontario keeps construction firms busy – by Saul Chernos

Daily Commercial News and Construction Record

Talk about construction and many people automatically think downtown and high-rise. But in fact it’s the polar opposite hundreds of kilometres north of Ontario’s industrial heartland, where some of the biggest projects go in the opposite direction, plunging close to three kilometres towards the Earth’s inner core.

It’s this environment that’s home to northern Ontario’s red-hot multi-billion-dollar mining and mining-construction sectors.

While revenues in Ontario from mining operations were pegged at roughly $10 billion last year, sales of related supplies and services rang in at $5.3 billion and could reach $6 billion this year, says Dick DeStefano, executive director of the Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Association (SAMSSA).

“The mining supply and service industry is being pushed fairly dramatically by a number of new explorations and expansions in northern Ontario,” DeStefano says.

Sales figures include actual supplies and services that don’t fit neatly into a construction umbrella, but the rise in activity is keeping construction-related firms busy building everything from roads and housing, to headframes and tunnels.

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Town hires ex-minister to lure [Ring of Fire] smelter northwest – by Mike Whitehouse (Sudbury Star – June 4, 2011)

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. This article was published on June 4, 2011. mwhitehouse@thesudburystar.com

Mining analyst Stan Sudol argues government should pick up the estimated $2-billion
cost of building a rail line to move ore from the yet-to-be-developed Ring of Fire deposits
to potential processing sites. … That investment, he said, would be easily made back
through the resulting economic development and taxes created by the Ring of Fire
deposits, which include nickel, copper, zinc, palladium, platinum and chromite …

A provincial and federal commitment to build a 350- kilometre railway could be key to keeping ore from the largest mining find in a generation in Northern Ontario, an analyst says.

But what community that railway leads to is one of the most hotly contested questions in the north this summer. The prize — a billion-dollar ferrochrome smelter and hundreds of high-paying jobs — has communities across the north queuing to position themselves on the other end of the proposed railway.

Cleveland-based Cliffs Natural Resources will announce a site as early as September. Cliffs estimates 500 people will work on the smelter during construction and up to 500 when it’s operating.

Cliffs’ preferred location is a site just north of Capreol. But the company also said it would consider other locations in the north, including Timmins, Thunder Bay and Greenstone, the community closest to the mine site in the James Bay lowlands.

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The world will hear more in the future from these OMA video competition winners

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.
 

The awards ceremony on June 1 for the Ontario Mining Association’s high school video competition So You Think You Know Mining highlighted the creativity and talent of a multitude of students from different parts of the province.  Their productions gave the audience at the Royal Ontario Museum for the ceremony a glimpse of the potential for the future success of these young film makers.

So what does an operetta about mining, a mock press conference, a rap song, a demonstration on the uses of rare earth elements, a local mining deal carried out in Bengali, a parody of the Terry Tate linebacker skits, an animation where MiningMan saves the world, a guided tour of Timmins, a philosophical discussion on the complexity of the world and an exploration of mineral industry careers have in common?

The producers of those videos all walked off the stage with SYTYKM statues and cheques in recognition of their hard work and videographic talents.  Topping the list as the Best Overall winner was Amanda Ceniti from Georgetown District High School for “Mining: A Musical.” 

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KWG Resources proposes going off the grid in Ring of Fire – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – June, 2011)

Established in 1980, Northern Ontario Business  provides Canadians and international investors with relevant, current and insightful editorial content and business news information about Ontario’s vibrant and resource-rich North. Ian Ross is the editor of Northern Ontario Business ianross@nob.on.ca and this article is from the June, 2011 issue.

Junior miner proposes a separate James Bay lowlands power grid

If the Ontario government can’t supply competitively-priced industrial power, one Ring of Fire mining executive proposes going off the grid.

Moe Lavigne, vice-president of exploration and development for KWG Resources, said the price of public power is the determining factor on where the ferrochrome mineral processing will be located.

“We’re not a big player,” said Lavigne, “but we’re the only player in the Ring of Fire that understands the chromite industry, and we’re going to present our view of how we think it would be done in a perfect world.”

KWG Resources has a 28 per cent stake in the high grade Big Daddy chromite deposit in the James Bay lowlands. In April, the company released a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) that recommends moving its remote deposit closer down the path toward production and into the feasibility study phase.

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Rails to the Ring of Fire – Stan Sudol (Toronto Star – May 30, 2011)

The Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada, has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant, mining columnist and blogger: stan.sudol@republicofmining.com

Notwithstanding the recent correction in commodity prices, near-record highs for gold, silver and a host of base metals essential for industry confirm that the commodity “supercycle” is back and with a vengeance.

China, India, Brazil and many other developing economies are continuing their rapid pace of growth. In 2010, China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy and surpassed the United States to become the biggest producer of cars.

In March, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney remarked: “Commodity markets are in the midst of a supercycle. . . . Rapid urbanization underpins this growth. . . . Even though history teaches that all booms are finite, this one could go on for some time.”

Quebec’s visionary 25-year “Plan Nord” will see billions invested in northern resource development and infrastructure to take advantage of the tsunami in global metal demand and generate much needed revenue for government programs.

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Peregrines disrupt Vale’s [Sudbury] demo plans – by Harold Carmichael (Sudbury Star – May 31, 2011)

The Sudbury Star, is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. This article was published on May 31, 2011.  hcarmichael@thesudburystar.com

It has been closed since 1980, but don’t tell a pair of peregrine falcons.

As far as the endangered raptors are concerned, the upper parts of Vale’s Iron Ore Recovery Plant off Fielding Road in Copper Cliff make for a perfect nesting area where they won’t be disturbed.

In fact, the pair — either descendants of young peregrines brought from Alberta to Greater Sudbury back in the early 1990s during Project Peregrine Sudbury or original birds released here — have been making the long-closed building their summer home for four years.

“I would expect so,” said Allison Merla, senior environmental analyst at Vale’s Greater Sudbury operations. “Peregrines will return to the same nesting area year after year.” While the pair’s nest was visible in previous years, it appears this year the nest is situated inside the structure.

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Battered [Sudbury] nickel regaining lustre – by Lisa Wright (Toronto Star – May 28, 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. This article was originally published May 28, 2011.

Two little Sudbury-area miners reopen amid a resource rebound

If Bill Anderson had a nickel for every time someone asked him why he’s not in the gold mining business, he could open a nickel mine. After all, gold is synonymous with glamour and wealth while nickel, at least for Canadians, is synonymous with, well…Sudbury. Jokes aside, the lifelong geologist took all those cocktail party digs and opened a little nickel mine.

First Nickel Inc., which CEO Anderson co-founded, scooped up the old Lockerby mine in the Sudbury basin from former Canadian mining giant Falconbridge (now Xstrata Plc) in 2005.

And it seemed like the good times would never end as nickel prices soared to what Anderson calls “silly” levels of nearly $25 U.S. a pound, prompting foreign mining conglomerates Xstrata of Switzerland and Brazil’s Vale to take over historic Sudbury foes Falconbridge and Inco respectively for top dollar at what turned out to be the height of the market.

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VALE NEWS RELEASE: $200 MILLION CORe PROJECT CONSTRUCTION UNDERWAY AT VALE’S

www.nickel.vale.com

For Immediate Release

SUDBURY, May 27, 2011 – Vale today announced that construction has begun on the Company’s CORe (Challenging Ore Recovery) project at Clarabelle Mill. The $200 million investment will increase metal recoveries at the mill by four per cent, increasing the value extracted from existing resources.

“The CORe project is part of a $3.4 billion investment plan Vale announced for our Sudbury operations in November of last year,” said Jon Treen, General Manager of Vale’s Ontario Operations. “This investment will help modernize our operations and contribute to our ongoing competitiveness and sustainability for years to come in Sudbury.”

The CORe project includes the construction of a new 38,000 square foot flotation plant containing a new flotation system using state-of-the-art technology. The project also involves technology improvements to existing mill infrastructure including installation of a new Isa Mill and replacement of flotation cells. A new dry (change house) is also part of the project along with a construction and equipment laydown yard to accommodate the anticipated workforce.

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Speech by Tim Hudak, MPP, Ontario PC Leader to the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities (FONOM) – May 12, 2011

This speech was given in Timmins, Ontario on May 12, 2011

“It took 23 Premiers 136 years to accumulate Ontario’s first $148 billion in debt. Dalton
McGuinty will single-handedly double that number in his eight years in office. Over the
past decade, the economic performance of Ontario – as measured by GDP per capita –
has been the worst of any Canadian province. We have fallen into have not status.”
(Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak, Timmins, May 12, 2011)

CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

Good morning et bonjour!

C’est un plaisir d’être ici avec vous à Timmins.

I want to thank you all for having me here today – it’s always a pleasure to be back in Timmins.

I’d also like to recognize Vic Fedeli (PC Candidate, Nipissing) who is joining us today. In his eight years as mayor for North Bay, Vic brought real change to northern families – we’re delighted he’s now working with us to bring change for all of Ontario.

And Vic isn’t alone in the experience he brings to the PC Party – we’ve also recruited Joe Chapman, mayor of Northeastern Manitoulin & the Islands, to run for us in Algoma-Manitoulin.

Joe couldn’t be here today but he sends his regards. And of course, thank you Alan [Spacek, President of FONOM and Mayor of Kapuskasing] for that kind introduction. I met with Alan just a couple of months ago to discuss FONOM’s priorities. His passion for not just Kapuskasing, but the whole of northern Ontario, is incredible.

Not only has he shown decisive leadership at FONOM, I had the pleasure of working with him at the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund when I was Minister of Northern Development and Mines.

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