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Ontario Mining

Ontario Government News Release: Investment, Chromite Top Agenda For Premier In Hong Kong – November 3, 2010

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

McGuinty Meets with Chairman Li Ka-shing and CEO Eric Huang

Leaders from Hong Kong’s business community met Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and ministers Sandra Pupatello and Michael Chan to discuss investment opportunities in Ontario.

Premier McGuinty spoke at a reception hosted by the Canada-Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce. Guests included leaders in mining and financial services. McGuinty credited Ontario’s strong financial services sector for helping it weather the global recession better than most other economies. He also talked about the government’s plans to develop the Ring of Fire, an area in Northern Ontario that contains one of the world’s largest chromite deposits.

Guests also included representatives from Hong Kong universities who came to learn about Ontario’s plans to boost international enrolment in postsecondary institutions by 50 per cent over the next five years.

Earlier, Premier McGuinty met with Li Ka-shing, Chairman of Cheung Kong Limited and Hutchison Whampoa. The Premier and Mr. Li discussed Ontario as a growing North American location for new investment and trade. McGuinty also met with Eric Huang, CEO of CITIC Merchant Bank.

Premier McGuinty also honoured Canadian soldiers at Sai Wan War Cemetery, resting place for soldiers who died in the defence of Hong Kong during the Second World War. McGuinty laid a wreath to honour the over 550 Canadian soldiers who died, 22 of whom were from Ontario.

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[Ontario Mining] Losing Ground – Karen Mazurkewich (Originally published in Financial Post Magazine, April 2010 issue)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. article was originally published in the Financial Post Magazine’s April, 2010 issue.

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

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, who stated in a February news conference that “we are not going to succeed in Ontario by pulling stuff out of the ground,” has changed his tune. “There is a tremendous amount of excitement over the economic potential of the Ring of Fire,” says Michael Gravelle, Ontario’s Minister of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry.

In Bygone Days, Good Bush Gear And Decent Maps Were A Mining Firm’s Greatest Assets. Today, Regulation And Bureaucracy Rule The Industry. Is Canada Paying The Price?

Don McKinnon, a grizzled prospector from Timmins, Ont., sports a whopping gold nugget on his finger — proof of his prodigious finds. The 80-year-old owns a stake in the nearby Hemlo gold mine and is still very much a player in the Canadian mining industry. He remembers when the staking was hard and the regulations were easy. To get a leg up on the competition, the hoary miner wasn’t above “dirty tricks” like buying up all the mine ministry maps in town. McKinnon still displays the 40 pairs of snowshoes he bought in the winter of ’79 to thwart competing prospectors during the Hemlo staking rush, and tells tales of being stalked by polar bears in the Far North.

But ask him his thoughts on the industry today, and he simply growls: “it’s tougher.” These days, McKinnon leaves the finer points of the mining business to his 27-year-old son, Gordon, president of Canadian Orebodies Inc., which has large claims in the James Bay Lowlands. The younger McKinnon doesn’t spend nights in the bush with a pick-axe. To be a player, junior miners need ample knowledge of stock market and the ability to negotiate impact benefit agreements with First Nations. In Gordon’s case, the list also includes overseeing an survey on caribou migratory patterns — a project he funded as part of an exploration deal in northern Ontario.

While his father still relies on his massive collection of topographical maps, Gordon eagerly awaits Ontario’s new regulations that permit online mapping. It’s staking made simple, but at a price: more bureaucracy. He processes more paper in a week than his father did in a year. “Before, the government saw a new mine as a new revenue stream; now they put us through hoops,” says the younger McKinnon.

Mining was the early economic engine of this nation, and swaths of Bay Street’s wealth can be traced back to prior generations of wheeler-dealers.

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Double-talk Dalton McGuinty [About Ontario Mining]- by Toronto Sun Columnist Christina Blizzard (Originally Published March 09, 2010)

Christina Blizzard is the Queen’s Park columnist for the Toronto Sun, the city’s daily tabloid newspaper.

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

“In a highly competitive, knowledge-based global economy, we are not going succeed in
Ontario by pulling stuff out of the ground.” – Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, Feb/11/2010

Premier Dalton McGuinty just pulled off the fastest head spin since Linda Blair grossed us all out in The Exorcist.

One minute the premier thought mining was a dying industry. The next, it’s alive and saving the economy.

In a news conference Feb. 11, McGuinty had this to say: “In a highly competitive, knowledge-based global economy, we are not going succeed in Ontario by pulling stuff out of the ground.

“Our natural resource sector is very important to us but we know that future growth will come on the basis of the development of our imaginations in innovative capacities.”

By Monday’s throne speech, McGuinty had put his imagination to good use — and changed his mind.

His message was mining will save the beleaguered northern economy.

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Ontario Shines as Canada’s Diamond Capital

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 is home to more diamond projects than any other jurisdiction in Canada.  While Ontario has one producing diamond operation, De Beers Canada’s Victor Mine near Attawapiskat, it is home to 131, or 24% of all diamond projects in the country.  There are more than 533 active diamond projects in Canada ranging from grassroots exploration to advanced development to producing mines.

Following Ontario, the Northwest Territories hosts 111 diamond projects, or 20% of the Canadian total, and Nunavut hosts 100 diamond projects, or 19% of the national total. Quebec is home to 84 diamond projects, or 16% of the total.  Following in order of diamond activity are Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and Yukon Territory.

The total number of companies exploring for diamonds in Canada is 252 and 180 of those companies are listed on stock exchanges.  There are four operating diamond mines in Canada – Diavik, Ekati and Snap Lake in the Northwest Territories and Victor in Ontario.

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Will Ring Of Fire Ever Burn? – by Terence Corcoran, Financial Post Editor (April/2010)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. Terence Corcoran’s editorial opinion was originally published in the Financial Post Magazine’s April, 2010 issue.

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

Canada’s mining history is full of characters. But a modern award for promotional ingenuity goes to Richard Nemis, the veteran prospecting whiz who came up with “Ring of Fire” as the name for the latest Ontario mining rush. (Terence Corcoran – April, 2010)

Through the summer of 1967, while my hometown, Montreal, hosted Expo ’67, I was elsewhere. Most of the time I was 4,200 feet underground working as an “apprentice miner” at the famed Kerr Addison gold mine in Northern Ontario. Even at that time, the Kerr Addison, while a legendary gold producer, was considered a has-been. Located in Virginiatown, about 50 kilometres east of the great gold centre at Kirkland Lake, the Kerr Addison was a hard-rock stope operation. We would board the cage at ground level for the long and rickety descent, then take a battery-powered ore mover through black tunnels to our stopes where, lit only by our head lamps, we drilled and blasted grey-green rock faces. The next shift we’d return to muck the rock away and drag in heavy six-foot timbers to build supports and prevent cave-ins. Then we’d drill and blast again.

I wasn’t much of miner, but I could lift and move stuff around, which is what apprentice miners do. The first gold was mined at Kerr Addison in 1913, and over its spectacular life it produced 11 million ounces. Since the first gold rush in 1906, the Kirkland Lake gold mining area — of which Kerr Addison was part — produced almost 37-million ounces of gold, worth more than $37 billion at today’s prices.

Will Ontario, or any part of Canada, ever see such mining-sector productivity and wealth creation again? The test will be the Ring of Fire.

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Ontario’s Mining Sector Booms in a Slow-Growing Provincial Economy

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.

New mines and mine expansions are reinforcing the mineral sector’s role in the foundation of Ontario’s economy.  Ontario’s economy is going through the pains of transformation as it moves from a manufacturing base to a service and knowledge base.  However, as when there was an earlier shift from agriculture to manufacturing, mining was there to cushion the adjustment and help society adapt.

Currently, mining companies are proceeding with major growth plans in many parts of the province.  If we look back two years and forward about three, an incomplete list will show that mining is investing more than $8.5 billion in capital expenditures – this is in addition to operating expenditures and exploration activities.  We are not sure other private sectors of the economy can match this level of recent activity on the capital spending front.

De Beers Canada made capital expenditures of $1 billion to bring the Victor Mine, near Attawapiskat, Ontario’s first diamond mine, into production in 2008.  The Victor Mine is expected to have a positive impact on Ontario’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $6.7 billion and a $4.2 billion GDP contribution to the economy of Northern Ontario.  Xstrata Nickel invested $927 million to bring its Nickel Rim South mine in Sudbury into operation in 2009.

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Ring of Fire Junior Probe Mines Takes the High—and Hard—Ground – by Michael Schwartz

This Corporate Profile Advertorial about Probe Mines originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of the Ontario Prospector magazine which is produced by the Ontario Prospectors Association and published by Naylor (Canada) Inc.

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

The End of a Joint Venture and 875 Claims Around McFauld’s Lake Make for Exciting Times

No fewer than 875 claims covering around 14,000 hectares mean that Probe Mines controls one of the larger land packages in the McFauld’s Lake greenstone belt stratigraphy. Probe operates four projects in the McFauld’s Lake area: Victory, which is the largest, Tamarack, McFauld’s West and Black Creek. Each offers a unique setting and unique potential within the Ring of Fire.

Probe Mines is confident in its success to date. Its major presence has led to interests in a full range of metals: chromite, nickel, copper, Platinum Group Metals (PGM), base metal Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide (VMS), gold and vanadium. Tamarack and Black Creek have demonstrated their potential with the discovery of Cu-rich VMS mineralization and chromite respectively.

In addition to the chromite discovery on Black Creek, considerable untested potential remains on its other properties. They are exactly what Probe Mines CEO David Palmer describes as “grass-roots projects where no major discovery has been made but where the company feels there is still substantial potential for further exploration.”

Probe’s projects lie in sparsely vegetated and subdued topography over a 100 km belt in the James Bay Lowlands of Northern Ontario. Very little is known about the geology of the McFauld’s Lake area and most of what is known has come from the company’s own exploration.

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Ring of Fire – A Mine Project That Will Transform the Far North – Ian Ross

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. This article was published in the December, 2010 issue.

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

Two years ago, the Ring of Fire was a hot high-grade chromite discovery resigned to the back pages of the business section.

It had a quirky name inspired by the crescent shape of the mining claims laid down in the swamps of the James Bay lowlands and a Noront Resource’s mining executive’s affinity for all things Johnny Cash.

Then along came a deep-pocketed miner called Cliffs Natural Resources. The Ohio-based international iron ore and coal company has a keen interest in breaking into the stainless steel business and has blue sky ambitions for Ontario’s Far North.

The socio-economic impact for the region, especially for impoverished First Nation
people, will be simply transformational for generations to come.

What has been found, in the muskeg is the stuff of top-secret, high-level boardroom discussions and plenty of chatter in the communities that stand to benefit from a potential $2-billion mine, processing and railroad project.

The mineral potential at McFaulds Lake has been compared to the groundbreaking discoveries of nickel, copper and gold in the early 1900s that opened up the North and forever changed Ontario’s economy.

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Consultation Integral to Ontario Mining Act Changes – Michael Gravelle

Michael Gravelle is the Ontario Minister of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry www.mndmf.gov.on.ca

To remain at the forefront in a highly competitive global marketplace, we need to be open — open to change and open for discussion. Ontario’s Mining Act Modernization is an example of our government’s willingness to do both.

The Mining Act is introducing effective changes that will help keep our mining industry competitive and responsive. These changes will help strengthen our mining industry, while respecting aboriginal and treaty rights, as well as the rights of individual property owners.

Over the past year, we have been discussing with you how to adopt those changes into government regulations. I cannot emphasize enough how important those discussions have been. Ongoing open dialogue is vital to the process of developing effective regulations. That’s why we have made that a priority.

We spent nine months meeting with over 500 members of industry, aboriginal communities, non-governmental organizations, municipal representatives and private land owners.

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Sudbury’s Mining Suppliers ‘Well Placed’ to Benefit From Ring of Fire – by Ian Ross

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.

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

The executive director of the Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Association (SAMSSA) said he’s cautiously optimistic about the opportunities his members may have through high-grade nickel-copper and chromite deposits in the James Bay region known as the “Ring of Fire.”

Dick DeStefano was among those who attended a speech by Wes Hanson, Noront Resources’ president and CEO at a Greater Sudbury Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Copper Cliff Nov. 26.

Hanson outlined the junior mining company’s preliminary plans for a massive underground mine and milling complex beneath the swamps of the James Bay Lowlands.

McFauld’s Lake and the James Bay region is a breadbasket of chromite, nickel, copper, gold, platinum and palladium. Noront is the largest landholder with 120,000 hectares, including its flagship Eagle’s Nest deposit, located 300 kilometres west of DeBeers Canada’s Victor diamond mine.

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Ontario’s Resilient Northwest Banks on Education, Public Sector and Ring of Fire Mining Developments – by Livio Di Matteo

Livio Di Matteo is a Professor of Economics at Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University where he has taught since 1990.  His research has explored the sustainability of provincial government health spending, historical wealth and asset holding and economic performance and institutions in Northwestern Ontario and the central North American economic region. He writes and comments on public policy and his articles have appeared in the National Post, Toronto Star, the Winnipeg Free Press and Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal. Mr. Di Matteo has started an Economics Blog at http://ldimatte.shawwebspace.ca/

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

According to the Stockholm Resilience Center (www.stockholmresilience.org), the concept of resilience refers to the capacity of a social-ecological system to withstand perturbations from various types of shock and to then renew itself afterwards.  In other words, if a system is resilient, it can deal with change.  The forest crisis in Northwestern Ontario was a major economic shock to the region’s economy that resulted in massive employment losses and yet if one looks at the region’s economy and especially its major center – Thunder Bay – one cannot help but notice the resilience of the economy. 

Thunder Bay, which has seen three of its four pulp mills close and numerous sawmill job losses over the period 2003-2009, has witnessed increases in many indicators of economic activity suggesting that the economy has been able to adapt to the shock of the forest sector loss.

The relatively resilient economy in Northwest Ontario is being driven by three broad forces: the continued transition towards a knowledge based economy in the region, the expenditure on public sector infrastructure and the growth and development of the mining sector in the region.  The knowledge economy in Northwestern Ontario is being spearheaded by the development of the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC), the Northwestern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) and the research work of the Thunder Bay Regional Research Institute (TBRRI). 

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Rio Tinto News Release: Rio Tinto Announces New Global Centre for Underground Mine Construction in [Sudbury] Canada

26 November 2010

Rio Tinto has announced a key strategic partnership in Canada, teaming with world leading researchers to create the Rio Tinto Centre for Underground Mine Construction.

The new Centre will be based at the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI) in Sudbury, Ontario, and will focus on innovative rapid mine construction and ground control for mining at depth.

Rio Tinto is investing C$10 million over five years in the centre, completing a suite of five global long term Rio Tinto research centres around the world.

The work with CEMI will assist Rio Tinto’s development of new excavation systems through The Mine of the Future™ programme, focusing on significantly improving the construction and operation of underground mines.

As part of this programme, Rio Tinto will conduct a full scale performance verification trial in 2012 at Northparkes’ copper and gold mine in New South Wales, Australia, as the first of three new underground excavation systems.

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Analysis of Vale’s $10 Billion Canadian Investment – Liezel Hill (Mining Weekly North American Deputy Editor)

Mining Weekly is South Africa’s premier source of weekly news on mining developments in Africa’s most important industry. Mining Weekly provides in-depth coverage of mining projects and the personalities reshaping the mining industry. In order to advance Mining Weekly’s objective of positioning itself as a leading global provider of mining news, a full-time correspondent is based …

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News Release: Rio Tinto Creates A New $10 Million Mining Research Centre at CEMI in Sudbury, Canada

Sudbury, ON – On November 25th, 2010, Rio Tinto announced the establishment of the Rio Tinto Centre for Underground Mine Construction (RTC-UMC) at the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI) located in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Rio Tinto will be investing $10 million dollars over five years to undertake research at the centre.

Rio Tinto is focusing on mechanized excavation including a shaft boring system (SBS) and tunnel boring systems (TBS). Rio Tinto has selected CEMI as the agent for collaborative research leadership in support of high speed construction associated with underground mine construction. For Rio Tinto, this investment reflects the company’s long term commitment to science, engineering and innovation, and is central to its approach to research partnerships. This is the fifth global long-term research centre to be established by Rio Tinto.

The Rio Tinto Centre for Underground Mine Construction at CEMI will undertake research with respect to ground and machine performance. For this purpose, prototype test sites will be instrumented to improve ground characterization techniques and to develop innovative support systems to facilitate high speed, mechanized tunnel and shaft development technologies for underground mines in highly stressed ground and at depth.

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Could Sault Ste. Marie be Site of Ring of Fire Processing? – by Ian Ross

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.

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

Bruce Strapp Exit interview

Sault Ste. Marie is well-positioned to get a share of the chromite processing from the James Bay lowlands, said its outgoing economic development head.

“The value that Sault Ste. Marie will bring to the Ring of Fire is we’ll have one of North America’s biggest steel plants,” said Bruce Strapp, who was preparing in October to take on his new job as executive director of the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC).

While a number of communities across the North have been vocal in getting a piece of the action to process chromite ore, the Sault has been flying below the radar, but Strapp said the city is far from being out of the loop.

Strapp said with mine development in the massive McFauld’s Lake camp more than five years away, there is no reason to blow the Sault’s horn until the site selectors show up.

“Moving forward and talking to Cliffs (Natural Resources) and saying ‘We want your business’ (makes no sense when) there’s really no business to be had yet.”

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