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A valuable discovery under the world’s second-largest temperate wetland and in the traditional lands of the Cree and Ojibway casts light on the growing conflict among resource development, environmental stewardship, and Indigenous rights

When prospectors discovered a gigantic crescent of metal deposits under the James Bay Lowlands of northern Canada in 2007, the find touched off a mining rush, lured a major American company to spend fortunes in the remote swamp, and forced politicians to confront their legal duty to consult Indigenous Peoples about development on their traditional territories. But the multibillion-dollar Ring of Fire was all but abandoned when stakeholders failed to reach a consensus on how to develop the cache despite years of negotiations and hundreds of millions of dollars in spending. Now plans for an all-weather road to connect the region to the highway network are reigniting the fireworks.

In this colorful tale, Virginia Heffernan draws on her bush and newsroom experiences to illustrate the complexities of resource development at a time when Indigenous rights are becoming enshrined globally. Ultimately, Heffernan strikes a hopeful note: the Ring of Fire presents an opportunity for Canada to leave behind centuries of plunder and set the global standard for responsible development of minerals critical to the green energy revolution.

EXCERPT: Ring of Fire – Geological Richness on a World-Class Supersize Scale – by Virginia Heffernan

Geologists now speculate that the only way Nemis’s ring could contain so much mantle-derived (or ultramafic) magma and metal is if some cataclysmic geological event, such as two continents colliding or separating, had cracked open the basement rocks….

Now cast your mind back 2.7 billion years. The crust is splitting apart just west of the current imprint of Hudson Bay. The crust is thinner and the core hotter than now, creating a lot of melted mantle with nowhere to go. So as soon as a rift opens up, the restless magma lets loose and ascends….

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Neskantaga First Nation says it wasn’t adequately consulted in a key Ring of Fire environmental study, and is warning Ring of Fire Metals, the Australian mining company bent on developing the region, that it will have to use force against members of the First Nation before they would allow development.

Ontario and two other First Nations, Webequie and Marten Falls, agreed on Monday on terms of reference related to an environmental assessment for the last of the three proposed roads into the Ring of Fire.

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https://indigenousresourcenetwork.ca/

CALGARY, AB, Feb. 27, 2023 /CNW/ – Data from Census 2021 show that the extractive resource sectors, and the oil and gas sector specifically, provide the highest paying average wages for Indigenous workers in Canada.

Indigenous people in Canada make almost three times more working in the oil and gas extraction sector than the average Indigenous worker ($140,400 vs $51,120 average employment income) and almost twice as much working in mining ($93,600). Forestry also paid higher than average ($56,100).

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RepublicOfMining.com will be back in the New Year. Stay safe.

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https://www.theepochtimes.com/

Environment Minister Stephen Guilbeault wants to put a mandate in place by early 2023 that would require auto dealers to meet increasingly higher annual goals for selling zero-emission vehicles. In a plan critics say is impractical, the federal government aims to have half of all new passenger cars sold in Canada be zero-emission by 2030, and to achieve 100 percent by 2035.

Roughly 3 or 4 percent of new cars sold in Canada are zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), commonly called electric vehicles (EVs), Guilbeault recently told The Canadian Press, noting that he wants to mandate increases to those percentages in order to cut carbon emissions and to push Canada to develop such vehicles for the global market. Federal consultations are ongoing to determine how the mandate should work.

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https://financialpost.com/

Billionaire says not only will BlackRock lose money, it will also hurt national security interests

George Soros criticized BlackRock Inc.’s China push as a risk to clients’ money and U.S. security interests, in the billionaire financier and philanthropist’s latest broadside against investment in the world’s second-largest economy.

“Pouring billions of dollars into China now is a tragic mistake,” Soros wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

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https://finance.yahoo.com/

(Bloomberg) — Rio Tinto Group plans to spend $2.4 billion building a lithium mine in Serbia, in the latest sign that the biggest miners are pushing into metals poised to benefit from the green-energy transition.

The biggest producers are churning out record profits after commodities rallied this year, raising the question of what the industry will do with all the extra cash.

Most have been focused on returning money to shareholders through dividends and buybacks — analysts are expecting more big payouts in the coming weeks, including from Rio itself when the world’s second-biggest miner reports financial results on Wednesday.

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The end of coal in Canada has unfurled over years. Ontario was early: The province in 2003 pledged to eliminate coal-fired power, which supplied a quarter of its electrical demand.

By 2014, coal was powering zero per cent of the province – replaced with natural gas, wind, solar, hydro and, above all, zero-carbon nuclear.

More recently, Alberta decided to also do away with coal power. In 2015, about half of the province’s electricity came from coal. Since then, spurred by policies including strong provincial rules limiting emissions from power generation, coal has quickly faded. By 2023, Alberta will be fully off coal power – seven years ahead of schedule.

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https://torontosun.com/

Uneven, bumpy and sluggish. A big political blunder. Confusing. A lack of action. A flawed vaccine plan.

The words above? They’re actual quotes. And they’re not from the pages of newspapers, like this one, who aren’t big fans of Justin Trudeau’s government.

They’re what international media have been saying about Canada’s vaccine rollout. The Washington Post, CNN and Bloomberg, respectively. And there’s a lot more criticism internationally, too, if you go looking for it.

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VRIFY Deal Room from VRIFY Technology, Inc. on Vimeo.

TORONTO, June 24, 2019 /CNW/ – VRIFY Technology Inc. is pleased to announce it has entered into an agreement with Kirkland Lake Gold to launch the KL Gold Deal Room, a new online corporate development initiative that enhances the process of identifying and evaluating potential investment opportunities.

The initiative utilizes the VRIFY Deal Room platform, a cloud-based 3D presentation and collaboration technology that helps strategic investors and growth-oriented companies, like Kirkland Lake Gold, identify new opportunities to complement existing asset portfolios.

The launch of the KL Gold Deal Room supports Kirkland Lake Gold’s objective to deploy its capital and technical expertise to make new discoveries, develop new mines, secure future gold resources and continue to responsibly deliver value to its shareholders. Kirkland Lake Gold has outlined a simple set of criteria for assets which have the potential to complement its growth strategy and will consider possible strategic investments, joint ventures and M&A opportunities. Using the KL Gold Deal Room, companies with assets that require capital, and meet these criteria, are invited to make online submissions to the KL Gold Deal Room using one standardized format that can be accessed anywhere, anytime.

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https://www.thestar.com/

I should have anticipated the blowback to the final report of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls.

I should have realized as I listened to question after question from non-Indigenous journalists during the formal release how much the pushback would hurt, that Indigenous people would be reminded, once again, of the great gulf of misunderstanding between ourselves and Canada.

I should have realized that the inquiry’s finding that Indigenous peoples are the victims of a “race-based” genocide empowered by colonial structures would be mocked by pundits in the media. After all, the media is among those colonial structures. My profession has been complicit in the suffering of Indigenous people. It still is.

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