Sudbury Basin – Page 58 – Republic of Mining

Sudbury lags behind peers in growth – by Jonathan Migneault (Sudbury Star – March 14, 2013)

March 15, 2013

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Sudbury was one of only two Canadian cities, along with Windsor, that saw a small population decline from 2005 to 2012, according to a report by the Conference Board of Canada’s Centre for Municipal Studies.

According to the report, Sudbury’s economy expanded by just 0.6% in 2012. But Mario Lefebvre, director of the Centre for Municipal Studies, said he expects Sudbury’s economy to bounce back in 2013.

“We are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel,” Lefebvre said. “That being said, I wouldn’t want to leave you with the message that the bottom line has changed and you don’t have to address any issues when it comes to future population and productivity growth.”

The study said real gross domestic product is expected to grow by 1.7% in 2013 and 2% in 2014. The construction of Vale’s $360-million Totten nickel mine — the first new mine in Sudbury in 40 years — is expected to play a significant role in that growth.

Lefebvre said Sudbury needs to take lessons from Western cities like Regina and Winnipeg, and reach out to immigrants to increase growth. David Robinson, director of Laurentian University’s Institute for Northern Ontario Research and Development, said the biggest factor holding back economic growth in Sudbury is weak local leadership.

Province to help clean up arsenic in Long Lake – by Laura Stricker (Sudbury Star – February 27, 2013)

March 11, 2013

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Two years after tests by the Long Lake Stewardship Committee showed high levels of arsenic were entering the lake, the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines announced it is starting a three-year cleanup project.

“The stewardship began a program more than two years ago to have the arsenic problem addressed when Stewardship testing showed high arsenic levels was entering the lake from Luke Creek at the most westerly end of the lake,” the committee said in a release.

“Luke Creek leads directly from the old tailings of the Long Lake Gold Mine. The Ministry of Environment, at the request of the Stewardship, conducted independent tests in the fall of 2012 and confirmed that the arsenic levels in the last bay of the lake were a danger to humans.”

Last July, The Star first reported on the issue of arsenic showing up in the lake. At the time, Kate Jordan, a spokesperson with the Ministry of the Environment, stressed that the ministry had no concerns about the safety of Long Lake’s water.

According the release, a study conducted sometime this year by a contractor will determine the extent of the problem, and a plan of action to clean up the arsenic will be developed. The ministry will present the options to the committee and area residents to determine which plan best suits address the concerns.

Stompin’ Tom remembered for Northern roots – by Sebastien Perth (Sudbury Star – March 8, 2013)

March 8, 2013

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Stompin Tom Connors’ Mining Songs: http://republicofmining.com/2013/01/21/stompin-tom-connors-wiki-profile-and-mining-songs/

The ties Stompin’ Tom Connors formed with Northern Ontario are legendary.

Connors, who was surrounded by his family when he died Wednesday night at age 77, often credited the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins for launching his professional career and the song he penned at the Townehouse Tavern — Sudbury Saturday Night — in 1965 became one of his biggest hits.

Charlie Angus — musician and Member of Parliament for Timmins-James Bay — says Connors showed Canadians who they were through his writing.

“I think what Tom did that was so important is that he put our experience and our places on the cultural map of Canada. I was talking to a woman who said when she was 11, she memorized Sudbury Saturday Night. She had never been there, but her dad worked at Stelco so she thought Stelco was like Inco and it was.

“My grandfather had been at the McIntyre mine (in Timmins) where the fire had been and Tom wrote the song and it gave chills to hear it. We thought we had that special relationship,” Angus said. Townehouse manager Paul Loewenberg said Connors captured the city very well when he wrote Sudbury Saturday Night in 1965.

Group takes [mining deaths] probe pitch north – by Carol Mulligan (Sudbury Star – March 4, 2013)

March 4, 2013

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

The Sudbury committee struck to lobby the province to conduct an inquiry into mining practices in Ontario will take its campaign on the road next month.

MINES (Mining Inquiry Needs Support) has been invited by United Steelworkers speak to its members in Timmins on March 24. Local 7850 members work for Goldcorp Porcupine and Hollinger mines.

Everyone’ Local 7850 The MINES committee formed after a United Steelworkers investigation into the June 8, 2011, deaths of two men at Vale’s Stobie Mine called for an inquiry to review an industry that hasn’t been under the microscope in 30 years.

Jason Chenier, 35, and Jordan Fram, 26, were killed while working at the 3,000-foot level of the century-old mine when they were overcome by a run of 350 tons of muck. The USW investigation found that excess water was a problem in the mine and that safety warnings by Chenier a day or two before the accident were not addressed.

Briana Fram, Jordan’s sister, is secretary of the committee chaired by her mother Wendy. MINES launched a postcard campaign last year to convince then Labour Minister Linda Jeffrey to order a mining inquiry.

Dark Matter: Could physics’ next biggest mystery be solved in Sudbury? – by Kate Allen (Toronto Star – March 1, 2013)

March 1, 2013

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Science experiments like PICASSO and DEAP-3600 are trying to resolve one of the universe’s biggest scientific mysteries

The hottest thing in science today is cold. It’s also invisible, though it still manages to be heavy.

Dark matter — the mysterious stuff that physicists believe makes up a quarter of the universe but which no one has been able to directly detect — is having what the style world would call “a moment.” At this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting, the Fashion Week of science, dark matter talks were the Marc Jacobs fall collection: devotees crammed themselves into darkened rooms to get a glimpse of the Next Big Thing.

“I’ve been saying for a couple years now that the 2010s will be the dark matter decade,” says Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. With the discovery last summer of what is almost certainly the Higgs Boson, dark matter is the next big mystery in physics — and experiments designed to detect it are just beginning to show fruit.

Some of the most exciting are sitting in a mine shaft two kilometres below Sudbury, Ont.

By 2014, the SNOLAB underground laboratory will have five different experiments searching for what physicists believe dark matter is made of: WIMPs, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.

Province to help clean up arsenic in [Sudbury’s] Long Lake – by Laura Stricker (Sudbury Star – February 27, 2013)

February 27, 2013

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Accent: City builds rep as mining [research] hub – by Jonathan Migneault (Sudbury Star – February 23, 2013)

May 7, 2013February 25, 2013

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

A giant 3D television displayed two separate animations of coloured rectangle s that appeared at seemingly random areas on the screen. The coloured rectangles — and they covered the entire spectrum of a rainbow — represented different mine areas, and appeared on screen in the order they should be developed.

The animation was a visual representation of mine scheduling and showcased the differences between a schedule that was put together manually, and another that was created by an algorithm developed at Laurentian University.

Scheduling ore extraction at a mine may seem like a mundane task at first, but tweaking the extraction order for peak mine performance can increase the net value of a mining operation by up to 20%.

Researchers at Laurentian’s Mining Innovation Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation (MIRARCO) developed a software solution called the schedule optimization tool, or SOT for short.

The technology helps mining companies save time and money before they start digging for minerals, and has been used by a number of companies, including Vale and Xstrata.

Lorrie Fava, MIRARCO’s program manager of ventilation and production optimization, said the program cuts down greatly on the amount of time companies need to dedicate to scheduling a new mine site.

[Sudbury]Mining to recover in 2013, board predicts – by Carol Mulligan (Sudbury Star – February 21, 2013)

February 21, 2013

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

New developments in the mining industry in 2013 will contribute to a predicted 1.7% growth in real gross domestic product in Sudbury, up from 0.6% in 2012, according to the Conference Board of Canada.

Sudbury was second from the bottom in economic performance of 28 census metropolitan areas last year, but the board is forecasting it will move up to 22 in 2013. GDP is a measure of the overall economic activity — the value of goods and services produced — within an economy.

Sudbury’s economy was held back last year by significant declines in several sectors, said Jane McIntyre, an economist with the Conference Board of Canada. McIntyre collects data for several cities, Sudbury among them.

In 2011, there was strong growth in the primary and utilities sector, mostly mining, as Vale recovered from the effects of a year-long strike by United Steelworkers.

Weaker metal prices last year, as well as the temporary shutdowns early in the year at Vale mines and the closing of the Frood portion of Frood-Stobie Mine at the end of the year, took a “chunk” out of that sector in 2013.

Steel VP resigns in union spat – by Carol Mulligan (Sudbury Star – February 11, 2013)

February 11, 2013

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

The executive board of United Steelworkers Local 6500 will decide in the next few weeks about appointing someone as the local’s vice-president, after the man elected to the post eight months ago quit the position last month.

Denis Theriault tendered his resignation to the union Jan. 18, saying he couldn’t serve the membership due to “opposing ideology and philosophy” with other union executives.

Theriault has returned to his duties as surface training inspector at Vale’s Copper Cliff Smelter Complex, concluding he wasn’t able “to build or foster a good working relationship with the group that’s there,” he said when contacted by The Star.

Theriault won the vice-presidency in April, after defeating incumbent Patrick Veinot. Veinot was appointed VP in 2010 after president John Fera retired, vice-president Rick Bertrand moved up to president and the executive appointed Veinot VP.

Theraiult said he wasn’t part of a slate of candidates running against Bertrand, Veinot and others last year, although he put his name forward “as an alternative with a group of people. We weren’t a full slate.” He was the only one of the six elected.

He said tried to build over time a better relationship with Bertrand and the executive, “and it just wasn’t happening.”

[Sudbury’s] Laurentian University to meet mining industry’s needs – by Lindsay Kelly (Northern Ontario Business – January 30, 2013)

May 7, 2013January 30, 2013

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.

Discovering a business’s competitive advantage, global marketing, export education, expanding market access: they’re the goals of the Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Services Association (SAMSSA), but they could easily be the founding principles of the Goodman School of Mines at Laurentian University, according to its president.

Dominic Giroux was the guest speaker at SAMSSA’s annual general meeting Dec. 4, and he outlined the scope and aims of the new mining school, which was announced last year and is expected to get underway in 2013.

According to industry statistics, 40 per cent of mining-industry workers are expected to retire over the next few years, leaving a deficit of 60,000 to 100,000 workers across the country. Laurentian aims to close that gap by offering education in mining-related programs that will bolster Northern Ontario’s existing mining cluster and boost the number of skilled workers in Canada.

Canvassing SAMSSA members, Laurentian found business owners appreciated the technical skills of engineering and earth sciences grads, of which there is a current demand, but they also voiced a need for executive programs in the areas of project management, business acumen, and international business.

Sudbury: Ontario’s mining superstore (Excerpt from Canadian Chamber of Commerce Mining Report)

January 30, 2013

This is an excerpt from the January 30, 2013 Canadian Chamber of Commerce Mining Report: Mining Capital: How Canada Transformed Its Resources Endowment Into a Global Competitive Advantage

Sudbury has a century of history as a mining centre and over a dozen mines operating within city limits. Over the past decade, the Northern Ontario city has been subtly shifting its focus from being a producer of metals to a creator of mining know-how and technology. This shift has been marked by the rise of an organized Northern Ontario mining technology cluster focused on underground hardrock mining technologies.

Sudbury is home to a broad range of mining related activities. The operations of large mining majors— Vale and Xstrata—serve as anchors for the cluster along with other mining ﬁrms.(38) Around these ﬁrms has grown a network of mining supply and technology ﬁrms that, together, contributed almost $4 billion to the local economy and employed 13,800 people—around eight per cent of the population of Greater Sudbury.(39)

The city is also home to a concentration of mining education and research. Sudbury is home to the public-private Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation, the Canadian Mining Industry Research Organization, the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology and Mining and Laurentian University’s School of Mining and its eight mining research centres. In addition, industry associations, like the Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Organization, and publications, like the Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal, seek to share information and strengthen the links among the cluster’s participants.

Mining companies need Ottawa’s help to solve shortage of workers – by Peter O’Neil (Vancouver Sun – January 29, 2013)

September 7, 2018January 30, 2013

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

Report says lack of skilled employees already causing costly mistakes

OTTAWA — Vancouver, Toronto and Sudbury are to Canada what Hollywood and Silicon Valley are to the U.S. — cities with a cluster of businesses built around a major industry that competes globally.

But the world-class industry in those Canadian cities — mining — needs government help, says a report to be released Wednesday.

According to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce report, world-competitive industries emerge when they attract a large cluster of related companies to a particular area, such as Metro Vancouver, allowing for increased competition, economies of scale and innovation.

But, the report warns, renewed federal government efforts are needed if mining is to continue to attract and maintain the “clusters” of companies it needs — in finance, insurance, manufacturing and more — to Vancouver, Toronto and Sudbury.

The top challenge for governments is to help the industry resolve the skilled worker shortage “crisis” that, according to the report, is increasingly resulting in costly mistakes in mining operations.