A month or so ago, a special task force for the Greater City of Sudbury called the Advisory Panel on Municipal Mining Revenues presented their recommendations to the city.
The committee was struck to review the astonishing inequities between the amount of mining tax money skimmed off the top by the provincial and federal governments, as opposed to the falling revenue for the city. This is not a new idea. The panel puts it in perspective.
In 1964, the mayor of Sudbury, at the time, struck a committee to investigate Sudbury’s financial problems and came up with a report entitled “1964; Year of the Dilemma.” The major theme was the lack of assessment available to the city from the mining industry.
In 1967, the Ontario Committee on Taxation went at it with a draft proposal that Sudbury would receive even less money.
The following excerpt by Vale Inco President and Chief Executive Officer Murilo Ferreira is from the Vale Inco sustainability report released last summer. The full report is available at: 
• Thank you, and good afternoon everyone. It’s been a little while since I spoke to the Chamber, so it’s a pleasure to be here.
With such turmoil on global stock exchanges, one might wonder if Xstrata CEO Mick Davis and Vale CEO Roger Agnelli are trying to perform their proposed merger/takeover – difficult enough at the best of times – on the deck of a financial Titanic.