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Minister responsible for Energy and Resources – by Tony Playter (Regina Leader-Post – May 25, 2013)

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

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Q & A with Tim McMillan

According to the Saskatchewan Mining Association website, Saskatchewan has more than 25 operating mines that produce minerals such as potash, uranium, coal and gold as well as mineral resources including diamonds, copper and zinc.

To ensure continued success in the mining sector and the province’s overall economic growth, the Ministry of the Economy has taken several steps to encourage investment and development in Saskatchewan. Tim McMillan, Minister responsible for Energy and Resources, discussed the future of mining in Saskatchewan.

Q: Since 2007, how has the provincial government encouraged investment in Saskatchewan’s mining sector?

I believe it is important to tell the Saskatchewan story in an accurate and positive light. For too long, Saskatchewan politicians talked about what we couldn’t do, what we didn’t have and how we would never grow or prosper like some of our neighbours.

The change in paradigm has been a very important part of our success. We have been very open and made some key structural changes that have created a stable royalty system that will drive long-term investments and benefits for our province.

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Canadian mine giant Barrick fined a record $16.4M in Chile – by Canadian Press/CBC News (May 25, 2013)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/

Native population complains of cancerous growths and aching stomachs

The Diaguita Indians live in the foothills of the Andes, just downstream from the world’s highest gold mine, where for as long as anyone can remember they’ve drunk straight from the glacier-fed river that irrigates their orchards and vineyards with its clear water.

Then thousands of mine workers and their huge machines moved in, building a road alongside the river that reaches all the way up to Pascua-Lama, a gold mine being built along both sides of the Chile-Argentine border at a lung-busting 5,000 metres above sea level.

The crews moved mountaintops in preparation for 25 years of gold and silver production, breaking rocks and allowing mineral acids that include arsenic, aluminum and sulfates to flow into the headwaters feeding Atacama desert communities down below.

River levels dropped, the water is murky in places and the Indians now complain of cancerous growths and aching stomachs. There’s no way to prove or disprove it, but villagers are convinced Barrick Gold Corp. is to blame for their health problems.

“We don’t know how much contamination the fruit and vegetables we eat may have,” complained Diaguita leader Yovana Paredes Paez. “They’re drying up the river, our farms aren’t the same. The animals are dying of hunger. Now there’s no cheese or meat. It’s changed completely.”

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Saskatchewan Mining Association predicts mining sector growth – by Robyn Tocker (Regina Leader-Post – May 25, 2013)

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

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Saskatchewan’s mining industry employs over 30,500 people who work in over 20 different mining operations across Saskatchewan. The province supplies a variety of minerals in Canada and internationally. It is best known for being the world’s leading producer of potash, producing roughly one third of the world’s supply. “Saskatchewan is also the world’s second-leading producer of uranium, supplying roughly 17 per cent,” said Pam Schwann, the executive director of the Saskatchewan Mining Association (SMA).

Saskatchewan’s mining industry also produces minerals such as lignite coal, which supplies over 50 per cent of the province’s baseload power. Gold, salt, sodium sulphate, bentonite and other clays are also mined.

“One of the key advantages Saskatchewan has over other jurisdictions [in producing these minerals] is its geologic framework,” Schwann said. Both the potash-bearing Prairie Evaporite Formation and the uranium-bearing Athabasca Basin host world class deposits in terms of tonnage and grade.

Saskatchewan also has an advantage because of a positive policy environment. Schwann explained the annual Fraser Institute Survey identified that Saskatchewan ranked 13th out of 96 global jurisdictions in terms of offering overall policy attractiveness for investment. Saskatchewan’s postsecondary institutes, including the Apprenticeship and Trade Certification Commission, also lend a hand.

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ONTC: Options for Ontera – by Maria Calabrese (North Bay Nugget – May 25, 2013)

http://www.nugget.ca/

NORTH BAY – The telecommunications arm of the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission is back on the table for options other than divestment.

Local politicians are hoping that won’t matter as they anticipate an announcement from the province that could bode well for the future of the Crown agency put up for sale by the province 14 months ago.

“I believe this issue will be resolved very quickly this summer,” said Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli. “The Liberals will want this resolved before the auditor general comes out with his report. Once his report comes out, they’ll have to end the fire sale.”

Fedeli called in the auditor general to look into ONTC divestment which he said would cost $530 million in pension, benefits, workers’ compensation, severance and other liabilities based on ONTC financial statements, contradicting the government’s projected savings of $265 million.

Northern Development and Mines Minister Michael Gravelle penned letters as recently as April 29 indicating the divestment process was still underway, and softened the government stance after those numbers were made public by suggesting there are options to divestment, Fedeli said.

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Entrepreneurial thinking drives airport’s success – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – May 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. Ian Ross is the editor of Northern Ontario Business ianross@nob.on.ca.

Mining signals opportunity to Scott McFadden. The opening of Ontario’s Far North to resource extraction and development is something the president and CEO of Thunder Bay International Airports Authority is keenly keeping his eye on.

While the remote mineral exploration camps in the Ring of Fire are serviced by dirt and ice air strips, as progress moves forward, McFadden said building a significant airfield in the James Bay lowlands to eventually service working mines is a must.

“A properly built and maintained airfield is going to be vital to the development of the Ring of Fire.” McFadden points to Goldcorp’s Musselwhite Mine, 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, which regularly runs charters out of the airport, as a prime example of how the industry has evolved to attract and retain a transient workforce that prefers the long commute to work.

Instead of creating a remote mining town with all its infrastructure, McFadden said companies prefer work camps to allow miners to arrive and leave on a rotational basis.

“Years ago you established a mine and a town around it. These days people’s expectations are different. They want to stay home and I see an airport as probably the best way to develop a mine in a remote area.”

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Layoffs at Lake Shore Gold [in Timmins] – by Benjamin Aubé (Timmins Daily Press – May 25, 2013)

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

TIMMINS – Despite laying off approximately 35 employees on Friday, Lake Shore Gold Corp. remains confident in its main commodity.

“We have a lot of confidence in the future of gold and we expect the price to go back up,” said Mark Utting, Lake Shore Gold’s vice-president, investor relations. “You just have to manage your business to be successful in the current price environment.”

The company employed “about 560” workers prior to Friday’s cuts. With localized operations in the region including the Timmins West Mine, the Bell Creek Mine, the Fenn-Gib Project and a rapidly expanding mill site, a large majority of the company’s employees are Timmins residents.

“You never want to do this, and it’s not something you do lightly,” said Utting. “But if you look at our company, we’re very proud of the fact that we’ve grown from 10 employees in 2007 to over 500 employees, even after these reductions today.

“The gold price is down over $250 an ounce so far this year, and we’re a rapidly growing company that’s currently in the heaviest part of its capital spending period. We’re investing a lot of capital in Timmins and as a company like that, we have to be responsive to changes in market conditions.

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Barrick Assesses Impact of Chile Resolution on Andes Mine – by Liezel Hill & James Attwood (Bloomberg News – May 24, 2013)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX), the world’s largest producer of the metal, is studying details of a Chilean resolution that imposed a fine and ordered work to safeguard water supplies at its $8.5 billion Pascua-Lama mining project.

Construction work at the site on the border with Argentina can’t resume until measures have been taken to prevent contamination, Chilean environmental agency SMA said in a statement on its website today.

Barrick is “fully committed” to complying with the resolution, the company said in a statement. The shares fell 2.1 percent after trading resumed following an earlier halt.

Construction on the Chilean side of the mine was stopped by a Chilean court last month. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Sokalsky told the Bloomberg Canada Economic Summit on May 21 that Toronto-based Barrick won’t continue making significant investments if there’s uncertainty about the project’s future. He said Barrick has already invested $5 billion in the mine.

“I think Barrick should seriously consider canceling the project,” Pawel Rajszel, a Toronto-based analyst at Veritas Investment Research Corp. who has a buy rating on the stock, said today by phone.

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Well intentioned ‘blood mineral’ provision backfires – by Lauren Cook (Medill News Service/UPI.com – May 24, 2013)

http://www.upi.com/

A U.S. law that imposed an embargo on mineral trade used to finance Congolese armed groups has backfired, affecting the region’s poorest artisanal miners.

WASHINGTON, May 24 — A provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law aimed at reducing money to militia groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by imposing rules on buying minerals from the region has backfired, exacerbating and depriving at least 1 million subsistence miners of their livelihood, several experts told a congressional committee Tuesday.

“Dodd-Frank 1502, the conflict minerals provision … is a case study in how good intentions can go awry,” said David Aronson, panel member and editor of CongoResources.org. “The law imposed a de facto embargo on mineral production that impoverished the region’s million or so artisanal miners; it also drove the trade into the hands of militia and predatory Congolese army units.”

The original intent of the conflict mineral provision, or Section 1502, was to reduce financing opportunities for the militia groups in the Congo’s mineral market by establishing disclosure requirements for companies that use minerals like gold, wolframite, casserite, columbite-tantalite and their derivative metals (tin, tungsten and tantalum) to make their products.

The companies are required to report the particular mineral’s origin. If the material is determined to be from the DRC — or if its source is unknown — they must notify the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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KWG CEO says rail access is the way to go – by Norm Tollinsky (Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal – May 24, 2013)

Norm Tollinsky is the editor of Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal, a quarterly magazine that showcases the mining expertise of Northern Ontario. http://www.sudburyminingsolutions.com/

“What we’re more concerned about is the use of the route to benefit our interests in the mineral deposits.”

Frank Smeenk, president and CEO of junior miner KWG Resources, can’t think of one good reason to build a road to the Ring of Fire, a remote mineral-rich region in Ontario’s James Bay Lowlands.

“It never occurred to me that anyone would ever contemplate shipping hundreds of millions of tonnes of (chromite ore) over a period of decades if not centuries any way other than by railroad,” he declared in an interview with Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal.

KWG owns 30 per cent of the Big Daddy chromite deposit, and through subsidiary Canada Chrome Corporation, rights to a string of mining claims along an esker stretching some 330 kilometres through wetland terrain from the CN Rail line to the Ring of Fire. Cliffs Natural Resources, which owns 70 per cent of Big Daddy is currently undergoing an environmental assessment and feasibility study to develop its adjacent 100 per cent-owned Black Thor chromite deposit, potentially leaving KWG and its shareholders out in the cold.

KWG’s staking of the route along what it calls “a unique linear sand ridge that stands proud of the vast wetlands” was one way to preserve some leverage over Cliffs and generate returns for its shareholders.

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Cliffs VP makes case for Ring of Fire road – by Norm Tollinsky (Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal – May 24, 2013)

Norm Tollinsky is the editor of Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal, a quarterly magazine that showcases the mining expertise of Northern Ontario. http://www.sudburyminingsolutions.com/

Volume, cost and safety taken into consideration

A senior executive with Cliffs Natural Resources offered a detailed explanation of the company’s position in favour of road access to the Ring of Fire at a standing room only session on the final day of the PDAC in March.

“We looked at a lot of different options,” said Ken Pavlich, vice-president of operations for the company’s global ferroalloys business. “After eliminating the obvious non-starters like trying to get to James Bay or Hudson Bay, we decided that the only viable options for our project began at the concentrator and ended at the CN Rail line.

“From that, we looked at three different rail zones and two different road zones and, within each, we looked at multiple routes trying to figure out what would work.

“This was not a two-week or a two-month project,” said Pavlich. “It was more like a two-year project. We put a lot of time and a lot of effort into it because this is going to be the most difficult part of the project in terms of construction.”

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Excerpt from “Lawyers, Families, and Businesses: The Shaping of a Bay Street Law Firm, Faskens 1863-1963″ – by C. Ian Kyer

To order a copy of Lawyers, Families, and Businesses, please click here: http://www.irwinlaw.com/store/product/712/lawyers-families-and-businesses 

In Lawyers, Families, and Businesses: The Shaping of a Bay Street Law Firm, Faskens 1863–1963, noted lawyer and historian, Ian Kyer, provides a superbly researched and fascinating study of the origins and development of the law firm now known as Fasken Martineau Dumoulin. Beginning in colonial Toronto in 1863 where two young lawyers, William Henry Beatty and Edward Marion Chadwick, established their partnership in “one room, half furnished,”

Kyer follows the first 100 years of mergers, redirections, challenges, and advances that today have resulted in an international firm of over 700 lawyers practising on three continents. In the process of giving readers a view of the evolution of the practice of law in Canada as seen from the perspective of one particular firm, Kyer also provides in-depth and original accounts of the interrelationships among law firms, family connections, business development, and political influence in Canadian history.

This is an insightful, compelling, social history of one of Canada’s most important law firms.

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Canada Travel: Britannia Mine Museum a fine family spot in British Columbia – by Camille Bains (Canadian Press/Toronto Star – May 23, 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.

Kids can pan for gold and explore the history of gold mining at this museum on the Sea to Sky Highway between Vancouver and Whistler, B.C.

BRITANNIA BEACH, B.C.—A big yellow dump truck along the Sea to Sky highway is no match for the mountains-and-ocean view between Vancouver and Whistler, but curious travellers would be in for a treat if they stopped at an adjoining museum that holds the secrets of a bygone era.

The Britannia Mine Museum features the history of the copper mine that was once the largest in the British Empire and employed 60,000 workers between 1904 and 1974, when it was closed.

The museum that made its debut the following year and is a national historic site has been steadily expanding since then.
Besides a kids’ play area and a gold-panning station that’s a huge hit, the museum includes a guided train tour of a former service tunnel, similar to the 210-kilometre tunnels where workers toiled six days a week.

Guide Isabelle Akerhielm warns visitors in hard hats that the tunnel will go dark for a few seconds “and you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face, guaranteed.”

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Still up in the air [Thunder Bay power plant] – by Leith Dunick (tbnewswatch.com – May 23, 2013)

http://www.tbnewswatch.com/

Premier Kathleen Wynne promised Northwestern Ontario will have the energy it needs.

What she didn’t say Thursday during a brief visit to Thunder Bay was how the province would accomplish the feat. Wynne waltzed deftly around several direct questions about the future of the Thunder Bay Power Generating Station, which supporters of its closure suggest will save the province $400 million.

“This is an ongoing discussion. This is not a dead issue by any stretch of the imagination. We’re still working with the community and the Ministry of Energy is very much engaged with this,” Wynne said.

“I stand by that commitment to make sure we have the generating capacity necessary.” Asked about a demand earlier this month by Mayor Keith Hobbs to either re-start the conversion of the plant to natural gas, a plan halted by former energy minister Chris Bentley, or apologize like she did to southern Ontarians over the gas-plant closure scandal, once again Wynne toed the party line.

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Minnesota lawmakers raise taconite tax to help pay for Iron Range school construction – by John Myers (Duluth News Tribune – May 24, 2013)

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/

Minnesota’s per-ton tax on taconite iron ore produced in the state will increase a dime this year, and the extra money will be dedicated to help rebuild and retool Iron Range schools.

The taconite provision was included in the 2013 Legislature’s final omnibus tax bill, which Gov. Mark Dayton signed into law Thursday.

The per-ton tax on taconite will increase to $2.56. Half the increase is part of an annual inflationary increase — this year, about 5.3 cents per ton produced. But there’s also an additional increase of a nickel per ton.

“We’re capturing that 10.3 cents to build and rebuild facilities for schools within the taconite tax relief area,” said state Rep. Tom Anzelc, DFL-Balsam Township, who served on the House Tax Committee and helped craft the taconite tax changes. “It’s something that’s long overdue and the school districts simply can’t handle on their own.”

That money will be made available for school construction and improvement projects through bonds issued by the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board. The extra money for school construction projects won’t affect other recipients of taconite tax revenue, such as homeowners, counties, towns and city governments and the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board. They all should get about the same amount as last year out of the taconite tax pool.

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Wynne ready to face [Northwestern Ontario] challenges (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – May 24, 2013)

Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

Ontario’s premier is happy she’s finally getting a chance to do her job. Kathleen Wynne was named premier earlier this year, and came into the job amidst a variety of crises, such as the gas plant controversy, the teacher standoff and a budget battle in which the Progressive Conservative party said it wouldn’t support the Liberal budget before any of its members even saw it.

But now, Wynne has worked out a deal with the provincial NDP that will see the NDP support the budget, avoiding an election and keeping the minority Liberal government in power.

“We’re pleased to be able to say that,” a smiling Wynne said at the Hoito on Thursday during her first-ever visit to Thunder Bay as premier. She’s been here before in her other Liberal roles; she was here, for example, a few days after last year’s flood in her role as minister of municipal affairs and housing.

“We’re in a minority parliament, so that sense of uncertainty doesn’t go away completely,” she said. “But that’s OK, because that keeps us sharp. “There’s a lot of work to do now. Yes, we have the support of the NDP to pass the budget, but that doesn’t mean that implementing the budget isn’t a huge priority. Once we get it through the legislature — we’ve got some work to do on that in the next few weeks — the implementation is really important to me.

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