Republic of Mining

Tories, Liberals clash over Ring of Fire – Star Staff (Sudbury Star – January 28, 2012)

January 29, 2012

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

Cliffs Natural Resources said Friday it still plans to open a chromite mine and plant by 2015, despite claims by a Conser vative MPP that development of the so-called Ring of Fire area has been pushed back to 2016.

“There has been no changes for the Ring of Fire chromite project timeline established by Cliffs,” said Patricia Persico, a Cliffs Natural Resources spokeswoman, when contacted by The Star.

Earlier Friday, Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli accused the McGuinty government of mismanaging the Ring of Fire, a huge, mineral-rich tract of land in Northern Ontario.

Fedeli said development of the Ring of fire has been delayed to 2016 from 2015, and he blamed the provincial government and its Ring of Fire coordinator, Christine Kaszycki.

[Sudbury new union hall] A brand new home – by Carol Mulligan (January 28, 2012)

January 29, 2012

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

Like a play that is a well-acted opening night after a chaotic dress rehearsal, there was no sign Thursday of the behind-the-scenes scrambling that went on this week at the new Steelworkers’ Hall at 66 Brady St.

By the time the ribbon was cut to the new Leo W. Gerard Hall, the multi-purpose union hall was ready for visitors.

There was no sign of the rolls of wire, lumber, sawdust and workers evident Monday when United Steelworkers Local 6500 president Rick Bertrand led a brief tour of the new facility. By Thursday afternoon, the main hall was transformed into an elegant ballroom — with a

musical trio playing on the main stage, a buffet of finger foods and an atmosphere reminiscent of a wedding or tiny social event.

Descendant of Jack London opposes [Northwest Territory] mine – by By Stephen Hume (Vancouver Sun – January 28, 2012)

January 28, 2012

The Vancouver Sun, a broadsheet daily paper first published in 1912, has the largest circulation in the province of British Columbia.

Aboriginal opposition to development of silver-zinc deposit in Nahanni National Park Reserve is supported by writer’s great-granddaughter

Celebrated writer Jack London’s great-granddaughter is supporting northern first nations and environmental groups challenging efforts by a Vancouver mining company to redevelop a rich silver-zinc deposit within the Nahanni National Park Reserve.

The park, surrounding the South Nahanni River where it carves through the Mackenzie Mountains about 1,300 kilometres north of Vancouver, has been called Canada’s Grand Canyon.

Last December, the Dehcho First Nations wrote to the federal government saying that a decision by the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board dismissing the need for an environmental impact review for the Canadian Zinc Corp.’s Prairie Creek mine was “troubling and disappointing” in its failure to adequately address their concerns about downstream water quality.

[India] Odisha CM urges Centre to complete ban chromite export with immediate effect – (Orissa Business News – January 26, 2012)

January 28, 2012

This article originaly came from India media: http://www.orissadiary.com/ Bhubaneswar: Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has demanded a complete ban on its exports with immediate effect. In a letter to Union Minister of Mines Dinsha Patel, the Chief Minister on Wednesday urged him to stop chrome ore export in order to provide raw material security to …

For people of Attawapiskat, hope endures – by Jim Coyle (Toronto Star – January 27, 2012)

November 5, 2015January 28, 2012

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.

ATTAWAPISKAT, ONT.—For more than 20 years, Gilles Bisson has been visiting Attawapiskat, often flying his own small plane up to this remote Cree reserve. As much as any outsider can, he knows all the people, all the issues. Being a smart guy, he also knows how much he doesn’t know.

“Sometimes,” sighs the veteran New Democrat MPP for Timmins-James Bay. “I wonder if I really understand the community any better now than when I started.”

Attawapiskat is basically built on swamp, about 300 kilometres north of Moosonee on the James Bay coast. And the imagery fits. Lately, as the reserve became the new Canadian shorthand for native need, dysfunction and failure, its problems have seemed just as boggy and intractable.

The community is, to be sure, everything it has been portrayed as and more — a world of chronic poverty and dependence, of babies having far too many babies, of cascading generations piling up in shanties, of disheartening self-sabotage, of nepotism and decidedly imperfect governance.

Cleaning up California’s Wild West: EPA takes on polluted mercury mine in San Benito ghost town – by Paul Rogers (San Jose Mercury News – December 4, 2011)

January 28, 2012

This article originally came from the San Jose Mercury News: http://www.mercurynews.com/

Every second of every day it flows: a river of poison gushing from the hillsides.

Forty gallons a minute, 21 million gallons a year. It bubbles and gurgles across the landscape, a bright orange toxic brew, nearly as corrosive as battery acid, teeming with mercury, aluminum, iron and nickel, the legacy of a long-abandoned mine, relentlessly pouring into nearby streams.

For 120 years, the mining town of New Idria in the rugged back country of southern San Benito County was a colorful California outpost, a Wild West community frequented by prospectors and speculators, stagecoaches and famous bandits like Joaquin Murrieta, known as the “Mexican Robin Hood.” Herbert Hoover even owned part of the claim at one point.

Today, after decades of neglect, this remote landscape with so much history may finally have a future.

The [resource] race to China – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – January 28, 2012)

January 28, 2012

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

KITIMAT, B.C. — In a climate of growing hostility toward energy industry development across North America, Timothy Wall, president of the Canadian unit of Houston-based Apache Corp., took the road less travelled to the heart of Kitimat.

He flew multiple times to the 9,000-resident town on the northern British Columbia coast to ensure support for his liquefied natural gas plans. He unleashed a team to explain the challenges and the benefits.

He won over the local aboriginals, the Haisla Nation, by meeting with them, acknowledging their rights, making them his landlords. “We had a big push … trying to make this a win-win for everybody,” Mr. Wall, who is originally from Houston, said in an interview.

“We told the stakeholders in the Kitimat area that there would be challenges, but that we would work through them. That with everybody pulling in the right way, we would get there.”

The two-year effort paid off with widespread community support for Apache’s plan to pipe natural gas from fields at the other end of the Rockies, build a terminal down the canal in Bish Cove to liquefy it, and transport it by tanker to Asia.

[Jim O’Neil and BRIC countries] The world’s not in crisis – it’s just between stabilities – by Doug Saunders (Globe and Mail – January 28, 2012)

January 28, 2012

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

There’s something you crucially need to understand about the global economic crisis: It doesn’t exist.

Sure, Europe may be weeks away from a monetary cataclysm that has the potential of crashing all its economies plus some of the euro-exposed banks across the Atlantic. The United States may be suffering its highest poverty rates in half a century. And here in Britain, the combination of high inflation and an economy that actually shrank last quarter may return the ugly word “stagflation” – stagnation plus inflation – to our vocabulary.

But that hardly constitutes “global.” If you live in Sao Paulo, Moscow, Mumbai, Shanghai, Mexico City, Jakarta, Istanbul, Johannesburg or a dozen other centres in the eastern and southern three-quarters of the world, then your country hasn’t been experiencing any kind of crisis, beyond a few rough months in 2008 and 2009. In fact, most of those places have been enjoying a more or less continuous boom.

If you view the world rather strictly through the lens of economic growth, you can paint a picture of neatly symmetrical rebalancing.

Ring of Fire coordinator never been at site, says energy critic – Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – January 27, 2012)

January 27, 2012

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.

Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli said the provincially-appointed Ring of Fire coordinator admitted to him that she has never set foot on the burgeoning mineral exploration camp in the James Bay lowlands.

He is accusing the McGuinty government of mismanaging the Ring of Fire mining development in the James Bay lowlands. Kaszycki was a guest speaker at a professional engineers luncheon in North Bay, Jan. 27.

Fedeli, who attended the event as the Ontario Progressive Conservative Energy Critic, introduced himself to Kaszycki and spoke of his experience in the exploration camp last year. He flew up to the region with Muskoka MPP Norm Miller last August for one day to tour the area.

The Ring of Fire is roughly 530 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay and is the site of a cluster of world class, multi-generational chromite deposits. Chromite is processed into ferrochrome which is used in the making of stainless steel.

ONTARIO CONSERVATIVE PARTY NEWS RELEASE: TIME TO LIGHT THE FUSE ON THE RING OF FIRE

January 27, 2012

This news release was issued by Ontario Conservative Vic Fedeli who is the MPP for Nipissing.

January 27, 2012

Government Coordinator Never Been to Site

NORTH BAY – Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli chastised the McGuinty government Friday for mismanaging the vital Ring of Fire mining development in Northern Ontario and causing unnecessary delays.

The development schedule for the major companies has already been pushed back a year to 2016. Today, Dalton McGuinty’s Ring of Fire coordinator, Dr. Christine Kaszycki, admitted to Fedeli at a conference in North Bay that she has NEVER stepped foot on the site.

“I was shocked to learn that she has never set foot in the Ring of Fire. No wonder this project is stalled!” exclaimed Fedeli, who toured the site himself last summer and is working to arrange a sales trip for local firms there this spring.

What miners should know about the injunction against Solid Gold Resources [Wahgoshig First Nation] – by Nalin Sahni & David Hunter (Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP – January 27, 2012)

January 27, 2012

Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP: http://www.fmc-law.com/Home.aspx

Ontario Court Halts Exploration After Mining Company Refused to Consult First Nation – Nalin Sahni & David Hunter

The Wahgoshig First Nation (“WFN”) in Northern Ontario has obtained an injunction to temporarily stop Solid Gold Resources Corp. (“Solid Gold”), a junior mining company, from drilling on their First Nation Treaty lands. In a decision released last week (2011 ONSC 7708 (CanLII)), Justice Brown of the Ontario Superior Court halted all exploration activities for at least 120 days after finding that Solid Gold had repeatedly failed to respond to consultation requests from both WFN and the Ontario Government.

While this decision should not come as a surprise to knowledgeable observers, it is important for three reasons:

1) It confirms that as yet there is no Aboriginal veto over mining exploration activities;

2) It highlights problems with the Crown’s practice of delegating the consultation to proponents and

China mining Canadian resources – by Tim Armstrong (Hamilton Spectator – January 27, 2012)

January 27, 2012

This column was originally in the Hamilton Spectator: http://www.thespec.com/

Tim Armstrong is a lawyer, who has been Ontario deputy minister of industry and trade and agent general for the Asia-Pacific Region.

Harper’s visit to China essential; Canada needs a strategy to deal with the huge trade imbalance

In February, Prime Minister Harper will revisit China, a nation that The New Yorker’s Henrik Hertzberg has accurately labelled “a fearsome engine of capitalist commerce.” What are the goals, and the prospects for achieving them?

In 1986, as Ontario’s Agent General, I made my first visit to the Ontario-Jiangsu Science and Technology Centre in Nanjing. The building had just been completed by workers from Hong Kong, because the local Nanjing workforce lacked the skills to perform simple construction work. Later that year, in Shanghai, I gazed at the empty mud flats of Pudong across the Huangpu River. A decade later, the site was dominated by a skyline resembling Manhattan. Since then, China’s spectacular growth has continued to outpace all other nations. So Harper’s mission is essential.

The Prime Minister’s Office has announced the agenda will focus on trade and investment, heralding the fact that China is now our second-largest trading partner, with two-way trade tripling over the last decade to a total of about $58 billion.

Conflict mineral readiness: what companies need to know – by Charlene Easton (Canadian Mining Journal – January, 2012)

January 27, 2012

The Canadian Mining Journal is Canada’s first mining publication providing information on Canadian mining and exploration trends, technologies, operations, and industry events.

Charlene Easton is a Senior Manager and Business Practice Leader in Ernst & Young’s Climate Change and Sustainability Services group. She is based in Vancouver.

Canadian mining and metals companies’ corporate social responsibility is about to get a lot more interesting as an uptake in regulations and frameworks for due diligence on mineral supply chains in conflict-affected and high-risk areas emerge around the world. The goal of these newly introduced regulations and frameworks is to ensure responsible supply chain management so that so-called “conflict minerals” do not directly or indirectly contribute to regional conflicts in areas where armed aggression can lead to severe human rights abuses against workers and local people.

In an attempt to prevent mined minerals from fuelling conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the US introduced a conflict mineral requirement in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July 2010. Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act requires all US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registrants – including any Canadian company listed on a US stock exchange – to disclose whether the minerals they source contribute to armed conflict.