Republic of Mining

The North loses a great leader: John Zigarlick Jr. – by Bill Braden (Canadian Mining Journal – December 20, 2011)

December 21, 2011

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

Across Northern Canada, the mining and transport industries mourn the death of John Zigarlick Jr. One of the North’s modern-day mining visionaries and builders, he died suddenly in Edmonton Dec. 17, of natural causes. He was 74.

It was his audacious decision in 1980 to build the Lupin Gold Mine by air that secured his place in mining history. As President of Echo Bay Mines, he bought a Boeing 727 and a Hercules freighter and airlifted 64 million pounds of material from Yellowknife. This and other developments vaulted Echo Bay into the spotlight as a mid-tier world gold miner.

Lupin was also the genesis of the 600 km Tibbitt to Contwoyto ice road, first built in 1982, that supplied the mine for the rest of its 18 year life. By the early 1990s, John had left Echo Bay and, in a joint venture with the Inuit of western Nunavut, started the Nuna Corporation which since 1997 has built and operated the road for the NWT’s diamond mines. John grew Nuna into a multi-layered construction, training and consulting services to mining and exploration companies across the arctic.

Eldorado aims to double production with European Goldfields bid – by Tim Kiladze (Globe and Mail – December 20, 2011)

December 20, 2011

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.

Eldorado Gold Corp. is on the cusp of creating a mining powerhouse around the Mediterranean. With a $2.5-billion bid for European Goldfields, (EGU-T11.800.524.61%) the owner of two undeveloped Greek gold projects, the Vancouver-based Eldorado is hoping the new assets will help it meet its goal of more than doubling this year’s production to about 1.4 million ounces by 2015.

The agreement, which was announced Sunday, comes at a time when gold has been hit hard. Since bullion peaked just shy of $1,900 (U.S.) per ounce in August, it has dropped 15 per cent, and some argue it could fall even more.

Still, analysts on Monday were generally positive about the deal. The acquisition fits into Eldorado’s strategy because it consolidates a region in which the miner is already established, Brad Humphrey at Raymond James wrote in a note to clients. It will also help keep cash operating costs low and maintains a gold-only focus, they said.

Investors were less impressed, sending Eldorado shares tumbling more than 12 per cent in Toronto trading on Monday.

How the resource boom is transforming our economy – by David Campbell (Globe and Mail Blog – December 20, 2011)

December 20, 2011

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.

David Campbell is an economic development consultant and columnist based in Moncton, New Brunswick. He also authors a daily blog on economic issues in Atlantic Canada which can be found at www.davidwcampbell.com.

The Canadian economy has undergone a fairly profound shift over the past 10 years and these changes will have considerable public policy implications as we move into the future.

The biggest change has been the shift in our goods producing economy from value-added manufacturing to non-renewable natural resources development. In 2001, transportation equipment manufacturing accounted for nearly $250 out of every $1,000 worth of exports from Canada (more than $100-billion in total). Based on January to September data, this year transportation equipment will account for only $142 out of every $1,000 worth of exports — a decline of 42 per cent.

The same pattern can be found in most other value added manufacturing sectors. As a share of total exports, fabricated metal manufacturing exports are down by 28 per cent.

Oilsands PR battle goes after Chiquita bananas – by Kenyon Wallace (Toronto Star – December 20, 2011)

December 20, 2011

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.

The public relations battle over Canada’s oilsands has reached new heights with the Harper government setting its sights on an unlikely foe: Chiquita bananas.

Several high-profile government MPs, including Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose, have urged Canadians not to buy bananas distributed by Chiquita Brands International after the Ohio-based company said it would avoid using fuel for its trucks derived from Alberta’s oilsands.

And now the pro-oilsands group EhticalOil.org is taking the fight to the airwaves with the launch of a new radio ad this week urging consumers to stop buying bananas or premade salads from Chiquita, a company the group calls a “foreign bully.”

“The Chiquita banana company says it’s boycotting oil from Canada’s oilsands. Apparently they like oil from OPEC dictatorships better,” an announcer’s voice says over orchestra music.

Ten questions for Jerry Asp [Aboriginal people and mining] – by Gail Jansen (Mining and Exploration – November, 2011)

December 19, 2011

http://www.miningandexploration.ca/

This year’s winner of the Skookum Jim award talks about Aboriginal Peoples and mining.

For more than 40 years, Jerry Asp has been working toward improving the quality of life for Aboriginal Peoples, using the mining industry as the driving force. He is a founder of the Tahltan Nation Development Corporation (TNDC), one of the largest native-owned-and-operated heavy construction companies in Canada. He helped set up both the National Indian Businessman’s Association and the Canadian Aboriginals Minerals Association and he is now president of C3 Alliance Corporation.

All of this makes Asp arguably the pre-eminent expert on aboriginal and mining relations. It’s an expertise he has been called upon to share around the world and one for which he has won numerous awards and accolades, most notably this past year when he was named recipient of the prestigious Skookum Jim Award from the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada.

Mining and Exploration magazine asked Asp to comment on his award and his lifetime of service to the mining industry.

Atomic Wasteland series: Why Canada’s nuclear cleanup will cost billions and take decades – by Ian MacLeod (Ottawa Citizen – December 19, 2011)

December 19, 2011

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

It lights our Christmas trees, drives industry, makes medicine, heats our homes and is carbon-free. Nuclear power has a back end, too. Radwaste.

More than 240,000 tonnes of intensely radioactive civilian waste has piled up around the globe since the dawning of the atomic age.

Sixty years on, no one is sure yet how to safely and permanently dispose of the stuff, much of it harmful to living organisms for thousands of years.

Canada’s share of the high-level heap stands at 44,000 tonnes. Virtually all is spent uranium fuel bundles — 2.3 million of them — that powered the commercial and research reactors that made Canada a leading nuclear nation.

“If you don’t respect it, you can get hit pretty hard,” says Don Howard, director of the wastes and decommissioning division for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC).

Ontario Mining sector continues on path of improved safety performance

December 19, 2011December 19, 2011

This article was provided by the Ontario Mining Association (OMA), an organization that was established in 1920 to represent the mining industry of the province.

Since 1976, Ontario mining industry’s lost time injury rate has improved by 96%. The path may have been filled with both pot holes and speed bumps but this steady improvement in safety performance in Ontario’s mining industry is no accident.

In moving forward in time and using the lost time injury rate as a yardstick, numbers indicate the mining sector’s record has been safer by 81% since 1989 and by 73% since 1993. The lost time injury rate was more than 12 per 200,000 hours worked in 1976 and it has been reduced to the 0.5 range today. The industry-wide goal is to reach a frequency of zero by 2015.

Mining safety statistics are moving in the right direction because of personal diligence and concern for one’s self and one’s colleagues. There are a number of initiatives and institutions supporting this progress. OMA programs, the Internal Responsibility System, inspections and programs from the Ministry of Labour, regulatory changes and adjustments to Common Core skills training along with the role of the sectoral safety group Workplace Safety North and unions have played strong parts in these gains.

Bid to stabilize Canada [Foreign funds against oilsands] – by Ezra Levant (Sudbury Star – December 19, 2011)

December 19, 2011

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

Who should decide whether Canada develops our oilsands: Canadian citizens, or foreign billionaires and their local hired-gun lobbyists?

It sounds like an absurd question, but it’s very real. In his explosive investigative report today, Sun Media’s Daniel Proussalidis shows that hundreds of millions of foreign dollars, pounds and francs have poured into Canada in recent years from billionaire interests in other countries dead-set against Canada developing our oilsands.

I know from personal experience that Saudi money has gone into smearing the oilsands, too. When my non-profit NGO called ethicaloil.orgran a TV ad comparing the treatment of women in Canada to Saudi Arabia, that foreign dictatorship hired Norton Rose, one of the biggest law firms in the world, to threaten lawsuits against any Canadian TV station that dared to criticize their conflict oil.

It’s not just our enemies like Saudi Arabia. Even our friends, like the United Kingdom, have meddled in our business. Far-left-wing groups like the Pembina Institute have been caught soliciting funds from foreign embassies — including the U.K. High Commission — to pay for their anti-oilsands propaganda.

Foreign funds flowing to fight oilsands – by Daniel Proussalidis (Sudbury Star – December 19, 2011)

December 19, 2011

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

OTTAWA – While debate rages about the Northern Gateway pipeline project to connect Alberta’s oilsands to a tanker terminal in Kitimat, B.C., European financing is pouring in to environmental and aboriginal groups who lead the charge against the projects. The stakes have never been higher.

A major University of Calgary study released Thursday concluded if pipeline capacity existed to take full advantage of the oilsands, Canada’s economy would see a $131 billion boost between 2016 and 2030.

Yet opposition to the oilsands has been active for years, and now QMI Agency has learned Swiss and British money has been pumped into Canada, adding a new element to an issue that has focused on billionaire American foundations so far.

Janet Annesley with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) said oilsands opposition isn’t all “grassroots.”

Drawings of the Porcupine Camp 1909-2009 Graphic Book – by Denis Newman

December 19, 2011December 18, 2011

A Great Christmas Gift

To order a copy of this $33.00 book, click here: http://www.highgradermagazine.com/books.html

Drawings of the Porcupine Camp 1909-2009 is a compendium of the Porcupine drawings of Denis Newman as we celebrate the Porcupine mines’ centennial.

Reminisce as you appreciate Denis Newman’s renderings of places where you worked and lived, or perhaps only visited in years past. These sketches will surely engender memories, both happy and sad, of all tha was near and dear to tose of us who knew and loved the Porcupine.- Syl Belisle

Denis Newman was born in Timmins and spent his early years on the Paymaster and Dome properties. After working at the Dome, Denis graduated from North Bay’s TEachers College and later Queen’s University. He now lives in Bellville with his wife Geneva. Most of his renderings focus on mine head frames and landscapes.

See below for more images:

[Kirkland Lake History] ERNIE’S GOLD: A Prospector’s Tale – by Brian (Chip) Martin

December 18, 2011

For an autographed copy of Ernie’s Gold, please contact the author at: chipmartin@sympatico.ca.

Great Christmas Gift: $20.00 plus shipping!

In the early 1900s, young Ernie Martin immigrated from Staffordshire, England, to Canada to seek his fortune. He finally ended up in Kirkland Lake, where gold was to be found if you were willing to work at it. Ernie was. And so was Harry Oakes. The two of them became prospecting partners. Ernie and Harry worked hard and non-stop to find a vein of gold so they could start a mine.

When it finally happened, the mine grew into a huge money-maker for the two of them. Ernie’s first wife, Mary, also was a prospector, and in fact ended up financially far better off than Ernie. Why was that? How is it that multi-millionaire Ernie Martin arrived at the end of his life virtually a pauper? This is a book full of surprises and answers — and a few questions.

Excerpt from Ernie’s Gold: A Prospector’s Tale:

Meanwhile, in Kirkland Lake, the town had reached a population of 13,000 and was weathering the Depression better than most communities. Job-seekers streamed in looking for work, but only a few were successful. Many moved on and only a few stayed behind. Relief rolls began to grow but remained comparatively small. At a time when one in ten workers was on relief in the depth of the Depression, only 205 families were on the dole in Kirkland Lake.

Long road ahead for environmental monitoring in the oilsands by Jennifer Pagliaro (Toronto Star – December 18, 2011)

December 18, 2011

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.

Government “outsourcing” of environmental monitoring in the oilsands has created a fractured system lacking scientific credibility and transparency that caters to oil industry interests, top scientists and environmental groups say.

As environmental groups’ criticism for development in the oilsands finds renewed vigour — with Kyoto abandoned and Total’s Joslyn North strip mine approved in the span of less than a week — the disjointed array of monitoring groups tasked with protecting vulnerable ecosystems simply can’t keep up.

And while the Alberta government promises plans for a new comprehensive monitoring system as early as next month, many are worried it will never match the pace of development.

The provincial government passed most of the responsibility for monitoring land, biodiversity, air and water quality in the oilsands to third-party groups as development boomed in the late ‘90s. Now, production is forecasted to more than double by 2025 — nearly 4.1 million barrels of bitumen per day.

Russia blasting into fragile Arctic in search of oil – by Paul Watson (Toronto Star – December 18, 2011)

December 18, 2011

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.

MURMANSK, RUSSIA—For as long as humans have spread out to conquer the planet, despoiling as they progress, the Arctic’s punishing environment has been its best defence.

Like fortress ramparts, heavy snow, metres-thick ice and battering winds made it very hard for miners, oil drillers and industrialists to take much ground, let alone make a grab for the riches of a frozen sea. Those walls are crumbling fast.

The rush is on to drill offshore in the fragile Arctic, and Russia is at the front of the pack with ambitious, and risky, plans to exploit some of the world’s biggest untapped oil and natural gas reserves.

Around 1,200 kilometres northwest of here, squeezed from all sides by the powerful ice of the Pechora Sea, Russia’s first ice-resistant stationary oil rig in the Arctic shelf is set to begin drilling for crude.

Fifteen years in the building, the Prirazlomnaya drilling platform is 126 square metres, weighs 117,000 tons without ballast, and sits on a gigantic box of heavy steel designed to withstand the intense pressure of constantly shifting Arctic ice.

[Kirkland Lake History] ERNIE’S GOLD: A Prospector’s Tale – by Brian (Chip) Martin

December 18, 2011

For an autographed copy of Ernie’s Gold, please contact the author at: chipmartin@sympatico.ca.

Great Christmas Gift: $20.00 plus shipping!

Excerpt from Ernie’s Gold: A Prospector’s Tale:

Mary wasn’t particularly attractive, being rather short and sturdy in build with a sallow complexion and deep-set eyes. Her fierce, independent spirit discouraged some suitors who were seeking a more traditional mate; but in a land where men far outnumbered women, Mary’s odds had improved.