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Widows taking on Vale – by Carol Mulligan (Sudbury Star – August 2, 2011)

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. cmulligan@thesudburystar.com

It’s not a sexy issue, but United Steelworkers’ J.P. Mrochek hopes to get candidates in the Oct. 6 provincial election talking about the need to change legislation affecting the survivors’ pensions of hundreds of Ontario widows. Two are the widows of members of USW Local 6500 in Sudbury, men who worked for Inco Ltd. for decades.

Marie-Rose Arbour’s husband, Lionel, died May 10, 2010, from lung cancer. The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board approved Arbour’s application for compensation and later survivor benefits for his widow, agreeing his cancer death was related to working in the sintering plant.

The plant operated for 15 years, refining semi-pure nickel into pure nickel, and is deemed responsible for hundreds of cases of lung and nasal cancers among workers. Former USW Local 6500 president Homer Seguin told The Sudbury Star in May 2006, a worker’s rate of contracting lung cancer doubled after one month in the sintering plant. After a decade, they were 13,000 times more likely to get nasal cancer.

Vale Ltd., the new owner of Inco, appealed the WSIB’s approval of Arbour’s claim.

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NEWS RELEASE: XSTRATA NICKEL TO DEVELOP CANADIAN GROWTH PROJECTS AT RAGLAN AND SUDBURY

Toronto, Canada – August 2, 2011

Xstrata plc (“Xstrata”) has approved two Xstrata Nickel projects totalling US$649 million as it continues its investment in growth options within its Canadian portfolio.

Xstrata Nickel’s development of the US$530 million Raglan extension project in Northern Quebec and the US$119 million Fraser Morgan project in Sudbury, Ontario, will now move ahead.

At Raglan Mine, Xstrata Nickel will develop the high grade Qakimajurq and Mine 2 Lower Zone deposits and upgrade associated infrastructure to increase annual nickel in concentrate production from 26,000 to 32,000 tonnes per annum by 2014. In addition, Raglan’s concentrator will be upgraded to reach 40,000 tonnes capacity per annum of nickel in concentrate by 2016, a 54% increase over current metal output, to facilitate further mining expansions.

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History of Building Roads and the Railway in Northern Ontario – by Gregory Reynolds (Highgrader – Spring 2008)

This column was originally published in the Spring, 2008 issue of Highgrader Magazine which is committed to serve the interests of northerners by bringing the issues, concerns and culture of the north to the world through the writings and art of award-winning journalists as well as talented freelance artists, writers and photographers.

Since mankind came down from its caves and established huts on the plains in order to grow food rather than to hunt it, the need for roads became apparent.

Just who would build them and who would pay for them became an early issue, perhaps the reason why politics was inflicted on the new civilizations. Fast forward to three momentous events, the decision by the Ontario Legislature in 1902 to build a railway north from North Bay to open up the vastness of Northern Ontario, the discovery of silver at Cobalt in 1903 and the discovery of gold in 1909 in what was to become the Town of Timmins.

The railway was to be the first step to staking a legal claim to the North by enticing farmers to homestead the region, thus blocking Quebec from making any claims on what was actually an empty land. The problem was that the legislators sitting in Toronto basically forgot to take the second step, constructing roads to link not just the various mining and farming communities that sprang up but North to South.

Development tended to occur close to the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway which reached Timmins on Jan.1, 1912 but it took another 20 years to reach Moosonee.

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Don’t blame NDP [for northern alienation]: Horwath – by Ron Grech (The Timmins Daily Press – July 30, 2011)

 The Daily Press, the city of Timmins newspaper. Contact the writer at news@thedailypress.ca.

Leader says fault of unsympathetic government lies with ruling parties

If Northerners feel alienated by Queen’s Park, don’t blame the New Democrats, says Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath.

“The reality is that we have had a majority Liberal government for two terms now that has really done nothing to make Northern communities strong again and to make sure Northerners have more control over their future,” said Horwath, during a brief stopover at the Timmins airport while on her way to Kirkland Lake Friday morning.

The message coming out of local Progressive Conservative and Liberal camps this week was that the concerns of Timmins-James Bay are being ignored by the provincial government because voters here keep re-electing an NDP representative, not a member of the ruling government.

“I don’t think that is the case at all,” Horwath replied when The Daily Press presented those views to the NDP leader. “As a matter of fact, it is up to government to make sure we have a strong Northern part of the province and the Liberals have not done that, notwithstanding how many MPPs they have that are Liberal from Northern Ontario.”

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Globe and Mail Editorial: The oil-diamond analogy (ethicaloil.org) (August 1, 2011)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media.

Its rhetoric is crude, and its visuals derivative (of the artist Barbara Kruger), but EthicalOil.org’s campaign is an effective and overdue response to the grossly distorted slurs used by some environmental groups to attack the oil-sands industry in Alberta.

Former federal Conservative political staffer Alykhan Velshi is driving the campaign, which characterizes oil flowing from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran as “conflict oil” – a riff on conflict diamonds – that is used to prop up dictatorship, funds terrorism and results in persecution. In contrast, Canada’s “ethical oil” fuels democracy, funds peacekeeping and is an economic underpinning of a society that embraces tolerance, such as gay pride. As Mr. Velshi explains, “When people buy coffee, they want to buy fair-trade coffee. This is a similar sort of idea.”

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ACCENT: Inside-out city [economic challeges of Sudbury geography] – by Mike Whitehouse (Sudbury Star – July 30, 2011)

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. mwhitehouse@thesudburystar.com 

The mining supply and service industry evolved on its own … In Sudbury, this sector
employs 13,800 people and generates $3.94 billion in economic activity…. Under the
radar, this rag-tag group of largely family-run fabricators, welders, communications
experts, technologists, engineers and suppliers spread across the city have taken
on a life of their own. These businesses share common causes and face common
challenges. They have developed their own networks, working relationships and de
facto strategies designed to meet these challenges. And, at least in the beginning,
they did so without encouragement or help from anyone.
(Mike Whitehouse – July 30, 2011 – Sudbury Star)

Look at a Google satellite map of northeastern Ontario, down onto a landscape without labels. The most visible feature is a wide, grey scar to the south cut into the Canadian Shield. Free of political boundaries, this is how the world knows Sudbury.

Zoom in a little closer and Greater Sudbury appears as a gormless sea of blobs, shapes and lines, islands adrift in the deep green Boreal forest. Look down on most Ontario cities and you’ll see patterns emerge. Confined urban matrixes with patches of remna nt forest and wetlands inside. From above, these cities define themselves. They have beginnings and ends.

Greater Sudbury is the opposite. It is nothing more than patches of development cut out of the endless Boreal forest, arbitrarily confined to borders that climb like a staircase to the northeast. It’s like taking any other city and turning it inside-out, and wondering why it doesn’t look right.

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Sudbury still vying for [Ring of Fire chromite] smelter – by Harold Carmichael (Sudbury Star – July 30, 2011)

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. hcarmichael@thesudburystar.com

Cliffs Natural Resources of Cleveland has yet to decide where it will build a smelter to process chromite concentrate from its Ring of Fire properties in northwestern Ontario.

A promotional video on the Cliffs’ website about the company’s three chromite deposits in the zone (Black Thor, Black Label and Big Daddy), entitled Value Beneath the Surface, highlights Greater Sudbury as one of the four communities where an enclosed chromite electric arc furnace facility could be built.

In the video, Cliffs says it is looking to start production with the Black Thor deposit in 2015 through an open pit operation and produce one million tonnes of chromite concentrate and 600,000 tonnes of ferrochrome annually. The three chromite deposits are described as “extensive, thick and high quality” with a potential production period of 80 years.

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[Barrick Gold’s] Peter Munk: in conversation – by Kenneth Whyte – Maclean’s Magazine – July 27, 2011

Maclean’s is the largest circulation weekly news magazine in Canada, reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events.

On immigrant dreams, the importance of failure and why the future belongs to Canada

Peter Munk, the founder and chair of Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold miner, found a land of opportunity when he arrived in Canada as a teenager after he fled Nazi-occupied Hungary. But the 83-year-old businessman is convinced the country’s brightest days may still lie ahead. As the appetite for raw materials skyrockets in China, India and other developing countries, he argues that Canada has a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish itself as the world’s next big financial sector, rivalling the dominance of London and New York.

Q: Let’s talk first about your earliest impressions of Canada as an immigrant boy.

A: That day I arrived, it was a miserable, rainy day in early March ’48. It was like, terra incognita, like going to Mars. I know it sounds moronic.

Q: No. It doesn’t.

A: I arrived in Toronto, and I tried to talk to my Uncle Nick in Hungarian, I tried to talk to him in German. The last time I saw him was in 1938 when Grandfather sent him to Canada as a General Motors agent. He was my father’s young brother. When I arrived, Uncle Nick was a part-owner of the Ajax manufactory. He said, “We don’t speak here Hungarian. This is Canada, we speak English.” I took it in school and I never practised except for the five days in England when Dad shoved me on that boat in Liverpool.

Q: Was the idea that you’d come and do a year of high school and then go to university?

A: It was Grade 13, and number one, I never in my life could conceive, never heard, never read, about mixed-sex schools. In Hungary and Switzerland there were girls’ school, and if a guy went near a girls’ school he was in danger to be dismissed, okay?

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Heavy metals [aluminum] – by Pratima Desai, Clare Baldwin, Susan Thomas and Melanie Burton (Reuters-National Post – July 29, 2011)

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

Goldman Sachs turns aluminum and warehouses into money machine

In a rundown patch of Detroit, enclosed by a cyclone fence and barbed wire, stands an unremarkable warehouse that investment bank Goldman Sachs has transformed into a money-making machine.

The derelict neighbourhood off Michigan Avenue is a sharp contrast to Goldman’s bustling skyscraper headquarters near Wall Street, but the two operations share one important element: management by the bank’s savvy financial professionals.

A string of warehouses in Detroit, most of them operated by Goldman, has stockpiled more than a million tonnes of the industrial metal aluminum, about a quarter of global reported inventories. Simply storing all that metal generates tens of millions of dollars in rental revenues for Goldman every year.

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NEWS RELEASE (Ernst & Young): Value of mining M&A continues to climb

http://www.ey.com/CA/en/Industries/Mining—Metals

First half deal value doubles year-on-year

London 25 July 2011 – The thirst for natural resources from rapidly developing economies continues to drive M&A in the mining sector, but the pace of growth in deal-making is being tempered by uncertainty around global macroeconomic issues and resource nationalism concerns around the world.

Total deal value for January—June 2011 doubled compared to January—June 2010, up from US$47.9b to US$96.3b.

There were slightly fewer deals in the same period, with 573 for the H1 2010 compared to 511 to 30 June this year, reinforcing the view that while larger deals are being executed there is still a level of uncertainty around doing M&A given the current macro-economic backdrop.

The number of mining & metals sector IPOs globally was up 30% from 56 in H1 2010 to 73 in H1 2011. Total proceeds from IPOs were up 107% from US$6.3b to US$13.0b, although this is dominated by the US$10 billion Glencore listing.

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Ontario Mining Association helps get teachers back to school for mining education

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.

The Ontario Mining Association will be one of the presenters at the second annual Teachers’ Mining Tour, which is being held at the Canadian Ecology Centre near Mattawa.  Thirty teachers from across the province will participate in the educational workshop being held August 15 to 19, 2011.   

The goal is to help educators learn more about the realities of modern, high tech, solution-providing, environmentally responsible mining in Ontario.  The Teachers’ Mining Tour is a professional development program for Ontario teachers and teachers in training. Teachers taking the course will be able to earn a component of their Environmental Science Additional Qualification through Nipissing University and the Ontario College of Teachers.

During the week, Lesley Hymers, OMA Environment and Education Specialist, will be making presentations on OMA education and outreach initiatives such as the So You Think You Know Mining high school video competition and the OMA’s collaboration with Skills Canada Ontario, which promotes trades and technologies as career options for students.

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Cliffs Natural Resources endorses Ring of Fire railroad plan – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – July 2011)

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.

Rails to Ontario’s Ring of Fire

With a $2 billion pricetag for a proposed Ring of Fire railroad, KWG Resources is searching for innovative ways to finance it. Building a Ring of Fire railroad to move millions of bulk tonnes of chromite is a certainty, said a senior official with Cliffs Natural Resources.

Bill Boor, Cliffs’ senior vice-president of global ferroalloys, who is overseeing the Ohio miner’s project development in the James Bay lowlands, said rail is an inevitability as more mines come onstream in the remote district.

In last winter’s base case for its high grade Black Thor chromite deposit, Cliffs proposed a permanent year-round haul road between the mine site and railway connections near Nakina in northwestern Ontario. But Boor clarified that one mine alone doesn’t support the investment of a railroad.

However, establishing a transportation corridor will improve the economics of other nearby deposits. Once that “scale” is built up, Boor said, “the right answer is to put a railroad in place.

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Digging in: Proves bigger can be better [Ontario mining] – Peter Koven (National Post – July 27, 2011)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. Peter Koven is their mining reporter.

Detour Lake, Ontario – It will soon be Canada’s largest gold mine. For now, it is simply one of its busiest construction sites.

More than 900 people and 14 different contracting companies are hard at work at the mosquito-infested Detour Lake site at Northern Ontario, where construction on Detour Gold Corp.’s $1.3-billion gold mine is moving at impressive speed. It is the biggest of several promising gold projects that promise to make Ontario a much bigger player in the global gold sector as the metal continues to hit record highs.

“Managing 14 contractors to stay on time and on budget is always challenging. But so far, so good,” says Gerald Panneton, Detour Gold’s chief executive.

Like many other mining projects in Canada and around the world, Detour Lake is a past-producing property that is being revitalized as a new operation because of high prices. But what makes Detour unique is the stunning exploration success that its new owners have managed in a brief period of time. In five years, Mr. Panneton’s team has identified almost 15 million ounces of gold reserves, with more being added on a regular basis. Including resources, the project holds more than 25 million ounces.

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Digging in: Beating the bad rap [British Columbia mining] – Peter Koven (National Post – July 27, 2011)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. Peter Koven is their mining reporter.

For all the criticism that British Columbia’s mining industry receives, Jim O’Rourke will tell you that it is a good place to do business.

He should know. Mr. O’Rourke is the chief executive of Copper Mountain Mining Corp., which is holding the grand opening of its namesake mine in B.C. next month. It is the most promising new operation to open in B.C. in years. He was also involved in a number of prior B.C. projects, including the Endako mine in the 1960s and the Gibraltar mine in the 1970s.

“The whole Copper Mountain project went very well. From the time of buying the mine, completing our preliminary assessment in the first year, we went right into the feasibility study and met all of our targets over the past four years,” he says. “I think things have gotten a little more complicated [in B.C.] but, overall, it went well.”

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New chair at [Sudbury’s] CEMI [mining research] – by Harold Carmichael (Sudbury Star – July 27, 2011)

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. hcarmichael@thesudburystar.com

The Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation at Laurentian University now has a Research Chair for Holistic Mining Practices. Douglas Morrison, who had been Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation’s vice-president, will head the new post announced Tuesday.

The position is being created thanks to $823,000 from the province’s Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation’s Emerging Technology Program.

“I do know it’s going to create a better milieu for mining,” said Sudbury Liberal MPP Rick Bartolucci, who announced the money at a press conference at the Willet Green Miller Centre on the Laurentian campus. “This research, this innovation is going to create greater numbers of jobs.”

Morrison, who has 30 years experience in the mining field, including time with both Falconbridge and Inco, has also worked for Golder Associates, serving as the company’s Global Mining Sector leader from 2005-10 before joining the Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation.

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