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The Ring of Fire: Will Fingers Be Burnt? – by Michael Schwartz

This article originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of the Ontario Prospector which is published by the Ontario Prospectors Association.

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

“There is no doubt that the Ring of Fire brings both enormous promise as well as enormous challenges for all. The enormity of the discoveries within the Ring of Fire could bring multi-generational community benefits if the regulatory roadmap is clear, if enabling mechanisms for community participation and partnership are created by government, and if industry brings their best practices forward.” – Mike Fox, Co-Chair of the PDAC Aboriginal Affairs Committee and President of Boreal Prospectors Association

On April 8, 2010, about 150 hungry people gathered at the Valhalla Inn in Thunder Bay to share a meal and explore opportunities at The Far North Feast. The venue was Thunder Bay, chosen because of its proximity to the Ring of Fire, a massive mineral deposit offering both benefits and challenges to exploration and mining companies, government at all levels, environmental agencies and, most crucially in the long-term, First Nations citizens in the vicinity.

Chairman of this year’s feast was Mike Fox, coincidentally both president of the Boreal Prospectors Association and co-chair of the Aboriginal Affairs Committee for the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC). He explains the purpose of the feast: “The overall intention is to highlight opportunities for progress and collaboration… Our aim is to show that the players are collaborating with the community, the province and its ministry, creating an enabling environment for others in the future.”

Recognising just how diverse and complex the situation is, the Ministry of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry has  established a new position of Excutive Lead,  Ring of Fire Secretariat to develop the strategic vision and framework to facilitate the successful development of the Ring of Fire initiative and partner with other ministries to develop creative solutions that meet the interests of northern Ontarians, Aboriginal communities and the mining industry, while achieving government business objectives.

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Greenhouse Gas Emissions – No Progress in Policy, Some Progress on the Ground – by Paul Stothart

Paul Stothart is vice president, economic affairs of the Mining Association of Canada. He is responsible for advancing the industry’s interests regarding federal tax, trade, investment, transport and energy issues.

Throughout the history of the global environmental movement, no issue has seen anything approaching the elaborate policy structure and negotiation frameworks that surround the climate change and greenhouse gas mitigation area. 

International climate change policy has been focused around the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for over 20 years.  The IFCC is a United Nations entity created in 1988 that writes extensive reports, drawing upon input from 2500 scientific experts, 800 contributing authors, 450 lead authors, and 620 expert reviewers.  IPCC reports typically stretch into the thousands of pages. 

The UNFCCC has coordinated 15 Conference of the Parties (CoP) sessions over the past fifteen years.  These sessions have in the past featured hundreds of environmental groups, business delegations, and government departments.  Thousands of bureaucrats congregate at CoP sessions, often held in exotic locations that entail enormous travel distances and related airline GHG emissions.  Between CoP sessions, numerous working groups interact and themselves congregate in sub-committee meetings at locations around the world.  There are some 192 countries engaged in the UNFCCC process and these individual countries in turn support their policy discussions and documents with equally substantial resources and bureaucracies.  Some countries, such as Australia and the UK, have created entire government departments around climate change policy. 

In Canada, at least eight “climate change strategies” have been unveiled since the mid-1990s – five by Liberal governments and three by Conservatives – each plan outlining targets, actions, and commitments supported by the loftiest of communications rhetoric and printed on the glossiest of paper.  Through the years, the federal government has outlined plans and processes for clean development mechanisms, offset systems, early action credits, technology funds, reduction targets, emission trading systems, cap and trade systems and carbon taxes.  One particularly memorable offset document contained a 34 page glossary.  The combined worth of these documents, plus a toonie, would today buy a Starbucks coffee. 

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Ring of Fire Railroad Study Staying on Track – by Ian Ross

Map Courtesy KWG Resources Inc.

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. This article was published in the October, 2010 issue.

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

Despite the frenzy of exploration drilling and company acquistions in the Ring of Fire, engineering work continues for a proposed chromite ore haul railroad into the James Bay lowlands.

Krech Ojard & Associates is preparing a rail feasibility study for the construction of a 350-kilometre-long railroad from McFaulds Lake, south to Exton in northwestern Ontario.

The preferred route would largely follow glacial eskers that start south of the Albany River. These gravel rises make for ideal track bed in an otherwise swampy landscape.

Nels Ojard, special projects manager at Krech Ojard, said the majority of work this past summer was focused on the geotechnical program.

Soil samples that were collected along the length of the route last winter and spring were being processed and evaluated to test their ability to support heavy bridge loads and frost susceptability.

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Peat Fuel Power in the Ring of Fire? – by Ian Ross

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. This article was published in the October, 2010 issue.

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

Peat fuel producer Peat Resources Limited eyeballs powering Far North mines.

A Toronto-based peat fuel pellet producer thinks he can provide a green source of power to mining companies currently operating off the grid in the Ring of Fire.

Peter Telford, president and CEO of Peat Resources, was making the rounds at last spring’s Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s annual convention, talking to companies like KWG KWG Resources and Cliffs Natural Resources of his ability to supply them with fuel for their future mine operations.

“If the Ring of Fire project proceeds and Cliffs wants to start processing chromite into ferrochrome for use in stainless steel, there will be a real power demand that (Ontario Power Generation stations in) Thunder Bay and Atikokan can’t supply.”

Peat Resources has an indicated and measured resource at its Upsala property in northwestern Ontario of 22.5 million tonnes of fuel-grade peat. The company has a small pilot plant there, where it has been optimizing its wet harvesting method and pelletizing technology.

Peat is a biomass that has been used for power generation in Europe. But it has been an uphill climb for the Toronto company to convince the Ontario government that the swampy material can be used as an environmentally friendly alternative fuel to burning coal.

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Premier Brad Wall’s Potash Saskatchewan Address – October 21, 2010

Potash Saskatchewan address

Premier Brad Wall gave this speech to the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce, at the Conexus Arts Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan on Oct. 21, 2010

(Check against delivery)

The world has, I think in many ways, tuned in a little bit more to what has been happening in Saskatchewan over the last number of years and certainly over the last number of weeks. 

If you were watching the Google trends back in August, when the BHP Billiton hostile takeover story broke, you would have seen a real spike in terms of the number of stories with the word Saskatchewan.  In fact, we broke our own record in terms of the number of media stories around the world involving the word Saskatchewan, at the time of this announcement of this hostile takeover.  It wiped out previous record, happily, because the previous record was the 13th man story from the Grey Cup. So there have been some unintended benefits to all of this.

I remember a night in August when I got a call from someone who told me that the next day the news would break, that the PostashCorp of Saskatchewan would become the target of a hostile takeover bid by BHP Billiton.  It was one of those rare nights where Tami and I had actually organized a date night.  We were going to be going to the movie, and the movie we went to that night was Inception.  I don’t know if you have seen it, it’s the new DiCaprio movie and it’s pretty complex.  It’s one of those movies you’ve got to pay attention to, there’s about seven different dream plots with one dream plot and I don’t remember anything of the movie, I can tell you that.  I was thinking mostly about potash and what the implications for what I had just been told might be.  Tami and I are going to have to rent that when it’s out on DVD. 

Immediately upon learning the news, the Government of Saskatchewan struck an internal task force made up of representatives, senior officials in Finance, Energy and Resources, in Justice and in Enterprise Saskatchewan.  We retained the services of the Conference Board of Canada to help us provide some qualitative analysis as to the impact of this takeover on the provincial economy and on the revenues for the province of Saskatchewan. 

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Stephen B. Roman (1921 – 1988) – 1989 Candian Mining Hall of Fame Inductee

The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame was conceived by the late Maurice R. Brown, former editor and publisher of The Northern Miner, as a way to recognize and honour the legendary mine finders and builders of a great Canadian industry. The Hall was established in 1988. For more information about the extraordinary individuals who have been inducted into the Hall of Fame, please go to their home website: http://mininghalloffame.ca/
 
It was not for nothing that The Northern Miner, the weekly journal of Canada’s mining industry, in 1977 chose Stephen B. Roman as its first Mining Man of the Year.

He received the title, the newspaper said at the time, “because Stephen Roman has graphically shown that Canadian money and expertise can compete very successfully with anyone in the world.”
At that time, he had engineered, through his already big and fast-growing company, Denison Mines, the largest-ever uranium sales by a uranium producer.

A Slovakian immigrant who began his working life in Canada as a tomato picker. Roman subsequently took control of a penny mining stock in 1953, and from this built Denison into one of the country’s largest mining and resource empires, rising from the foundation of the company’s sprawling uranium mines at Elliot Lake, Ontario.

That globe-spanning empire now includes, in addition to its uranium interests, coal mining in British Columbia, potash mining in New Brunswick, and oil and gas production in Greece, Egypt, Spain, Italy and Western Canada.

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Stephen Roman Digging Up His Own Success – by Toronto Star Business Reporter Lisa Wright

Lisa Wright is a business reporter with the Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. This article was originally published October 31, 2010.

His father [Stephen Roman] was a well-known [Denison Mines’ uranium operations at Elliot Lake] mining icon, but Stephen Roman is digging up his own success

Stephen Roman has endured various viruses and parasites and all manner of poisonous spiders and snakes – even a few on Bay St.—while prospecting for oil and metals around the world over the last 30 years.

The 57-year-old mining entrepreneur nearly died from cerebral malaria three years ago, when he lapsed into a coma after being bitten by mosquitoes at night in the Sahara Desert in uranium-rich Niger.

And his original exploration firm Exall Resources Ltd. suffered through an industry downturn so deep during the dot-com craze 10 years ago that he was forced to sell off his furniture and artwork to keep it afloat as metals prices tanked.

“That’s the hazard of the business,” the affable financier says in an interview. “People may think it’s all glamorous but there are a lot of risks. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it all adds to the fun.”

On top of all that, Stephen G. Roman – son of the late mining magnate Stephen B. Roman – has carried on the family name, and despite all the weight that carries has managed to stake out his own Roman empire.
Just a week before the market plummeted in 2008, the junior Roman sold Gold Eagle Mines and its coveted asset in Red Lake for $1.5 billion to giant Goldcorp Inc. – one of the highest prices ever paid to a non-operating junior whose discovery was not yet a proven resource.

And with some promising drilling up in northern Ontario, he and his Harte Gold investors bet they may be sitting on the next big gold find in the storied Hemlo gold camp, which was the centre of a Klondike-style gold rush in the early 1980s and is now run by Barrick Gold Corp. about 350 km east of Thunder Bay.

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“Ontario’s Mining Act” and the Importance of Exploration to the Future Prosperity of the Province – by R. S. Middleton (October/2008)

This letter was sent to the Minister of Northern Development and Mines in October/2008. The letter provides interesting background information on Ontario’s mineral exploration sector. R. S. Middleton is a well-known and respected geophysicist who has been involved with many mining projects around the world and in Canada over the past 40 years.

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

LACK OF ADEQUATE OR APPROPRIATE CONSULTAION

Meetings on changes to the Mining Act in Ontario were held on August 11, 13, 18, and September 8th, 2008 in Timmins, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Kingston and Toronto. The timing was particularly unfortunate since exploration people are always away in the field during the summer months so they were unable to take part or comment on the  proposed changes to the Act. This suggests either that the government has a poor understanding of the industry or that it has deliberately set in train a process to carry out its plans without proper consultation with the industry. Changing an Act of Parliament with only a three week review period is completely unacceptable in any parliamentary democracy.

Those of us away on field work have been unaware of any of the discussions and proposals that have taken place and consider that they have not been properly consulted.

Moreover holding hearings in a small number of towns over such a short time frame, will not elicit the input that is required from the industry.  Why was Ottawa not included in the hearings?  There are more exploration mining companies based in Ottawa than in Thunder Bay.

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A Brief Summary of the Mining Sector’s Contributions to Ontario – by R. S. Middleton, P.Eng.

R. S. Middleton is a well-known and respected geophysicist who has been involved with many mining projects around the world and in Canada over the past 40 years.

 The wealth extracted from the north has benefited southern Ontario and particularly Toronto since the 1800’s.  The discovery of silver at Cobalt in 1903 was a major historical event.  The enormous wealth produced at Cobalt was a major boost to  the early Toronto Stock Exchange.  The prospectors spread northward and found the Hollinger Gold Mine in 1909 and hence the town (now the  City of Timmins). 

The Town of Timmins needed a Newspaper and Radio station.  This was Roy Thomson’s first business and the beginning of the Thomson newspaper chain and empire.  Where is the monument to this success and financial wealth?  In Toronto on King Street – Roy Thomson Hall!  Where is the original head office where Roy’s son David worked as a cub reporter?  It was in downtown Timmins on the corner of Cedar and Second Street, which is now an empty space since the building was torn down.

The dividends paid by the Hollinger Mine financed the Noranda Smelter for Noranda Mines (based in Toronto.)  Hollinger money started the Iron Ore Company of Canada in Quebec and Labrador, the source for iron ore to make steel in Hamilton, Ontario and the USA.  Who was the lawyer and president for IOCC, Brian Mulroney!

Next to the Hollinger Mine was the McIntyre Mine which produced the funds to start Falconbridge Nickel in 1934 whose office was in Toronto.  The Dome mine, six miles to the east, started Dome Petroleum and the Canadian Oil Industry.  Argus Corporation (from Toronto) took over the Hollinger Gold Mine and remaining treasury and Conrad Black (from Toronto) used these funds to buy up many newspapers.  Hollinger Inc. held the Financial Post (now National Post), Daily Telegraph (London, England) Jerusalem Post, Vancouver Sun, Chicago Papers etc. and the rest of this story is still being played out.

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STATEMENT BY PROSPECTORS AND DEVELOPERS ASSOCIATION OF CANADA AND THE MINING ASSOCIATION OF CANADA ON THE DEFEAT OF BILL C-300

OTTAWA, Canada (October 27, 2010) – The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) and the Mining Association of Canada (MAC) today issued the following statement in response to the defeat of bill C-300, a private members bill entitled An Act Respecting Corporate Accountability for the Activities of Mining, Oil or Gas in Developing Countries in the House of Commons:

“Canada’s mining and exploration industry, which employs more than 306,000 Canadians, is pleased that the Parliament of Canada saw the importance of defeating bill C-300, a fundamentally flawed private members bill that would have damaged Canada’s exploration and mining industry and jeopardized jobs here in Canada and the local jobs in the communities in which we work. We appreciate the efforts of the Government of Canada in exposing the flaws of the bill and in working to defeat it in the House.

Canada’s mining and exploration industry is already actively engaged in Corporate Social Responsibility practices and bill C-300 would not have enhanced Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Canada’s competitors would have used the passage of bill C-300 as a tool to undermine the competitiveness of Canadian firms in the highly competitive global extraction industry. Frivolous or vexatious claims would have been filed against Canadian firms by competitive interests at no cost or risk to themselves, tying up important projects and putting well paying local jobs and community development projects in developing countries at risk.

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Ring of Fire: Ontario Embarking on a Major Economic Development Project – by Geophysicist R.S. Middleton, P.Eng.

Map Courtesy KWG Resources Inc.This article originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of the Ontario Prospector which is published by the Ontario Prospectors Association.

R. S. Middleton is a well-known and respected geophysicist who has been involved with many mining projects around the world and in Canada over the past 40 years.

For an extensive list of articles on this mineral discovery, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery

A New Chromite Industry for North America

Ontario has been blessed in that a number of world class mineral discoveries have been made over the past 125 years which has brought wealth and prosperity to its citizens and Canada.  These discoveries have sustained thousands of support industries that have manufactured and supplied the implements to extract the metals, industrial minerals and gemstones that form the Mining Industry of Ontario.  Revenues from these mining operations make up approximately 30% of government tax revenue and were the foundation and beginning of the financial industry based in Toronto.

The discovery of the Sudbury nickel-copper-cobalt-PGE (Platinum Group Element) deposits at the end of the 19th century are the largest contributor of revenue with a gross metal value of over $190 billion.  The multitude of silver mines found in 1903 in Cobalt, Ontario generated millions of ounces of silver with by-product cobalt, arsenic, nickel and bismuth and became the strength of the Toronto Stock Exchange in the early 1900’s.  By 1909 prospectors operating from the Cobalt Camp found the famous Porcupine Gold Camp (Timmins) which has now produced over 70 million ounces of gold from 100 years of production.

Prospectors from both Timmins and Cobalt then found the Kirkland Lake – Larder Lake gold mines and the Noranda Camp in Quebec.  Also from Timmins the Kidd Creek copper-zinc-silver mine (1963) with a gross metal value reaching $75 billion, the Kamiskotia (1915), Detour gold (1974) and Hemlo (1979) camps were found.  Geraldton-Beardmore and the Red Lake gold camps were developed in the 1920’s-1930’s in part with the financial base built by Timmins.

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Chile Mine Rescue Teaches Us That Modern Civilization Built on Mining — John R. Hunt (On the Rocks)

I spent most of one night and the next day watching the rescue of the Chilean miners. Like most people I am delighted, and a little surprised, that the rescue was successful. The news they are likely to make a very healthy buck out of their adventure is also pleasing.

I thought the commentators missed one point when they were pontificating about mining and miners. If it were not for the metal ore miners dig up, modern civilization could not exist. This is not an exaggeration. Just walk around your home and consider all the things made out of metal, or held together with metal.

Plastics have replaced some metal but I even your computer has some vital bits of gold and other precious metals performing tasks I do not understand and cannot spell. That awful tangle of wires that connect your computer, printer, scanner and also connect to the power source are most likely made of copper, possibly from the same mine the 33 Chileans were trapped in.

Mining is dangerous, even if safety regulations have made mining a lot safer in Canada than in many other countries. Even as this is written there is news of miners trapped beneath the surface in Ecuador and a much bigger and nastier accident in China.

According to many reports the Chinese mines kill more than 2,000 miners a year. There are not only many big operations which can be supervised but also many illegal small mines where anything goes.

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Leaked PDAC Sponsored Corporate Social Responsibility Report Flawed by – Marilyn Scales

Marilyn Scales is a field editor for the Canadian Mining Journal, Canada’s first mining publication. She is one of Canada’s most senior mining commentators.

 If words such as “suppressed report” and “international violations by Canadian mining companies” were not written to be inflammatory, I miss my guess. Such was the headline above a report leaked by MiningWatch to the Montreal Gazette, Toronto Star and various news outlets. MiningWatch’s release also made hay out of the fact that the report was commissioned by the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada. The implication is that the mining industry is trying to hide its bad behaviour from the public.

In fairness, I called the PDAC and learned that the leaked document was a first draft and the final draft was not identical. I was also told that the association wanted a benchmark survey and was disappointed with the quality of the study.

So I looked over the 16 pages of “Corporate Social Responsibility: Movements and Footprints of Canadian Mining and Exploration Firms in the Developing World.” It was prepared by the Canadian Centre for the Study of Resource Conflict, that has no dated material more recent than 2006 on its website. I did learn that the CCSRC is associated with Royal Roads University.

I turned past the title page. It seems 75% of the world’s mining companies are Canadian, and 33% of all violations are attributed to Canadian miners. Followed by India, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, companies from these five countries are responsible for 63% of all corporate social responsibility violations.

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STATEMENT BY PROSPECTORS AND DEVELOPERS ASSOCIATION OF CANADA REGARDING MEDIA REPORTS ON THE CANADIAN EXPLORATION AND MINING INDUSTRY

The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) is a national association representing the mineral exploration and development industry. Its 7,000 individual and corporate members are involved in the exploration, discovery and development of new mines and new wealth. The PDAC’s annual convention is the world’s largest annual gathering of the mineral industry.

TORONTO, Canada (October 19, 2010) – The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) today issued the following statement regarding media reports on the Canadian exploration and mining industry:

“In August 2009 the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) commissioned the Canadian Centre for the Study of Resource Conflict to conduct an internal study on the public’s perception of the Canadian exploration and mining industry’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) record. The study was for internal industry deliberation to inform its ongoing thinking on CSR.

The study deals with unproven allegations, not proven violations.

The internal study suggests that Canadian exploration and mining companies are alleged to be involved in approximately 5 “incidents” per year, over the course of the study’s 10-year timeframe. This is consistent with the data collected and published by the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation.

To provide some perspective: Canada has 1,800 exploration and mining companies operating 10,000 projects in over 100 countries at any one time. Given this and the fact that Canada is the headquarters of more than 75 per cent of the world’s mining and exploration companies, the PDAC found the results encouraging but with room for improvement.

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Canadian Mining Firms Worst for Environment, Rights: Report – by Toronto Star Reporter Les Whittington

Les Whittington is with the Ottawa Bureau of the Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. This article was originally published October 19, 2010.

OTTAWA—Canadian mining companies are far and away the worst offenders in environmental, human rights and other abuses around the world, according to a global study commissioned by an industry association but never made public.

“Canadian companies have been the most significant group involved in unfortunate incidents in the developing world,” the report obtained by the Toronto Star concludes.

“Canadian companies have played a much more major role than their peers from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States” in these incidents, says the Canadian Centre for the Study of Resource Conflict, an independent, non-profit think tank.

The problems involving Canada’s mining and exploration corporations go far beyond workplace issues. “Canadian companies are more likely to be engaged in community conflict, environmental and unethical behaviour, and are less likely to be involved in incidents related to occupational concerns.”

The research surfaced as a long, fierce political battle over legislation to tighten federal government scrutiny of Canadian mining operations abroad comes to a head. Bill C-300, a private member’s bill put forward by Toronto Liberal MP John McKay, will be voted on in the Commons next week.

The proportion of incidents globally that involve Canadian corporations is very large, according to the report. “Of the 171 companies identified in incidents involving mining and exploration companies over the past 10 years, 34 per cent are Canadian,” the Centre found.

It said the high incidence of involvement of Canadian companies is in line with the Canadian industry’s dominant position in global mining and exploration.

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