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.

Several measures announced by Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan in the 2009 provincial Budget yesterday promise tax savings to Ontario mineral producers.  Perhaps the most important is the move to a single value added tax by July 1, 2010, which could save the mining sector potentially millions of dollars annually.  This federally administered value added tax would have a combined rate of 13% — 8% for Ontario, matching the soon to be phased out retail sales tax, and 5% for Ottawa, matching the current Goods and Services Tax (GST).  

The value added tax allows companies to be reimbursed for tax paid on business inputs through tax credits.  It is estimated that Ontario´s $10 billion-plus mining sector spends about $3 billion annually on these inputs to production.  More than 90% of these production inputs are purchased in Canada and 80% of the province´s mineral output is exported.  The arithmetic may be complicated for individual companies and there is a lag in receiving benefits of the tax credits, but the potential for tax saving — freeing more dollars for future investment — is significant.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Canadian Mining Journal is Canada’s first mining publication.

This article was originally published – August/2005

Everything you wanted to know about laterites but were afraid to ask

The last few years of the 20th Century were not very kind to the nickel industry. In October and December of 1998 the LME price for nickel dipped to US$1.76 a pound, the lowest level ever, if you factor in inflation. The imploding Russian economy was dumping nickel on western markets, the Asian currency crisis was annihilating economic growth and metal demand, and new lower-cost mine production was threatening to come on stream.

Of great concern to Canadian nickel giants Inco Ltd. and Falconbridge Ltd., the second and third largest producers after Russian MMC Norilsk, was an upstart Australian company called Anaconda Nickel Ltd.

Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, Anaconda’s chairman, was well known in Australian mining circles for his legendary salesmanship and determination. One could almost imagine him pounding the table like Nikita Khrushchev and boasting that “he would bury the West with low-cost laterite nickel.”

Read the rest of this entry »