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Day: July 23, 2010

A History of the Canadian Shield – Canada’s Mineral Treasure Trove – David Kilgour (Part 2 of 2)

The Honourable David Kilgour P.C., is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Edmonton Southeast. http://www.david-kilgour.com/mp/house.htm

North of the Fiftieth Parallel

In addition to its northeast and northwest, Ontario also has another north, the one beyond the fiftieth parallel where boreal forests become tundra. Sioux Lookout, Moosonee and Red Lake/Balmertown are its major cities; places like Pickle Lake and Ear Falls are its “towns.” Most of its approximately 30,000 residents live in isolated communities, accessible mostly by bush planes.

Culturally, the various Ontario Norths differ both from each other and from the southern part of the province. Many non-British newcomers reached parts of northern Ontario and Prairie Canada in roughly equal numbers and at about the same time. Today, despite the passage of three generations, multiculturalism has triumphed in numerous northern communities.

Francophones are found everywhere in northern Ontario, although most numerous in the northeast, and today command reasonable access to francophone education, radio and health services in a number of census districts. A second major group is the aboriginal peoples who predominate “north of fifty” either as status Indians, with treaty rights, as non-status Indians, or as Métis. Ojibway is spoken in the south; Ojibway and Cree in the centre; Cree only in the north. Band councils and Band chiefs are the municipal governments of these peoples. It troubles small native communities who live from fishing and hunting that their band chairmen are not yet recognized by Queen’s Park and Ottawa as they are by other Indians.

The living conditions of Ontario aboriginals tend to vary with the situation of the neighbouring white centres. The Fort William band members near Thunder Bay live quite well; conditions for people living near less prosperous centres are often outrageous. Native communities in some remote reserves compare unfavourably with settlements in developing world nations. Virtually nowhere today do hunting, fishing, trapping, and wild rice harvesting provide decent livings. High school and junior education is generally inadequate for young persons choosing either to remain in the north or to seek future-oriented jobs in the south.

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A History of the Canadian Shield – Canada’s Mineral Treasure Trove – David Kilgour (Part 1 of 2)

The Honourable David Kilgour P.C., is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Edmonton Southeast. http://www.david-kilgour.com/mp/house.htm

The Canadian Shield is, to most Canadians and foreigners alike, the quintessential Canada. I share this view having lived in the Gatineau Park spur of it for more than a decade and having often vacationed at Lake of the Woods for many more years. In countless ways, the Shield is idyllic. I think, for example, of the hundreds of motor boats which gather each July 1st in Kenora Bay at the north end of Lake of the Woods to watch Canada Day fireworks. Mingled with townspeople at these annual events under the stars are summer residents from all over the country. Many would move to the area to live year round if they could somehow earn a living; some do.

Approximately two million Québeckers and Ontarians combined live on the Canadian Shield. Since its borders are physical rather than political, residents on both sides of the provincial boundary lack effective structures through which they can pursue common regional concerns. The north of both provinces contains relatively thinly-populated frontier hinterlands; for many years, each of them has had only a limited influence on its respective provincial parliament and upon Ottawa policy makers.

The Shield in fact occupies more than forty per cent of our national territory across five provinces, but contains only eight per cent of our national population. In recent years, vigorous natural resource competition from developing countries, a declining resource-orientation of the world economy, and the weakened political position of the American economy have reduced mineral exploration and development across the region. Decades ago, it also contributed to the development of our national self-identity through the art of the Group of Seven and considerable writing about Northern self-reliance.

John Diefenbaker’s view that our national future lay in harnessing the distant North was popular in its day.

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Brief History of Ontario Mining

Prospecting and Developing

Ontario has become one of the most fortunate and richest regions of the world primarily for two reasons. It has vast natural resources including mineral deposits of untold potential. The increasingly complex skills and knowledge necessary for the discovery and development of these deposits have been acquired, refined and applied vigorously by residents of Ontario with growing sophistication during the last 200 years.

Although native peoples knew of some of its mineral deposits and drew on them to meet their own needs, the extent of Ontario’s mineral potential did not begin to become clear until major discoveries of silver and gold were made early in the 20th century on the province’s section of the Precambrian Shield, Canada’s primary geological formation. Massive deposits of copper-nickel ores had been uncovered near Sudbury in the 1880s. But knowledge of their presence did little to change the prevailing view that the Precambrian region of northern Ontario was a barrier to progress. Something of the character of that region, and of what had to occur before its rocks would yield up their riches, may be found in the poetry of Robert W. Service:

I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;
Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods.
Long have I waited lonely, shunned as a thing accurst,
Monstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the first;
Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway,
And I wait for the men who will win me — and I will not be won in a day.

Men and women, with the qualities that Robert Service identified, settled in Ontario as the 19th century ended and the 20th century began. The record of how they and successive generations transformed its mineral potential into the reality of wealth, with few of them becoming rich in the process, is a central though often neglected feature of the history of Ontario and Canada. Indeed, the emergence of Ontario as the most populous and wealthiest Canadian province, and of Canada as an industrialized and respected nation, cannot be fully understood without some appreciation of the key roles that prospecting and mining have played in that development.

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Brief History of Northern Ontario

This brief history was originally posted on the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry www.mndm.gov.on.ca

The largest single population increase in the history of Northern Ontario
occurred in the 1950s during a period of unprecedented economic prosperity.
The boom, mostly in the mining sector, pushed the population from 536,000
in 1951 to 722,000 in 1961.

Northern Ontario a Vast and Magnificent Land

Northern Ontario is a unique land sculpted by geology, tempered by climate. Imagine more than a million square kilometre expanse of Precambrian forests and lakes punctuated occasionally by towns and cities — a contrast to the flat, populous, lowland area that is southern Ontario.

Northerners believe that living on this ruggedly beautiful land and battling climatic extremes has imbued them with a distinctiveness.

The mists of time in Northern Ontario lift 9,000 years ago with the arrival of the ancestors of First Nations people. From them descended the woodland, hunter-gatherer societies of the Algonkian culture.

The first European forays into the area came in the early 17th century by explorers from competing colonial empires, England’s Henry Hudson and France’s Samuel de Champlain. Initially, they were looking for a shorter trade route to Asia. They found something else, a land blessed with fur, which was in great demand in Europe.

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