March 17, 2011 – Republic of Mining

Keeping Thunder Bay in the picture for Ring of Fire refinery – Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal editorial (March 15, 2011)

March 17, 2011

The Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario. This opinion piece was originally published on March 15, 2011.

MAYOR Keith Hobbs is trying hard to position Thunder Bay as the logical location to process chromite from the giant Ring of Fire mineral deposit far to the north. In competition with officials from other Northern Ontario communities, Hobbs has made a good case.

Thunder Bay has the services, the manpower and expertise, the transportation and the electrical energy needed for a project of this size. And sizable it will be, requiring enough electricity to power a community of 300,000 people. It will be the largest single user of power in the province, which puts enormous pressure on the provincial government to provide what Cliffs Natural Resources, the main Ring of Fire developer, refers to as “a key input. The availability of a large, reliable, long-term and cost-competitive supply of electricity is a key consideration in siting the ferrochrome production facility.”

Cliffs identifies Timmins, Sudbury and Thunder Bay as potential locations, though it has gone so far as to use Sudbury as its base case model for planning purposes because it is already an important mineral processing centre. Hobbs has gone to some lengths to ensure Thunder Bay remains fully in Cliffs’ consideration and he’s got an Ontario Power Generation plant as one ace along with a Seaway port that Sudbury does not have.

Governments should fund railroad to Ontario’s Ring of Fire mining camp – by Stan Sudol

June 29, 2011March 17, 2011

This column was published in the March 17, 2011 issue of Northern Life.

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant who writes extensively on mining issues. stan.sudol@republicofmining.com

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

“In the next 25 years, demand for metals could meet or exceed what we have used
since the beginning of the industrial revolution. By way of illustration, China needs to
build three cities larger than Sydney or Toronto every year until 2030 to accommodate
rural to urban growth.” (John McGagh, Rio Tinto – Head of Innovation)

Commodity Super Cycle is Back

The commodity super cycle is back, and with a vengeance. China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and many other developing economies are continuing their rapid pace of industrialization and urbanization. In 2010, China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy and surpassed the United States to become the biggest producer of cars.

During a recent speech in Calgary, Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada remarked, “Commodity markets are in the midst of a supercycle. …Rapid urbanization underpins this growth. Since 1990, the number of people living in cities in China and India has risen by nearly 500 million, the equivalent of housing the entire population of Canada 15 times over. …Even though history teaches that all booms are finite, this one could go on for some time.”

At the annual economics conference in Davos, Switzerland, held last January – where the most respected world leaders in politics, economics and academia gather – the consensus was one of enormous global prosperity predicting that, “For only the third time since the Industrial Revolution, the world may be entering a long-term growth cycle that will lift all economies simultaneously…”

John McGagh, head of innovation, at Rio Tinto – the world’s third largest mining company – has said, “In the next 25 years, demand for metals could meet or exceed what we have used since the beginning of the industrial revolution. By way of illustration, China needs to build three cities larger than Sydney or Toronto every year until 2030 to accommodate rural to urban growth. This equates to the largest migration of population from rural to urban living in the history of mankind.”

The isolated Ring of Fire mining camp, located in the James Bay lowlands of Ontario’s far north, is one of the most exciting and possibly the richest new Canadian mineral discovery made in over a generation. It has been compared to both the Sudbury Basin and the Abitibi Greenstone belt, which includes Timmins, Kirkland Lake, Noranda and Val d’Or.

Early bird incentive attracts So You Think You Know Mining (SYTYKM) video competition entries in advance of March 31 deadline

March 17, 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.

The Early Bird incentive has helped to attract 13 excellent entries into the Ontario Mining Association’s third annual So You Think You Know Mining (SYTYKM) high school video competition before the March 31 deadline. These videos from all areas of the province, which were received electronically at the OMA before midnight March 10, are eligible for all video award categories and for the draw to win the $500 Early Bird prize.

This year’s SYTYKM competition is bigger and better than ever with $25,500 available in cash and prizes. To learn more about submitting a two to three minute video on the benefits of mining click on the SYTYKM box at the OMA website www.oma.on.ca. Judging from some of the Early Bird entries, OMA e-news items are being used as a source for ideas and information by student film makers.

In order to help spread awareness of SYTYKM, the OMA ventured into the realm of social media and used Facebook as a venue to promote the competition from the start. This year, the OMA is also using Twitter. As of today, there are 168 followers on Twitter and the number is growing as the SYTYKM deadline approaches. Many of the tweets address the philosophical question “can rising global demand for greener cutting-edge products and services be met without mining?” Check it out @OntMiningAssoc on Twitter.

Yes Virginia, there is a commodity super-cycle (August 3, 2007) – Stan Sudol

March 17, 2011

This column was originally published in the August 3, 2007 issue of Northern Life.

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant who writes extensively on mining issues. stan.sudol@republicofmining.com

Emerging economies are growing at record levels

Sometimes when it looks, sounds and walks like a duck…then it is duck! The continuing decline in the price of some metals including nickel has many analysts clucking that this mining boom is over.

That is definitely not the case according to Europe’s top-ranked natural resources investor BlackRock Merrill Lynch Investment Managers. Blackrock is one of the world’s largest publicly traded investment management firms with assets of about $1.23 trillion (US). Let me emphasis that the figure is trillion not billion!

Evy Hambro, who manages Blackrock’s World Mining Fund, recently said in Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, “We find it astonishing that, six years into a cycle, the analysts are still getting it wrong. They have been too pessimistic for six years in a row and seem to be behaving like desperate gamblers, always betting on the same number.”

According to Hambro, the four emerging giant economies – the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries – will need more oil, aluminum and copper by 2015 than the entire planet used last year. According to current projections, the BRIC countries alone will need 121 percent of oil, 140 percent of aluminum and 105 percent of copper produced globally last year.

Miners should dig deeper – by William Watson (Financial Post- March 17, 2011)

March 17, 2011

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. This article was originally published in the Financial Post on March 17, 2011.

Mining companies pay just 9% in corporate taxes, while retailers fork out 23%

Here in Canada we may be lumberjacks, to paraphrase the famous Monty Python song, but we’re not OK. Or at least we may be OK in an overall sense but we’ve never been very OK about being lumberjacks. Hewing wood, drawing water and digging for ores for a living, even if it has given us a very good living, has always been a source of shame for us. Couldn’t we find something, well, harder and more demanding of cleverness in order to earn our way in the world?

Hewing, drawing and digging all seem so mindless. They’re not, of course. Done the modern way, they all involve much more brain power than brawn. But still we’re sheepish.

Which makes the results of a new study from a couple of U.S. business school researchers all the more puzzling. Douglas Shackelford of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Kevin Markle at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth have just published a comprehensive study of the corporate taxes paid by 11,602 public corporations from 82 countries from 1988 to 2009. They trace corporate ownership structures across countries and are mainly interested in whether multinational companies can manage their affairs so their worldwide tax burden doesn’t much depend on where they locate. They find that in fact domicile does matter, which is an interesting result in this supposed age of footloose capital. But it’s their comparison of tax rates by industry that caught my eye.

NEWS RELEASE: Mining Watch – Video: Oral Promises/Broken Promises Shows Alternative Interpretation of Ontario’s Treaty 9 (February 25, 2011)

March 17, 2011

Feb 25 2011 This video by MiningWatch Canada questions the jurisdiction of the Ontario provincial government over the traditional territories of northern Ontario’s First Nations, and the government’s right to unilaterally grant access to the resources within these territories to mining companies or other industries. First Nations signed a number of treaties with the …