Railway provided vital link for the North – by Karen Bachmann (Timmins Daily Press – March 30, 2012)

 The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

Karen Bachmann is the director/curator of the Timmins Museum and a local author.

HISTORY: More than one major mining discovery made while railroads were being build through Northern Ontario

In the past few years, we have been witness to some amazing changes in the field of mass transportation. The high-speed rail systems found in France can move people along the Paris-Lyon line at cruising speeds of 320 km/h hour. In Japan and Germany, the high-speed rail systems reach speeds of 300 km/h on regular routes.

The Airbus A380 (seating capacity 840) has forced airports around the world to renovate so that they can land the monstrosities (the aircraft amazingly measures seven stories high).

Cruise ships, on the other hand might as well be huge floating semi-independent countries. They are run just like small cities and have the same problems those cities face (3,400 people all sharing the same space).

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Outlook 2012: Exciting times for mining – CEMI: 10 questions for Douglas Morrison, president of the Centre for Excellence in Mining

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Q: What exactly is CEMI?

A: The Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation is a not for profit organization of about 10 people that was established to help bring innovation in the areas of exploration, deep mining, integrated mine engineering, environment and sustainability to the mining industry of Northern Ontario by directing industry funding to universities and colleges, existing research groups, and the supply and services sector.

It is widely recognized that the era of cost-cutting to survive low commodity prices is gone and the present challenge is to meet the continuing demand of the global economy for metals given the demographics of the industry.
Companies such as Xstrata Nickel, Vale, and Rio Tinto fully recognize that this can be accomplished only by implementing new ideas that will redefine how the mining industry of the future will operate.

Q: What is its mandate?

A: Well, it is the centre for excellence because the mandate is to deliver solutions that can be implemented in the fields of mining operations, exploration, and sustainability. Most metal mines in Canada are underground mines that are getting deeper and hotter, and this presents huge challenges.

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Outlook 2012: Morrison to lead CEMI into a new era [mining research] – by Heather Campbell (Sudbury Star March 30, 2012)

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

The Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation has made a few changes to prepare for its continued growth. Peter Kaiser, founding president during the startup phase of CEMI, has passed the leadership baton to Douglas Morrison, chair of Holistic Mining Practices, who joined CEMI in 2011 as vice-president.

Kaiser will not be going very far as he will continue to lead the Rio Tinto Centre for Underground Mine Construction, a division of CEMI. During the five years of his leadership the organization more than doubled the initial investment by the Ontario government and founding partners Vale, Xstrata Nickel and Laurentian University.

CEMI directs and coordinates step-change innovation in the areas of exploration, deep mining, integrated mine engineering, environment and sustainability for the metal mining industry. This year, CEMI’s cumulative program funding exceeded the $40-million threshold.

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Canada’s wood firms cluster for survival – and growth – by Tavia Grant (Globe and Mail – March 31, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

WALKERTON, ONT.—  Three hours northwest of Toronto, a group of Ontario manufacturers is throwing the traditional rules of business out the window.

Business owners visit each other’s factories. They share secrets. They plan long-term hiring strategies, collaborate on research and development, and ponder productivity enhancements. They help solve each other’s problems on a shared website.

In years past – tumultuous years, given the surge of competition from China and the soaring Canadian currency – these small and medium-sized makers of furniture, flooring, doors and cabinets viewed each other as direct competitors. Now, 30 business owners gather every few months in small boardrooms to share ideas.

The companies formed a cluster, a concept first coined by Harvard University’s Michael Porter two decades ago that has since been adopted in countries from Germany to China. While some clusters have emerged in Canada – tech in Waterloo, aerospace in Montreal – manufacturing clusters remain relatively rare in this country.

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[General Electric’s] Jeffrey Immelt has a cure for Canada’s ‘resource curse’ – by Shawn McCarthy (Globe and Mail – March 31, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

TORONTO — In his global travels as chairman and CEO of manufacturing giant General Electric Co. (GE-N20.070.120.60%), Jeffrey Immelt has heard all about the “resource curse.”

He’s heard it in Brazil, in Australia, in Russia – wherever a country’s natural resources boom is casting a shadow over domestic manufacturers. And meeting with business leaders in Toronto this week, he heard it again.

Mr. Immelt has closely followed the debate that has erupted in this country about the uneven benefits of the natural resources boom. Many worry that relentless demand for Canadian energy, metals and other resources is undermining the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector by driving up the Canadian dollar and making goods here more expensive in global trade. The higher currency only adds to long-running pressures that threaten manufacturing jobs in North America in a world of global markets and abundant, cheap labour.

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A world awash in oil – by Lawrence Solomon (National Post – March 31, 2012)

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

Middle East will go back to being an obscure backwater
 
Today, the Middle East is in the news daily — we hear of strife in Syria, in Iran, in Israel and Palestine. Ten or 20 years from now, conflicts in the Middle East will count for less in the world’s scheme of things, just as the daily conflicts that now occur in Africa get short shrift, despite Africa’s far greater loss of life. Twenty years from now, the Middle East could be about as important as it was at the turn of the previous century — before its oil was discovered — which was not very important at all.
 
The Middle East will attract scant attention in future, not because the region will have run out of oil — it will have found much more — but because the rest of the world will also be awash in oil. As supplies increase, oil depreciates in price, as does the political value of its purveyors.
 
To see the future of oil, consider the present of natural gas. Until recently, many thought the West was running out of gas — most of the easily accessible natural gas finds were being depleted, making the West reliant on ever more distant, ever more difficult reserves to exploit. The U.S., the world’s biggest natural gas importer, began to build ports to receive liquefied natural gas from distant continents in the expectation that it couldn’t import enough from Canada and Mexico.

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Why shortening review process is a good thing – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – March 31, 2012)

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

Ottawa’s decision to bring in a “one project, one review” regulatory process for major energy projects doesn’t sit well with environmental groups or First Nations, but it’s the right way to go.  In fact, if there is a concern, it’s that it took too long to reform an unwieldy system that is benefiting no one – except those feeding off its paralysis.

Anyone who has sat through public hearings into high-profile projects knows issues, concerns and suggestions become repetitive within days. And yet a regulatory review of the Mackenzie gas pipeline took six years, while the panel now reviewing the Northern Gateway pipeline is patiently hearing from an unprecedented 4,000-plus people.

In its budget Thursday, the federal government said it plans to introduce legislation to impose a maximum 24-month limit for reviews, cap hearings by the National Energy Board at 18 months and standard environmental assessments at no more than 12 months.

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China must improve its construction record – by Diane Francis (National Post – March 31, 2012)

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

Chinese companies should be banned from construction work in Canada because of their questionable track record here and around the world. It was shocking that Enbridge Inc.’s Pat Daniel said his company was willing to allow a Chinese company to buy a stake in and to bid for the construction of the proposed Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline.
 
Not only should Chinese companies be banned from construction or bidding but Investment Canada should ban them from buying resource companies or related assets.
 
China’s strategy is to buy resources around the world, then low-ball to get construction contracts by using Chinese laborers and materials. This is not only damaging to the domestic economy, and unnecessary, but in some cases laws and obligations have been flouted. Just for the record, my husband heads Canada’s largest infrastructure and construction public company in Canada.

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Anmar Mechanical part of Vale’s environmental upgrade – by Carol Mulligan (Sudbury Star – March 31, 2012)

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Anmar Mechanical and Electrical Contractors Inc. is one of dozens of local companies that will benefit from Vale Ltd.’s $2-billion Clean AER Project. The Lively-based company has won the contract to fabricate four converters that are a big part of the environmental upgrade of the Copper Cliff Smelter Complex.

Anmar president Gianni Grossi won’t reveal the exact amount of the contract, but says it is in the neighbourhood of $15 million — and could employ as many as 700 of his employees at the peak of construction.

Each of the converters is 44 feet long and 13 feet in diameter, and is made of two-inch boiler-plate steel that will stand up to high temperatures in the smelting process. Anmar has also bid on contracts for other parts of the Clean AER (Atmospheric Emissions Reduction) Project. His company is also involved in other work during shutdown and other times at Vale facilities.

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ACCENT: Clean AER in works for Sudbury – by Carol Mulligan (Sudbury Star – March 31, 2012)

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Dave Stefanuto tells the story of taking his two young sons to Science North, where they love the space exhibits on the top floor.  One time, he pointed the boys to a photograph of Apollo astronauts walking on the rocky landscape that was Sudbury in the 1970s.

“How come they’re wearing shorts on the moon?” one of his sons asked him, to which Stefanuto replied: “That’s not the moon, that’s Sudbury.” It’s a sobering reminder that Sudbury wasn’t always as green as it is today.

Sudbury was the butt of jokes four decades ago and for years after those astronauts visited a city whose landscape was a dead-ringer for the moon. Anyone who has visited the Nickel City in the last 25 years has had no reason to laugh at us. In three years’ time, they will have even less.

Stefanuto, 39, has come back to Sudbury after seven or eight years spent working for Vale in Newfoundland and Labrador. He came back home to head up Vale’s $2-billion Clean AER (Atmospheric Emissions Reduction) Project.

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Canada, home to the suicide capital of the world [Pikangikum FN] – by Martin Patriquin (Maclean’s Magazine – March 30, 2012)

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

In Pikangikum, gas sniffing is rampant and young people are taking their own lives at a shocking rate.

Randy Keeper is sick of building coffins. A wiry fellow who looks younger than his 49 years, Keeper is proud of his job as a carpenter and crew leader, saying he’s built 25 houses from scratch over 17 years in Pikangikum, the reserve in northwestern Ontario where he has lived his whole life. But when it comes to the wooden boxes he builds for Pikangikum’s dead, he draws a blank. “I don’t count them,” he says from his daughter’s dining room table. He remembers the last ones, though. They were in December. “I had to make two in one day, one for an elder and one for a younger person.”
 
The dreams started a couple of weeks after that. In one, he’s lying face up in a freshly dug grave, watching as a coffin is slowly lowered toward him. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone inside, but he recognizes his handiwork: 100 lb. of plywood, treated pine and nails, a simple enough thing that takes him no more than 90 minutes to build. In the dream he’s alive but can’t move as it comes down on his chest, smothering him. Then he wakes up. “The elders told me to stop making them,” he says, “but I have no choice because I work for the band. I get nervous, shaky. Once the dreams happened I’d say yes out of respect for chief and council, but sometimes I don’t show up.”

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NEWS RELEASE: KI CALLS FOR RESUMPTION OF GOVERNMENT TO GOVERNMENT TALKS

IMMEDIATE RELEASE       

 MARCH 29, 2012

KI is calling for resumption of government to government talks in the month of June in the wake of the Ontario buyout of God’s Lake Resources mining claims and leases in the KI sacred landscape at Sherman Lake.

“The decision is bittersweet,” said Chief Donny Morris.  “KI has a sacred duty under KI Law to assert its jurisdiction, care for the land and protect and honour sacred landscapes and graves of our ancestors.  That is why we went to jail in the past and that is why we will defend our lands in the future.” he said.

“KI is pleased that Ontario has acted to protect the KI sacred landscape but disappointed that GLR was able to apparently unjustly enrich themselves at the hands of tax payers,” said Chief Morris.

KI had warned Ontario officials that they were repeating mistakes made when taxpayers paid $5 million to mining exploration company Platinex in 2008 to buy out the company’s claims and leases following a dispute with KI over unwanted drilling and mining exploration.

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[State capitalism] Is it a rival to market capitalism? And how does it affect the natural resources industries? – by Keith Campbell (MiningWeekly.com – March 30, 2012)

 www.miningweekly.com

Since the start of the current global economic crisis in 2008, there has been renewed interest in the concept of ‘State capitalism’, as distinct from ‘market capitalism’. (The term ‘liberal capitalism’ is shorthand for ‘liberal democracy plus market capitalism’.)
 
This interest is centred on China more than any other country, in part because of the country’s ability (so far) to ride out the crisis, in part because of the key role it has played in keeping the global economy running while the developed West has been stagnating and in part because China is, unlike India or Brazil or South Korea, not a democracy. This last factor creates the impression of a ‘Chinese model’ of autocracy plus State capitalism that can be compared and contrasted with the ‘Western model’ of liberal capitalism.
 
There has been considerable debate about the rival merits of these ‘models’ in recent times. Thus, renowned British historian Niall Ferguson, who teaches at Harvard University, in the US, had a recent article on State capitalism in the US academic journal Foreign Policy. In late January, The Economist, of London, had a cover and special report devoted to State capitalism. The topic has also been addressed in the past couple of months by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek. And these are only some, albeit prominent, examples.

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Outlook 2012: [Sudbury] Welcome to KGHM Ltd. – by Jenn Lamothe (Sudbury Star – March 30, 2012)

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

On Feb. 20, Quadra FNX Mining Ltd. security holders approved the plan of arrangement with KGHM Polska Mied_ S.A. in which a subsidiary of KGHM would acquire all of the issued and outstanding securities of Quadra FNX.

The March 5 closing date brought a name change for the third largest mining company in Sudbury — now operating under the name KGHM International Ltd — and will focus on growth in copper and other metals.

KGHM International is a Polish company and the world’s ninth largest producer of copper and third largest silver producer; it operates mines in Canada, the USA and Chile and is currently constructing the Sierra Gorda copper-molybdenum project in Chile. They are also actively advancing the Victoria project, the newest discovery here in Sudbury.

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Outlook 2012: We’re a mining hotspot [Sudbury] – by Heather Campbell (Sudbury Star – March 29, 2012)

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

According to SAMSSA source, Stan Sudol, the demand for resources in developing
nations, like China, will continue to place upward pressure on commodity prices,
and Canada is the top country in the world for mining project development. It is
estimated that over the next 25 years, we will need to dig out of the ground as
many minerals as has consumed since the beginning of time.
(Stan Sudol, Mining Analysist)

The booming mining sector has the suppliers and service companies scrambling to keep up with the demand and opportunities.

Dick Destefano, Executive Director, Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Association (SAMSSA), said the group has switched gears from connecting his members with work to helping them meet the overwhelming demand.

The organization represents the interests of 115 members providing the largest concentration of expertise in mining supply/products and services from within the most recognized centre of excellence worldwide. For the past nine years SAMSSA has been monitoring the mining sector and Destefano predicts that we are not even close to finishing the super cycle.

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