July 14, 2012 – Republic of Mining

The Ring of Fire: Politics and intrigue – by Stan Sudol (Sudbury Star – July 14, 2012)

December 27, 2012July 14, 2012

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

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant, speechwriter and columnist who blogs at www.republicofmining.com. stan.sudol@republicofmining.com

On May 9, Cliffs Natural Resources announced the company was advancing its massive $3.2-billion chromite project in the isolated and infrastructure-challenged Ring of Fire region to the feasibility stage. Sudbury was selected as the best location for the proposed $1.8-billion smelter for a wide range of reasons, including rail, transportation, power supply and skilled workforce.

If you think that such a positive announcement should bring collective cheers across the North and an economically imploding southern Ontario, you would be wrong. The ensuing flurry of anguished and angry news releases from First Nations, environmental organizations, and some politicians was enough to make any reader despair that the Ring of Fire will ever be developed.

First, some essential background info before I continue: Discovered in 2007, the Ring of Fire mining camp, located 540 km northeast of Thunder Bay, in the James Bay Lowlands, will probably go down in history books as one of the most significant Canadian mineral finds of the past century. It is estimated that the chromite deposits are so large that we could be mining up there for the next hundred years and that the total mineral potential of the region — chromite, nickel, copper, PGMs, vanadium, gold — could easily exceed the legendary trillion-dollar Sudbury basin.

BRIC’s spectacular rise, not so spectacular after all – by Conrad Black (National Post – July 14, 2012)

July 14, 2012

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

As the threat of a general global recession grows, the eurozone teeters, the United States slows, and the main developing countries revise their previous confident predictions of bounding to regional or even global leadership like Biblical gazelles leaping from mountain top to mountain top, we can see more clearly which economies will remain healthy.

For years, we heard of the rise of the “BRIC” nations — Brazil, Russia, India, and China — countries anointed as battering rams to the future, inexorably surging forward, into and through the ranks of the tired incumbent economic leadership provided by North America, Western Europe and Japan. BRIC nation even held their own meetings, to compare notes on their vertiginous rise.

Of course, it was utter nonsense; no such rise persists, and these countries have almost nothing in common anyway. In the case of Russia, India and China, the three great national land masses of Eurasia, there are ancient and vivid rivalries between them, both geopolitically and culturally.

China and Brazil, and to a lesser degree India, have performed well as developing economies, pulling tens of millions of people out of poverty and putting up 6% to 10% growth rates for a time, about as good as it gets when under-developed countries become serious about economic development.

The fight for the soul of the AFN [First Nations resource issues] – by John Ivison (National Post – July 14, 2012)

July 14, 2012

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

Only in native politics could securing the Prime Minister’s undivided attention for a day, and hooking hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding at a time of austerity, be considered a sellout. Shawn Atleo, the AFN’s National Chief, persuaded Stephen Harper to attend a Crown-First Nations gathering earlier this year, aimed at making progress toward a goal both men covet — self-sufficient, self-governing native communities.

For his troubles, Mr. Atleo, who is facing a tough re-election fight next week, has been accused of “selling our souls to the devil” by one of his rivals, Pam Palmater.

“There is a sense that if you’re not intransigent and fighting the federal government, then you’re not doing it right,” said Joseph Quesnel, an analyst with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. “After the gathering, the whole ‘Atleo sell-out’ narrative started to take shape, which in my view was bizarre and unfortunate.”

Ms. Palmater, an aboriginal lawyer and academic, is one seven candidates running against Mr. Atleo to become National Chief – a line-up that includes an unprecedented four women.

Natural resources to define first nations leader’s next term – by Gloria Galloway and Nathan Vanderklippe (Globe and Mail – July 14, 2012)

July 14, 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.

OTTAWA and VANCOUVER – Two months ago, 23-year-old Brendon Grant left his northern British Columbia hometown for San Diego, where he now lives a 10-minute jog from La Jolla beach. He moved south to start work as a junior analyst with RA Capital Advisors LLC, a private investment bank that has worked on more than $60-billion in financial transactions. Next month, he intends to start training toward becoming an investment banker.

Mr. Grant is Haisla, and his is not a traditional career path for a young person whose grandfather taught him to fish salmon and halibut.

But there is a seismic change shaking the economic foundations of the Haisla – and indeed, first nations across Canada. It’s a change that will have ripple effects all over the country and profound implications on whether the large-scale resource projects that provinces are looking at as an economic panacea move ahead.

For the Haisla, it is natural gas, and a rush to build tens of billions of dollars in new export terminals near Kitimat, B.C., to connect western gas fields with Asian consumers.

Engineers who declared mall structurally sound were guilty of professional misconduct in 2010 – by Stephen Spencer Davis (Globe and Mail – July 14, 2012)

July 14, 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.

Two engineers who this year signed a letter declaring the Elliot Lake Algo Centre Mall structurally sound were found guilty of professional misconduct for work on an unrelated project by a provincial regulatory body in 2010.

The Ontario Provincial Police are conducting a criminal investigation into the Algo Centre’s collapse on June 23, which killed two people and injured several more. A judge was recently appointed to head a public inquiry.

Although city officials have remained tight-lipped about past inspections on the mall, documents released this week reveal that the engineers, Gregory Saunders and Robert Wood of M.R. Wright & Associates, inspected the building as recently as April, 2012.

Details of inspections on the Algo Centre performed by M.R. Wright are sparse, and there is no indication of any irregularities in the firm’s work there. A May, 2012, letter to the mall’s manager, Rhonda Bear, signed by Mr. Wood and Mr. Saunders, noted rust on beams in the mall, but declared the building structurally sound.

Enbridge made PR disaster worse: experts – by Peter O’Neil (National Post – July 14, 2012)

July 14, 2012

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

OTTAWA – Enbridge Inc. made a mounting public relations disaster worse this week by not immediately accepting blame in its official statement issued after an outspoken U.S. regulator compared one of Canada’s energy giants to the “Keystone Kops” due to Enbridge’s bungled response to a massive pipeline spill in Michigan, experts say.

National Transportation Safety Board chairwoman Debbie Hersman’s scathing assessment of Enbridge’s 2010 spill response has also raised questions over whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper needs to distance his government from Enbridge’s proposed $5.5-billion oil sands pipeline megaproject from Alberta to the B.C. coast.

Enbridge’s Pat Daniel, voted the 2011 Canadian chief executive of the year by the consulting firm Caldwell Partners, said in his initial formal response that company personnel “were trying to do the right thing” but encountered “a series of unfortunate events and circumstances [that] resulted in an outcome no one wanted.”

There was no apology or acknowledgement of wrongdoing in the release, though a company official said Mr. Daniel – who was not made available for an interview with Postmedia News – apologized when speaking to reporters in Washington, D.C., after the NTSB event.

Enbridge, TransCanada pipeline safety is a pipedream – by David Olive (Toronto Star – July 14, 2012)

July 14, 2012

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Someone needs to save Canada’s two largest pipeline operators from themselves. Enbridge Inc. and TransCanada Corp., both based in Canada’s greatest city, as Stephen Harper recently labelled his adopted Calgary hometown, have been doing giant work giving this country a black eye.

And they may have driven a stake through their plans for two pipeline megaprojects – combined cost, $13-billion-plus. One of them is to span the length of the U.S. to deliver Athabasca crude to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast (TransCanada’s Keystone XL). The other is to navigate the mountain ranges of B.C. and Alberta to convey Athabasca crude to Asian markets (Enbridge’s Northern Gateway) as an alternative to a U.S. market that now takes practically all of Canada’s oil exports.

Even before this week’s report by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) excoriating Enbridge over its reckless disregard and ineptitude with its massive leak in Michigan in 2010, controversy had dogged these two planned projects since their inception.

Then came Tuesday’s widely reported NTSB findings on the rupture of an Enbridge pipeline that spilled about three million litres of oil in one of the most heavily populated U.S. states, in the Kalamazoo River some 70 km. west of Detroit.